By Tuhairwe Joab
It’s just a few days after Kenyan singing group Sauti Sol performed in Kampala. Some revelers were left disgruntled claiming Sauti Sol’s performance was not worth 100K with other people saying Swahili Nation put up a better performance.
What am I driving at? Ugandans have a tendency of over praising foreign musicians and promoters have therefore exploited this by constantly bringing in the so called international musicians and over pricing their shows. It’s only in Uganda that a foreign singer after making a single hit would come and perform before a mammoth crowd.
How many Ugandan musicians receive such hype when they go for performances in other countries? Most of our local musicians perform in bars abroad to an audience of not more than 100 people, including those that we take to be ‘big’ here.
This brings me back to the way we package our musicians and how we manage our talent. Music has become something every Tom, Dick and Harry can do and therefore a lot of half baked talents crop up everyday and this gives promoters a hard time on how to front such a musician to the international market. Packaging and marketing our musicians keeps pulling us down.
I must say if you put the former BigTym group that comprised of Ray Signature and Larry Charry with Souti Soul from Kenya, you would be shocked to find that BigTym would put up a better show. The boys that represented us in Tucker project fame is such a talented a capella group that they would sing live music too way better than Sauti Soul, but people were made to pay 100K to watch them sing yet you can not convince them to pay that much when local musicians are performing. It’s high time Ugandans and promoters shifted focus from one hit makers and concentrated on our own musicians.