FM Reggae Radio Station

[shake]

flashman wrote :Buy volumes 1-30,000 of Now That's What I Call Every Reggae Song.

What about 30,001? That's the one with all the great stuff by Maxi Priest, and it has all of vanilla Ice's covers of Bob Marley's tunes

Now that is what i call funny....!

[ras_gaks]

Kneel down and pray.

[Siegi]

judge not

[Congo Bunny]

Congo Bunny wrote :flashman wrote :Buy volumes 1-30,000 of Now That's What I Call Every Reggae Song.

What about 30,001? That's the one with all the great stuff by Maxi Priest, and it has all of vanilla Ice's covers of Bob Marley's tunes

Now that is what i call funny....!

fancy being so sarcastic

[blakbeltjonez]

I'm about to start an FM radio station in Africa that specializes in the reggae genre. What is the best way possible to get every reggae track from 1970 till the present for my radio music library? Any help will be appreciated.

man, that would be quite a mountain to climb.

you'd be looking at about 100,000 releases or so, and much, maybe the majority of it never was issued on CD. there is probably only a small handful of people on earth who have most everything, they tend to be old beardly collectors or elderly sound system veterans. both types have been amassing the music for decades.

don't forget you also have 3 crucial years before 1970 as well - 1967, 68 and 69. missing those foundation years would be like having a car with three wheels. think of all the Studio One and Treasure Isle releases alone, never mind any of the others....

my advice would be to scour discogs.com and ebay and buy what you need to start with, if you want to build a library. but building up a radio library isn't cheap, you could try hitting up the record labels for promo, too.

but the way i see it, right now, you don't "specialize" in anything if you don't have the tunes to back it up.
if you don't know enough yet to know what you need for content (you don't say how much you plan to be on air, 24/7 or a set time each day, once/twice a week, etc.), you would be better served by trying to get people that do know the music and do have the records(or CD's or whatever) to do podcast-type sets for you that you can be broadcast.

if you have guest DJ's, you have the benefit of their knowledge and their collecting blood, sweat and tears to make your station meaningful. the only downside is that none of the individual pieces of music belong to the station library, but after a while you will archive a pretty decent amount of DJ sets that you can rebroadcast as you see fit. and you'll be exposed to music you likely may never have heard otherwise.

most people who collect tend to concentrate on a particular facet of reggae - early '67 -'70 rocksteady/reggae, roots, dancehall, lover's rock, deejay, dub, etc.... and then there's ska, and mento if you want to get all historical about it.

so, maybe your station could have a couple hour block of different styles from contributors - maybe a top ten of a certain week & year, dancehall/bashment stuff on saturday nights, etc from someone else, lover's rock on sunday afternoons, etc, etc. etc.... that's the programming part that you need to do to make it interesting and engaging to listeners. having things be free form is OK, but some sort of structure would be good for listeners who want to check out certain things. you could have a schedule up on the station web site.

maybe you could find a couple of local DJ's or collectors who are familiar with reggae to help you, too.

i would imagine you would need proper playlists with credits wherever possible if you have to pay for music licensing to ASCAP, BMI, or whoever. a dude stringing together some nondesript MP3's probably would have trouble doing that for you - that's the other advantage of having people that know and own the music to play the music.

i wish you the best luck with your station, but get some help instead of chasing your tail trying to put a reggae library together overnight.

[kalcidis]

On an unrelated note there was once a guy on here who claimed to have heard 99% of all reggae ever released...

[unorthodoxconqueror]

On an unrelated note there was once a guy on here who claimed to have heard 99% of all reggae ever released...

probably lee scratch in disguise