Michael Riley’s Feedback On the Black Music Vs Urban Music Debate (One Voice)

The theme of the debate at Wembley was between the two titles, black music on one end versus urban, and whether urban needed to exist at all as a title. What was interesting about the people in the audience was that there was quite a healthy American representation. The general thrust that came back was one that from the American perspective was that, as far as urban was concerned, it was a bit of a non-title. It was just a category. Everyone understood it was black music, and they generally didn’t have a problem with white artists performing black music where those artists actually paid respect to the source.

What they went to lengths to point out was that the majority of white artists in the States have a black team around them of some description, Be it management, writers, producers or whatever - there is a team around them. They would simply “not be allowed to get away with it”. However, from the UK perspective, at this conference, it was very different. The debate was more centred around certain things that have already been highlighted by the panel.

Like the whole marketing of black music in the UK. We’ve adopted the term urban as a marketing term, for as I said, multi-cultural ownership of black music. And as part of that, the thrust of the debate there was to say if you have a black face you are not saleable in the UK, it’s that simple. There is a culture of, I think, institutionalised racism within the companies which is borne out of ignorance as much as anything.

But they will base their marketing on what they feel the black community to be in terms of size, and that market is considered to be specialist and quite small. So where a white artist will come along with exactly the same music, they are considered more marketable plus internationally more saleable, and this was kind of repeated from the audience. These were their feelings.

And again, somebody quoted an incident where they were actually a marketing person for an artist, and they were told categorically from a particular paper, “We’ll give you a page inside. We’ll give you two pages, but we’ll not give you a front cover. And the reason why we won’t give you a front cover is because our readers might be confused”.