In 1998 I started teaching at university, and a year later was honoured to be involved in the partnership that founded the Business of Black Music course at City University, alongside my business partner Kienda Hoji.

Between us, we manage a number of ‘credible’ artists who don’t necessarily fall into line with the aesthetic and materialistic views of the recording industry in the UK, which is dominated by European personnel with typical European taste. Faced with these barriers to launching careers, we “brush our shoulders off” and do what feels good to us. And my main tasks have involved coming up with marketing plans and strategies to get them to the position we feel they warrant.

Part of the problem with the music business in the UK is that we fail to recognise the relevance of our own achievements, and continue to adopt the ‘myth’ that there is no market for Black music in the UK. I have seen the progress that we have made in the UK over 15 years. From Soul II Soul and Sade, to today’s stars like Lisa Maffia, Mis-teeq, Dizzee Rascal, Ms Dynamite, etc.

The All-Star concept was born out of the desire to recognise their achievements, and out of the recognition that there needed to be a focused and sustainable combined effort by entertainers and business people within the UK Black music scene to develop the identity of UK music, and provide a platform for International exposure.

The key issue when trying to promote our acts has been “where do we pigeon hole them”? The term Black Music has always been deemed to be exclusive rather than inclusive, and therefore doesn’t provide the basis for universal ‘BRAND’. Sustainable business is about developing loyalty. Loyalty is achieved through creating brands that people are aware of, identify with, buy into and feel a part of.  My aim was to build a brand that had a broad commercial global appeal.

We used the term ‘All-Star’ to define the ‘pick of the best’ philosophy and the term ‘Urban’ because of its all-embracing, broad appeal. We could not have gone to MIDEM with a compilation album titled ‘UK Black All-Star’s Volume I’ and expected to do business. We can put exactly the same product out with the term Urban instead and be part of the commercial, mass market.

When I was signed to Shut Up & Dance in ’89, there was a very small specialist first generation British-born Black market for Black music in the UK, and Soul II Soul was as big as it got! Caucasians were, and are still not comfortable with, using the word Black in the presence of Black people and we have come too far for them to go back to calling it Negro or sepia music.

So today the word Black has been replaced by Urban as a descriptive word for a ‘lifestyle’ influenced by Black Culture and black people, and has become a multi-billion pound industry because the consumer profile is now three generations of people who identify with this new lifestyle. They are Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, African, American, European, South American etc. If you call the lifestyle and music Black, you alienate 90% of your market. Urban makes pounds, shillings, pence and sense!

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