St. Kitts Music Festival Lineup Complete
All the major international and regional acts for the 19th Annual St. Kitts Music Festival have now been released.
The latest high profile performer to be announced for the June 25-27th event is US Pop singer Ciara. She joins US R&B/Pop artistes Trey Songz and Jason Derulo on the festival lineup. The Observer has learned that one of the acts will perform on Friday and not on the Saturday as expected,
Previously announced were a list of Soca, Dancehall, Reggae, Merengue and Kompa acts including Roy Cape, Ricardo Drew, Blaxx, Kerwin Dubois, Benjai, Patrice Roberts, T Vice, and Toño Rosario for the Thursday night and Christopher Martin, Aswad, and Bounty Killer for Friday night.
Music Festival Head of the Artiste Selection Committee, Adrian Lam confirmed to The Observer, “That’s it for the international acts; the only acts left to come are the local acts.”
11 local performers will be appearing on this year’s festival. Lam said however the Committee had to be careful not to have too many local acts, as persons overseas would not be moved to travel to St. Kitts for “a local show”.
“The Committee made a decisive effort this year; as much as we want locals in the show, you can’t over load it because people won’t travel from say Antigua, for a local show. What people have to understand is that we are still running an international show,” he said.
On the regional side, booking acts is becoming more and more difficult as the artistes have repeatedly toured neighboring islands and have been to St. Kitts and Nevis for private events including Culturama and political concerts.
“With our election campaign this year for instance, we had an enormous amount of artistes pass through here, Dancehall and Reggae. If you check the lineup, people we have are those who haven’t been here recently, except for Christopher Martin who was at Culturama last year and Music Festival the year before. Bounty Killa hasn’t been here for about ten years and Aswad has never been here.”
Lam said the public feedback on the line-up and especially the international act has been very positive. This is one of the most current set of artistes the Festival has ever had with respect to international performers, he said.
He had told The Observer previously that the Festival would have been targeting a younger demographic this year, and said all three R&B acts booked have a large following of young people while being known by the more mature demographic.
The artistes are worth their weight in gold in terms of media exposure, Lam disclosed, as between Trey Songz, Jason Derulo and Ciara, they had some 60 million followers.
He informed that soon the artistes would start posting about their upcoming performances in St. Kitts and Nevis on their websites, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social sites.
To have access to such a large international market, Lam pointed out, it would have cost Tourism authorities millions in advertising dollars.
While Lam opined the Festival was fortunate to land the acts already confirmed, he said there were some artistes that had eluded them due to scheduling, including Destra Garcia and Chronixx.
Two of the most called for acts by Music Festival fans over the past few years have been Rihanna and Beyonce.
“It sounds good but reality is we simply cannot afford them,” Lam said.
The full lineup and major sponsors will be announced when the 19th Annual St. Kitts Music Festival is officially launched, most likely sometime next week.
