Mark Lyn­der­say

If you're a young so­ca artiste fight­ing to make your pres­ence felt in a crowd­ed Car­ni­val mar­ket­place, what do you do? You could do the usu­al. Make the rounds of me­dia hous­es, do in­ter­views on the ra­dio, make guest ap­pear­ances with bands on the par­ty cir­cuit and gen­er­al­ly flog the hell out of your new song. Or you could go di­rect. To your fans, that is. Two lo­cal so­ca singers are work­ing the so­cial me­dia an­gle well, Shiv­onne "Lil Bitts" Churche and Patrick "Mr Vybe" Gor­don.

Their stats are com­pelling. Churche has 6,296 Face­book friends fol­low­ing her up­dates and post­ings and 703 fol­low­ers on Twit­ter, while Gor­don has amassed 4,407 Face­book friends and 619 Twit­ter fol­low­ers. Both artistes have re­leased on­line mu­sic to their fan base on so­cial me­dia, Churche of­fered her Christ­mas re­make of Ma­maci­ta and very, very briefly, her 2009 song, Care­ful to Twit­ter and Face­book fol­low­ers. Churche, in an e-mail sent by her man­age­ment, re­fused to be in­ter­viewed for this col­umn.

Gor­don most re­cent­ly up­loaded a dig­i­tal mix­tape he pro­duced with Cana­di­an DJ Jester, and any­one who's re­al­ly in­ter­est­ed in his work will un­cov­er links to some of his ear­li­er songs on his blog (http://mis­tavy­be­world.com/.) Gor­don has been work­ing in the busi­ness since 1992 when he first came to pub­lic at­ten­tion in the lo­cal boy band Blak Mayl. He's been a rap­per on Shar­lene Boodram's hit Joe Le Taxi, co-writ­ten the so­ca re-imag­in­ing of Bil­lie Jean with Andy Stephen­son, worked with sev­er­al big so­ca bands and fi­nal­ly meta­mor­phosed in­to his brood­ing, braid­ed and be­spec­ta­cled Mr Vybe per­sona. Ting for the road was a lo­cal hit in Car­ni­val 2006 and won him the St Lu­cia Caribbean So­ca Monarch crown.

Be­hind the dark shades and dour ex­pres­sion he af­fects for his pro­mo­tion­al ma­te­r­i­al is a thor­ough geek with an en­gag­ing smile and in­de­fati­ga­ble en­thu­si­asm for what com­put­ers can do for his ca­reer. Quick­ly re­al­is­ing just how ex­haust­ing keep­ing up with mul­ti­ple net­works can be, he has clev­er­ly cen­tralised his ef­forts us­ing a Word­press blog de­signed by Teni­ka Jones. "Teni­ka's work on the blog was very im­por­tant," Gor­don said. "She set it up so that I can post to the blog and that in­for­ma­tion gets sent au­to­mat­i­cal­ly to the so­cial net­works I par­tic­i­pate in." The so­ca singer and pro­duc­er al­so keeps a care­ful eye on how his down­loads are man­aged. The DJ Jester mix­tape reg­is­tered 1,500 down­loads in less than a month af­ter it was re­leased, but there's a cut­off point for all of the Mr Vybe down­loads.

"Some songs and projects are done for pro­mo­tion; they are re­leased to go vi­ral. Some of it you put out there to get feed­back from peo­ple on a new di­rec­tion or style." That feed­back can some­times be both pos­i­tive and prof­itable. In May 2009, Gor­don end­ed up in Ger­many when a My­Space friend hooked him up with a pro­mot­er who was a fan of his work and he trav­elled to per­form his 2005 song Up which is still pop­u­lar in clubs in that coun­try. "I look at what's hap­pen­ing on­line with oth­er artistes, what folks like Drake, Kid Cu­di, Ryan Leslie and Jer­maine Dupri are do­ing is re­al­ly in­spir­ing to me. I look at what's hap­pen­ing, and I take a bit of this and a bit of that and then put a bit of Vybe in­to it."