PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER
pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

There may not be a Car­ni­val com­ing up, but So­ca is still in de­mand.

Youtube chan­nel Ju­lianspro­mos, which ex­clu­sive­ly fea­tures So­ca mu­sic, record­ed a mile­stone last week when it record­ed 1 mil­lion sub­scribers on Oc­to­ber 13.

“It’s good for us. It feels re­al­ly good,” said Ju­lian Hack­ett, the own­er of the chan­nel, who said this pe­ri­od presents a unique op­por­tu­ni­ty to do what his page has al­ways done; pro­vide an av­enue for the genre out­side of the var­i­ous Car­ni­val sea­sons.

He ex­plained that the chan­nel had seen an in­crease in sub­scribers dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

“This year when the pan­dem­ic hit we ac­tu­al­ly saw an in­crease in sub­scribers main­ly be­cause a lot of peo­ple are home and they’re look­ing for new mu­sic but a lot of the artists didn’t re­lease new mu­sic. So there is a de­mand for the mu­sic but there isn’t much mu­sic com­ing out,” he said.

He said this should en­cour­age artistes to con­tin­ue re­leas­ing mu­sic as it was clear there was still in­ter­est in the genre de­spite the ab­sence of Car­ni­val events, where artistes of the genre usu­al­ly thrive.

Hack­ett said he had been in con­tact with artistes and not­ed that many artistes had been re­luc­tant to re­lease mu­sic be­cause of the un­cer­tain­ty, but he stressed that the should keep push­ing out fresh con­tent.

The chan­nel is do­ing it’s part, as the group will re­lease a new so­ca rid­dim called the Ten­der Touch Rid­dim on Thurs­day.

The rid­dim fea­tures Patrice Roberts, Olatun­ji, Nailah Black­man, Hey Chop­pi as well as Mel­ly Rose & Seales.

The rid­dim is a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween Ju­lianspro­mos and Ad­voK­it pro­duc­tions, who had teamed up pri­or to put to­geth­er the “Folk­lore Rid­dim” which birthed Kes’ 2018 hit “Hel­lo”,  a track which court­ed in­ter­na­tion­al at­ten­tion, and Na­dia Bat­son “Catch­ing Feel­ings” and Turn­er’s “Hold­ing On.”

Hack­ett said younger artistes in par­tic­u­lar should re­lease mu­sic, as their lev­el of risk, in terms of a song blos­som­ing in­to a hit per­haps was high­er as fans search for new re­leas­es. He al­so not­ed that in some cas­es the re­lease of mu­sic video for songs that pre­vi­ous­ly went un­der the radar al­so sparked re­newed in­ter­est in songs dur­ing this pan­dem­ic.

“I know a few artistes who have songs that came out so six sev­en months ago. They are now do­ing mu­sic videos for those songs, which I find is a very smart move is to bet­ter fi­nan­cial­ly and it’s smarter to not let us all go to waste so we have been see­ing that when it comes to artists re­hash­ing pri­or ma­te­r­i­al,” said Hack­ett.

One artiste, who has seen such suc­cess with mu­sic videos, has been Nes­sa Prep­py, whose col­lab­o­ra­tion with Patrice Roberts “Splash”’s mu­sic video was re­leased post Car­ni­val, has hit 12 mil­lion views and has since been fea­tured as part of a chal­lenge on Tik Tok. Prep­py’s mu­sic video for “Pull Up” on the Big Ride rid­dim, re­leased on June 29, has gained over half a mil­lion views, dou­ble the amount the orig­i­nal Ju­lianspro­mo post of the song gar­nered de­spite be­ing re­leased al­most a year ago.