Question Mark Entertainment’s Simon Baptiste: ‘I believe that there’s a different way…’

Team Talk is Music Ally’s weekly interview series, where our marketing experts speak to music industry teams about their latest work, best practices, and smart strategies. You can find the archive here.

2020 was the 20th birthday of Question Mark Entertainment, but as for many music companies across the world, it was a tough year for the Trinidad and Tobago-based company.

Founded in 2000 as a full-service talent-management firm, QME had since expanded with a successful live events business and moves in TV and film production.

However, 2020 began with a parting of ways with Kes the Band, a group the company had been working with for 16 years.

“And right after that Covid happened, so it was like a one-two punch. It brought not just our company, but many companies to their knees,” CEO Simon Baptiste tells Music Ally. “But we used this time period to really start discussing what was a different way forward.”

QME had worked with artists including MX Prime, Precious, Nadia Batson, Kerwin Du Bois and Tessanne Chin, while building live brands Decibel Entertainment Festival, Dream Big Expo and Tuesday On The Rocks.

As Covid hit, Baptiste and his colleagues looked outside their core business and began thinking about how to build structures for the industry – and the creatives – around them.

One degree of separation

Towards the end of 2020 QME launched a platform called ODOS (One Degree of Separation) to bring together creatives from around the world who had a connection to the Caribbean islands.

“We’ve grown to over 500 members in 33 countries, and we’re finding ways of being able to share information, educate ourselves and pull each other up,” says Baptiste.

“We have executives from Fortune 500 companies, we have presidents from record labels… It’s a beautiful swatch of people who literally just are willing to band together to see something through or make something successful.”

WhatsApp groups are at the heart of this community, helping people to collaborate across the different sectors.

“When someone puts into the group ‘Hey, I’m working on a film and I would love to find someone who could score it’ we can immediately put them in touch with several composers who they can meet with,” says Baptiste.

“And vice versa: if someone has created a piece of music that they want to translate into a music video, we can put them in touch with directors. Whether they’re in Los Angeles or London or any part of the world.”

ODOS in turn spawned Island Lime, a media brand that is part physical magazine and part website, with use of QR codes and multimedia content to drive people between the two.

“Perhaps, we’ve done an excellent job marketing our Caribbean with such mindless aplomb that somewhere along the line of sun, sand, and surf, we forgot to remind people that we are also known for our ability to shine via our academics, scientific prowess, literature, and creative genius,” as its website explains its mission.

From the Caribbean to the world

This leads on to a challenge that Baptiste is thinking deeply about: how to help Caribbean artists reach listeners across the world, rather than just a limited local audience.

That’s been a challenge for soca music, one of the most storied genres to emerge from the islands, but one that he thinks has struggled to cut through on streaming services.

“The heartbeat of it all is from Trinidad and Tobago, and you have other islands involved as well: Barbados, Grenada, Antigua, Saint Vincent etc. But the reality is that we are barely doing any kind of [streaming] numbers close to an artist that hits Billboard success,” he says.

“That is a huge problem, because we are [live] performance-driven versus streaming-driven. So when you have a situation like a pandemic, whereas other artists could probably still survive off of streaming, you had others almost calling it quits because they didn’t have that revenue coming in,” he continues.

“It’s really a numbers game, and we don’t have the numbers. And because we don’t have the numbers, we’re not in the conversation.”

Baptiste also suggests that reggae and dancehall have slipped from their commercial heyday of the 1990s and 2000s, with the odd breakthrough success not masking the overall decline, and a lack of investment from the industry.

“We probably haven’t invested in the infrastructure to stay relevant enough: using social media and the other assets that have been created,” he says.

“I’m not a guru here! I’m not sitting on top of a mountain preaching and saying that I know it all. I just believe that there’s a different way that economically and technologically we could get involved and make things better.”

Baptiste also talks about the way soca has developed on a seasonal platform, rather than being released all-year round to build momentum over time. He calls it a ‘soca switch’ – where suddenly as the annual Trinidad and Tobago Carnival approaches there is a glut of releases. Then, like a switch being turned off, that activity ceases.

“This is music from our land: it should just play all year!” he says. “There should be that sort of almost aggressive and vigorous attitude by the radio stations and networks and everyone else: that this is how we produce it and look at it. But we don’t, and that’s why Soca music, in my opinion, has not been thriving. And personally I find it’s on a decline.”

“The audience is growing old with us. We have been singing the same thing since 1996 and our stars are all in their 40s,” he continues. “There’s a culture or mindset that exists that needs to change for us to become part of the conversation.”

Breaking traditional templates

Baptiste hopes that more artists will break out of the traditional templates, which in turn will inspire others to break the mould. That’s what QME is doing: he enthuses about some of the artists it’s currently working with.

Tobagonian artist Kye DeVere has already been described as a cross between Amy Winehouse and Lauryn Hill, for example.

“Her sound is very unique, and as a vocalist she is absolutely on fire. The direction I’m looking for in terms of the artists I’m working with are those who really demonstrate a massive potential in areas that can appeal globally. I’m not just looking for a soca artist. She represents that type of talent,” he says.

Olatunji Yearwood is another example, having explored the crossover between soca and Afrobeats, not to mention making it onto the UK version of talent show X Factor. Baptiste also cites Hey Choppi, whose music has blended soca, reggae, hip-hip and pop, as another artist worth getting excited about.

“We’re trying to find those who set up a lane for themselves,” he says. “I’m not trying to develop a soca artist, I’m trying to develop an artist that can conquer globally through consistency, discipline, and great music that you could play in your car at any time in a year, not just for a season!”