Jamaican dancehall star Vybz Kartel (Adidja Palmer) performs at the national stadium in Guyana, May 24, 2025. Screenshot from YouTube video by Selector Andre Entertainment. Fair use.

This past weekend in Trinidad’s capital, Port of Spain, the soca society was once again gearing up for its much-anticipated opportunity to see Jamaica’s Vybz Kartel (Adidja Palmer), who was set to appear at the One Caribbean Music Festival at the Queen's Park Savannah. But the headline act never took the stage and, in fact, never even landed on the island.

Hours before showtime, word began spreading that Kartel had pulled, amid calls by the country’s recently elected government for a cleaner act by the dancehall artist, as well as rumours of the promoter's failure to meet the full financial terms of the contract. Organisers later responded to the latter point, stating they had already paid USD 1.1 million of the USD 1.3 million fee.

On the surface, this may appear to be a garden-variety case of CD, contractual discrepancy. However, it raises a deeper question that resonates far beyond this one instance: how sustainable are current models of commercial performance in Caribbean markets?

A million US dollars is no trivial sum — in Trinidad, it translates to over TTD seven million. Ticket prices for the music festival ranged from TTD 700 for general admission (nearly USD 103) to over TTD 20,000 (close to USD 3,000) for premium experiences. Yet, many of these fans are citizens of small economies with micro-populations, where the value of local currencies, median incomes and market size differ starkly from that of the United States or Europe.

There is a deeper, more uncomfortable tension here: artists and promoters often import fee structures from circuits in the Global North into local markets that cannot realistically support them. It’s an economic mismatch that can leave audiences short-changed and trust-challenged. We can recount similar uncertainty with Nigerian “Afrobeats” sensation Burna Boy and Jamaican dancehall star Popcaan appearing in Trinidad for a December 2022 concert. More recently, American R&B singer Keyshia Cole fell short of audience expectations in Trinidad last month.

The blowback from Trinidad’s One Caribbean Festival is also reportedly reverberating into Kartel’s upcoming performance at the St. Kitts Music Festival later this month. The dancehall performer also didn’t perform as scheduled in Costa Rica on May 3, allegedly because of a problem with the promoter not being able to secure all the necessary permits in time, though he did vow to return.

There is also an underlying, more human, question: to what extent do regional artists, particularly those who have found global success, feel an obligation to their home audiences — the very communities that inspire and nurture their work and talent? Caribbean popular music has given the world everything from reggae to soca to dancehall, yet too often, homegrown fans are priced out of the very culture they helped create.

As an artist and promoter myself, in the world of dance, I’ve witnessed another model. In Trinidad, we have brought internationally renowned, A-list American dance companies to perform for as little as TTD 150 a ticket. It required months of planning, creative funding, and a commitment to accessibility and artistry. Perhaps we were trained, naively or rightly, and at times to our own financial detriment, to view art as a civic good, not merely a commercial product.

That ideal is worth revisiting. Both artists and promoters across the Caribbean music scene could benefit from reimagining the performance contract, not just in legal terms, but in moral ones. A more respectful, sustainable model would honour both the economic realities of the region and the cultural bond between artist and audience.

We need not accept the narrative that Caribbean performance spaces must mimic the cutthroat economics of the global luxury circuit. There is space for another kind of stage — one where community, care, and culture come first.

When the music stops, that is the question worth asking.