Relaunching the original Reggae Sunsplash Festival
History
Reggae Sunsplash festival: founded in Montego Bay Jamaica during the summer of 1978 by five young Jamaicans, Tony Johnson, Don Green, Ronnie Burke, John Wakeling and Maxine Walters.
Major objectives of the Reggae Sunsplash music festival included:
· Creating a weeklong music festival that would celebrate reggae music at its highest level by providing an international, state of the art platform for the most entertaining reggae artistes and musicians to perform to local and an international audience with a warm cultural Jamaican experience.
· Creating jobs for the unemployed musicians and artistes and providing a showcase for the best talent to appear at the Reggae Sunsplash music festival utilizing “first world” lighting and staging facilities.
· Establishing a linkage and a synergy between the music, tourism, and travel industries.
· Earning critically needed foreign exchange for the Jamaican economy during that time.
· Establishing an annual tourist attraction and a summer tourist season in Jamaica since the hotels were traditionally closed during the summer period because of lower tourist arrivals.
· Creating massive employment opportunities for the hotel trade, car rental companies, airlines and stimulate entrepreneurial activities for the local art, craft and food vendors that would benefit from the influx of tourists and the associated foreign exchange.
Having achieved all the above within the first 7 years, Synergy Productions and the Reggae Sunsplash brand contributed significantly to attract a diverse international audience to the city of Montego Bay surpassing its objective of creating a summer tourist season because many of the guests that came for Reggae Sunsplash returned to visit Jamaica throughout the year. The Reggae Sunsplash festival expanded tourism in Jamaica through its extensive Reggae Sunsplash World Tours, attracting journalists and music enthusiasts from new niche markets such as Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Europe, and the Caribbean.
Synergy Productions was responsible for the following:
· Global Marketing, Branding, Merchandising & Inter-functional Business Management
· Festival & Concert Planning, Promotion & Production
· Audio-visual Planning, Production & Post-Production
· Music Tours - Planning & Management
· Audio-visual Rights Negotiations
· Live Satellite Transmission - Planning & Production
· Extensive Pay-Per-View Distribution throughout the USA and Canada
· Developing the audio-visual catalogue
Forty-seven years after its inception the Reggae Sunsplash festival still has strong global brand equity and a wealth of audio-visual treasures that include outstanding, high-quality visual performances of many of the reggae legends.
Continued
Interestingly, in all the outlined objectives stated by Synergy Productions there was no mention of making money listed as an objective and that made Reggae Sunsplash unique. In hindsight, most companies were focused on making profits, the directors of Synergy Productions were busy promoting reggae music and brand Jamaica with negligible financial rewards.
What happened to the Reggae Sunsplash festival that was first billed as “The Biggest Reggae Festival in the History of the World” and was later repositioned as “Reggae Sunsplash, Uniting the World through Music?” Many compare the Woodstock festival to Reggae Sunsplash, but Sunsplash offers more because the festival created a global cultural movement that spawned the creation of over 250 annual reggae festivals worldwide and the mission of Reggae Sunsplash continues to achieve the goal of Uniting the World through Music. As Reggae Sunsplash celebrates its 47th anniversary in 2025, there are plans to continue developing the Reggae Sunsplash Preservation Society, a non-profit organization designed to properly catalogue, curate, preserve and store all Reggae Sunsplash audio-visual assets and to reposition the brand, starting in the USA.
Reggae Sunsplash rocking at Crystal Palace UK
Uniting the World through Music
The legendary Reggae Sunsplash World Tour operating since 1984 is the only and longest touring reggae platform. The Reggae Sunsplash World Tours, conducted throughout the eighties and nineties featured an eclectic mix of the iconic reggae and dancehall greats, with an impressive array of international artistes. Artistes that performed on Reggae Sunsplash include Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, Jimmy Cliff, Dennis Brown, Rita Marley, Shaggy, Shabba Ranks, Maxi Priest, Buju Banton, Stevie Wonder, Deneice Williams, Gil Scott Heron, Taj Mahal, Manu D'bango, Hugh Masakela, Steel Pulse, Third World, Inner Circle, Freddie Mc Gregor, Barrington Levy, Junior Reid, Nadine Sutherland, Wyclef Jean, plus many more.