Ugandan New York based songstress, Joanna Amaru, thinks the Uganda Music Industry’s biggest weakness is the ‘copy and paste’ syndrome.
Amaru is a very talented New York based Ugandan singer, actor, and songwriter. Her music has been applauded for having an edge as regards to sound quality and lyrical maturity. She has done songs like ‘Stay‘, ‘Heartbeat‘, ‘Dance My Pain Away‘, ‘Crashing‘, ‘Make It Better‘ among others. She categorizes her music as Acoustic Soul/Pop Soul. She thinks Uganda is so blessed with raw talent but the industry might be slowly losing it due to just a few reasons, and she explains them below.
She says the biggest weakness Uganda’s music industry is facing is song writing. She acknowledges the presence of extremely talented vocalists and instrumentalists but there’s a lot to do as regards creative competitive songwriting. As a cause, she blames the continued trend of recycling the same sounds over and over by various Ugandan artistes and producers. When a good sound is created, Ugandan artistes concentrate more on reproducing the same sound instead of focusing their minds on making major creative changes to the melodies and structure. There are really few cases of originality in the sound generally and Ugandan artistes often get criticized for the ‘copy and paste’ syndrome.
As a solution, being aware of this, Amaru is trying to be conscious of originality in sound as she works, and she is happy that many other musicians are breaking this mold by boldly stepping out with different sounds. Amaru is proud that the Ugandan music industry has grown so much as an industry and she is very grateful for those who have gone before her and raised the standards as well as paved the way for the Ugandan Music Industry to aspire the other nationals to even greater heights.
