Zimpapers Logo

Clive mono Mukundu
Special Correspondent
The biggest issue on the lips of musicians when you mention the year 2021 in retrospect is obviously the biggest elephant in the room, which is Covid-19.

The year 2020 ended on a slow note, and 2021 began on a slow note too.

The very first lockdown was introduced when on Friday, the 27th of March, 2020, President Mnangagwa announced that starting on Monday, March 30, a nationwide lockdown would be in effect across Zimbabwe for 21 days.

That marked a period of doom for the entertainment industry in Zimbabwe.

I remember spending days laying on the sofa watching TV, wondering how I was going to pay my bills. Then I came up with the idea of jamming with my son for the mere purposes of keeping ourselves busy.

It is my son who came up with the idea of recording the sessions so that we post on social media.

Then the posts started trending.

We then started including artists that visited the studio to record Covid-19 awareness material, starting with Albert Nyathi and Dereck Mpofu.

Elsewhere around Zimbabwe, other media houses, the likes of Nash TV, Ngoda TV etc followed suit and this provided entertainment to the music fans, as well as visibility and relevance to the artists.

This was in sharp contrast to artistes in countries like Turkey where more than a 100 committed suicide. Zimbabweans have always been known to be resilient.

But online shows, just like online education, will never be the same as normal live shows.

And the revenue was very little and not constant compared to club gigs. The online shows were offered to a few artists, so the majority of artistes did not benefit from them.

There were also accusations of bad contracts against some of the online broadcasters, with artistes complaining of having been given raw deals.

Therefore, by the start of 2021 we saw the sharp decline of online shows.

Some of the most prominent players that had given a lot of positive visibility to the music sector stopped amid the accusations.

Music studios were also not spared. The lack of revenue which was experienced by the artistes started a domino effect that music studios started feeling towards the end of 2020.

At the beginning of the lockdown periods in the year 2020, artistes became busy recording music to sustain their names, thinking the pandemic will be short lived.

By the end of 2020 it had dawned on them that the battle was still raging on, so interest in recording music dwindled, and music studios began feeling the pinch.

Even the Covid-19 adverts that had given music studios business during the start of the pandemic had stopped.

On Sunday the 19th of April this year, President Mnangagwa said that the country had not yet met conditions set down by the World Health Organisation (WHO), therefore the lockdown carried on.

With the absence of live gigs and physical music sales, the music industry visibility was mainly relegated to social media.

As a result, the measurement of success for any artiste, or released music became social media views and likes.

This resulted in artists releasing music that can be described as click bait music – that is music that attracts social media likes.

The only problem with this is that in Zimbabwe at times what trends and what sells differs, but who cares when there were no shows or sales to talk about.

For example, Mbira artistes never trend on social media, but their shows rarely flop, as opposed to a number of RnB artistes who trend, but have poor gig attendances.

However, most of the music released in 2021 failed to last past two weeks, which can be attributed to a lack of preparedness on the part of the artists.

There are a few artistes that took advantage of the captive audience to launch their careers, the most prominent being Van Choga and Kae Chaps.

Both artistes received social media critical acclaim.

Towards the end of 2021, there had been some renewed interest in releasing music since some restrictions had been relaxed, and some venues were given the green light to hold shows, but under strict health regulations.

Things improved slightly, but most artists complained of incurring losses during the shows since only a few people were allowed in, and generally things were not yet back to normal.

In the first week of this month, the Government announced new lockdown measures due to the Omicron variant and within the first hours of the announcement, a number of music gigs were cancelled immediately.

Affected artistes include Janet Manyowa, Gary Tight, Vee Mhofu and Dziva Rembira to mention a few.

As we come to the end of 2021, we end the year very uncertain on what the next year holds.