Alemay Fernandez —The life of a working musician (Part V)

Stages, not studios — Singapore’s best-loved Jazz singer discusses the age of streaming.

“Never forget you are a storyteller. And how well you tell your story decides how well you’ll hold an audience.”

A biography that begins “born and raised in Singapore in a staunchly Catholic family” seems unlikely to also include “internationally renowned jazz singer”, but Alemay Fernandez has had a joyful disregard for convention since she first began her professional singing career 20 years ago.

Her first experiences as a singer stemmed from her Catholic upbringing in a house that was filled with music. Whether it was singing in the church choir, spontaneously breaking into harmonies with her family around the piano, or subconsciously soaking in her Dad’s jazz collection, many of her earliest and fondest memories involve music. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, however, she was by no means averse to the R&B music of the day, ravenously consuming hits from the likes of Luther Vandross, Whitney Houston, TLC, and Mariah Carey. This inspired an interest in old-school soul music like Aretha Franklin, Al Green and Stevie Wonder and ultimately culminated in a love of jazz singers like Nancy Wilson and Etta James.

Fast forward 20 years and Fernandez’s voice — at one moment loose and conversational, a moment later supremely powerful and controlled — needs to be experienced to be understood. Over this time she has worked with many of the greats: the Count Basie Orchestra, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Gregory Porter and Ernie Watts, to name just a few. But although she is rapidly approaching the status of national treasure in Singapore, jazz remains a relatively niche genre in the country. We spoke to her about the economic realities of being a touring jazz singer in the digital age.

In some respects, you might think it would be easier for artists like Fernandez, who consider themselves to be primarily performers rather than recording musicians, to adapt to digitization. If you have never relied on royalties and earn a sustainable income from touring, streaming does not necessarily require any major adjustment. The reality, however, is a lot more complex. While the majority of her revenue derives from live performance, the sale of physical media like CDs at shows has seen a marked decline in recent years:

“I definitely need to become better about delving into and making full use of streaming revenues. So most of my income comes from live performances and a VERY little bit from physical CD sales at shows as well as a few sales online…”

Despite a long and illustrious career, Fernandez didn’t release her first full album, Hard to Imagine, until 2016. It was a labor of love that took five years to produce and highlights both the benefits and pitfalls of the digital age for artists. On the plus side, she became an accidental digital trailblazer by part-funding the recording through a crowdfunding campaign set up by her sister in 2011, half a decade before Kickstarter launched in Singapore.

On the other hand, the relatively long production time was partially a result of economic necessity: as she could not rely on passive income from royalties, she needed to take regular breaks to go touring to continue to finance the project. Indeed, while there is an undoubted intrinsic artistic value in recording and producing an album, it does not pay the bills for many artists, even for those like Fernandez who have built up a devoted fan base over decades. In order to balance the books, she has diversified her sources of income by taking up side jobs as a college lecturer, private vocal coach and freelance voiceover artist. In addition, she plans to focus more on merchandise at gigs:

“People want to support you and take something home but most people don’t have CD players anymore, so another piece of merchandise might have a greater chance of piquing people’s interest.”

While recognizing that digital platforms allow artists to reach a wider international listenership, Fernandez also feels that audiences are a little too beholden to algorithms. Anyone who has spent a few hours aimlessly scrolling through their Facebook or Youtube feed knows that the human brain is not very good at filtering an abundance of options, and often favors a short-term dopamine rush over long-term contentment. She feels that a similar dynamic, or paradox of choice, may be at play in the music industry:

“I am deeply saddened by how shallow we have become as a society. Placing importance on trivial and superficial aspects of life instead of wanting to deal with things that are truly honest and real. And this has trickled down into the music industry… There’s much less grit and what sounds like a lot more fluff. I’m not saying great artistes don’t exist, I am just saying they are harder to hear in the cacophony of noise that drowns our feeds.”

Fernandez has obviously thought long and deeply about these issues and has a perspective that is refreshingly balanced — she is not prone to hyperbole, but is never bland in her opinions. Asked whether the royalty collection process is transparent enough, she replies:

“It’s easier to track your streams and plays thanks to the technology but because it’s so easy for anyone to upload your music on unregulated sites, there will be times when you have no idea where your music goes.”

In a career that has spanned the entire digitization of the music industry — from the birth of iTunes at the turn of the millenium, to the rapid growth of streaming more recently — Fernandez’s experience shows how touring artists have adapted to a rapidly evolving economic landscape. One of our central goals at Utopia Music is to help create a music industry that harnesses the benefits of emerging technologies, while providing more revenue, faster, for artists and other rights holders.

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