Digital technologies are among the most dynamic and disruptive innovations of our times. They have transformed the way our creative practitioners turn artistic concepts into reality, thereby giving a voice and platform for them to directly extract tremendous benefits from the cultural value chain.

This transformation has disrupted the production, distribution and consumption of creative output. It has also democratised access to markets that many could only have dreamed of breaking into, and has opened the door to cross-border collaboration and skills exchange with their peers.

With all its earlier successes, over the past two years, this emerging cultural business model has been thrown into a tailspin, leaving some creatives facing unprecedented hardships due to lockdown measures and gathering restrictions that have severely affected their ability to stage and distribute their creative work. To a large degree, the sector has managed to overcome most of these challenges, enabled by swift digital responses from app and platform developers that have come up with innovative ways to bridge the distribution and participation gap.

What the past two years have taught us is the need for public and private entities to implement more collaborative and proactive measures to support the creative sectors. We must emerge from this era with a deep sense of awareness of the need to fine-tune policies and strategies that consider the complete cultural ecosystem, placing sustainability, diversity, accessibility and equal access at its core.

Driving digital democratisation

Digitisation gives the artisan an increased level of power and independence to create what they like on their schedule, and then put that content in the hands of consumers across the world via social media or streaming platforms instantly with just the click of a button and Internet connectivity.

This unprecedented level of digital democratisation gives creators virtually unhindered ability to accelerate and optimise content delivery — a quantum leap from the pre-digital age when creators made content, waited for an intermediary to distribute it, and hoped that audiences receive their art well, if at all.

Today, digital democratisation permeates the creative distribution process via streaming apps like Netflix, Sound Cloud, Spotify, Tidal and YouTube. Producing a potentially viral short film or song is only a smartphone and high-speed Internet connection away. A few more finger taps can secure distribution via the creator’s preferred streaming app. Local productions including My Story on the PlayGo TV streaming app, and Behind D’Music on the D’Music music-streaming app are successful examples of how Jamaican-based creators are curating the cultural zeitgeist through unique storytelling. These home-grown apps are stimulating local content development, introducing new artistes and their releases to the wider Caribbean, and acquainting more digital natives with the versatility of Jamaican creatives.

With this comes the ability to optimise content delivery by getting material to market much faster via secure and intelligent cloud services like Billo or Google Drive. Creators can quickly automate the ingestion, protection, storage, subtitling, and translation of content for global distribution in multiple formats, to any device.

Driving eco-sustainability

Evidence supports the need for e-commerce platforms to ‘think green’ in order to achieve environmental and economic sustainability. The burgeoning ‘made to order’ local cottage industry has moved its eco-friendly practices online by producing only what e-shoppers want. This reduces the need for huge inventories of fashion, craft, jewellery and handmade products that may end up unsold, having left a vast carbon footprint from the production stage.

E-commerce — especially due to its dependence on smart devices that eventually convert to e-waste — owes it to our environment to support eco-friendly online shopping. Technologies like blockchain are helping to increase transparency in the artisan supply chain. The wealth of information collected by these systems allows producers to better match output to actual demand, thereby reducing waste. More consumers are conscious of this when making a buying decision. They can easily track where their creations come from, and how they are produced. This forces manufacturers to employ increasingly sustainable methods of production and industry accreditation.

In part two next week, I will look at taking our creative industries deeper into digital, along with some implementable solutions that will enable our creators to grow their innovative ideas and generate sustainable wealth.

Nasha-Monique Douglas is Chief Marketing Officer at Digicel Jamaica.