By Alex Balimwikungu
Singer Juliana isn’t the type to engage in social media wars with fellow artistes. She is largely reclusive and only makes some ‘noise’ when she has a concert or music project coming up.
Early this month (February 6th), she premiered a song titled ‘Omwana’. Unlike her previous songs, which left many swooning, this particular song received a bit of stick., with some critics, notably on Tiktok suggesting that she never sounded like the Juliana of old, but rather like Spice Diana and Lydia Jazmine.
Although she never responded then, she has now taken a subtle dig at the current crop of musicians in the music industry who think they are big just because of TikTok. She argues that raking the numbers on social media doesn’t necessarily mean that a song is nice.
She notes that artists back then had to prove themselves to the nation that they were talented and their music had to be totally good and top-notch and not just trending jams on TikTok and other platforms.
“You cannot base everything about your success on just social media likes and views. People can like your stuff for many reasons. You can upload your music video and people like it because you got a nice and good-looking body.
And people will like it because in the video you used a video vixen that they love. So social media is good and it is an amazing time we are living in,” she says.
She further explains, “And there is so much you can do with it but at the same time, there is so much work you have to put in behind the scenes before social media. The thing I like about us by the time we started, we had to put in 150% of our craft because we didn’t have social media likes and boosters to push our content. You had to prove yourself.
If I brought a song to a radio station, it had to be a really good song, not just a trending jam. Now, your song can get on the radio because it is trending on TikTok. Those days, it had to be good music. For many of us, we were doing music that would stand for a taste of time,” she concluded.
