Who keeps the record

The island's principal repository of documentary heritage, grown out of the Institute of Jamaica's West India Reference Library, holding print, photographic and audiovisual sources vital to music and cultural history.

The oral-history programme within Jamaica's cultural institutions that has recorded elders' testimony since the early 1980s — folk practice, work songs, ritual and speech. For music history it matters because it holds first-person accounts of traditions that predate the record industry entirely.

Jamaica's main national television station, successor to the state JBC television service, whose entertainment strands — from the Entertainment Report to Dancin' Dynamites — document the music scene.

Museum opened in October 2016 at the Pulse Centre on Trafalgar Road, Kingston, honouring Peter Tosh with memorabilia including his M16 guitar and unicycle, plus audio and video of his life and work.

Island-wide televised dance competition launched in 2006, broadcast on Television Jamaica, in which trios perform weekly across genres before a mass voting audience. It has served as a launchpad for Jamaican dance talent for two decades.

The national music museum, a division of the Institute of Jamaica, holding instruments, recordings, ephemera and research material on the island's music. It is the formal public archive counterpart to the private collections and sound-system tape libraries that hold much of the surviving record.

The Institute of Jamaica is a national cultural institution whose divisions and events include music-history programming, exhibitions and public lectures that help document Jamaican music as heritage.

Division of the Institute of Jamaica established in 1973 to document African cultural retentions; merged in 1990 with the Jamaica Memory Bank, holding thousands of audiovisual records of folk song, ceremony and oral history across the parishes.

Jamaica Journal, the scholarly cultural quarterly published by the Institute of Jamaica since 1967, which has carried research on Jamaican arts, language and popular culture and provided an early venue for serious writing on the music and its controversies.

Jamaican cable music-and-entertainment channel, launched on 4 December 2002 and billed as the country's first round-the-clock station centred on reggae, dancehall and Caribbean culture. Its founder's own account fills in what the broadcast record does not. Carrie "Quizz" Sigurdson started it out of the street-level work she was already doing at whaddat.com, with a team of five including the cameraman Slicer, growing to a roster of VJs, videographers, producers and editors. The signature programme was "In the Streets", which went into the communities Jamaican television usually shot from a distance. The distribution decision was deliberate and is the interesting part: the channel had been planned for Logic-One cable in Waterhouse, West Kingston, and she moved it to Telstar, which served Kingston 6 and 8 — putting the ghetto on screen in front of uptown rather than in front of itself. By her account it took the top of the market from HYPE TV and Music Plus inside six months. RETV was sold to the Radio Jamaica / Gleaner group in 2006.

Kingston entertainment television channel launched in 1999, broadcasting music-video, event and lifestyle programming that helped drive the music-video era of dancehall.