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In Jamaica's foundation years the man who paid for the session owned the sound - and often the shop, the studio and the label too.

From ska instrumentals to modern dancehall, a cluster of Chinese-Jamaican entrepreneurs ran the shops, studios and labels at the centre of the music.

Randy's, Rockers, Aquarius, Record Globe and later overseas retailers show how shops acted as A&R rooms, archives, distributors and community hubs.

Heartbeat, Blood and Fire, Pressure Sounds and Soul Jazz helped make Jamaican studio archives legible to global collectors.

From the rocksteady queens and the first female producer to the I-Threes, the lovers-rock pioneers and the dancehall crown, women have carried Jamaican music from the studio floor to the world stage.

From The Skatalites to Roots Radics, Jamaican music history depends on flexible bands, rhythm sections, horn lines and arrangers as much as named singers.

Alpha Boys School, Federal, Studio One and touring bands made ska both local dance music and exportable show business.

When King Jammy's went digital in 1985, a wave of deejays rode the new Waterhouse computer sound into the dancehall mainstream.

From one Yokohama selector in 1984 to stadium-sized festivals, Japan built the most devoted non-Jamaican dancehall scene in the world.

How a London label turned King Tubby's mixing-desk science into a post-punk-era sound of its own.

On one Boxing Night stage, the deejay's word became a weapon of pure performance.

In 1950s Kingston, Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat and Duke Reid's Trojan turned rival dances into the foundation of an entire music industry.

A new cohort of Jamaican deejays broke through on YouTube views and streaming charts rather than radio play, without breaking from dancehall's toasting lineage.

Sonia Pottinger's labels, Treasure Isle singers and later dancehall voices complicate male-centred histories.

Dub and dancehall studio history depends on engineers whose mixing, effects and versioning choices became creative authorship.

Before ska there was mento — rural songs of humour, labour and double meaning.

Poets turned reggae cadence, sound-system address and political speech into recorded and printed literature.

In Jamaica and the diaspora, the retail counter was the A&R department.

A cross-border human-rights campaign collided with dancehall over lyrics, cancellations and a disputed pledge.

How rival rigs, custom dubplates and selectors turned the dance into Jamaica's first media platform.

One harmony group's lead-singer chair changed hands more than almost any other in reggae, and each singer carried it somewhere new.

Rastafari drumming came down from the Wareika Hills and onto record while colonial-era radio kept its distance.

Street dances, named moves, dance songs and voicing rooms made 2000s dancehall a fast feedback system.

The digital riddim turned the producer into the star of the record - and the story runs from a Casio preset to the modern hit factory.

When Jamaican video vixens talk about the job themselves, the story is less about spectacle than about bookings, contracts and a path into other work.

As fusion, revival and trap reshaped the sound, the authenticity question came home.

In the early 1980s a wave of teenage deejays turned the dancehall over to youth.

How a Waterhouse engineer turned mixing into an instrument and previewed the remix age.

From Clarks and Kangols in the dance to Caribbean runways and global catwalks.

Janet Kay, Louisa Mark, Carroll Thompson, Dennis Bovell and London shops/labels made a UK reggae language of intimacy.

In Jamaica the rhythm track, not the finished song, is the durable unit of creativity.

The selector went from an anonymous pair of hands on the turntable to the named star of the dance.

How operators, selectors and live tapes helped turn local deejays into recording artists.

How a weekly dance built a global vocabulary of moves.

How studio players turned imported R&B and local feel into a brand-new offbeat as a nation stepped forward.

By the mid-1970s, stripping a reggae master down to drum, bass and echo had stopped being a B-side trick and become an album statement in its own right.

Singers and producers changed by the week; the studio band underneath them almost never did.

How a cheap keyboard preset in 1985 reset the sound of dancehall.

A 2010s wave of singers reclaimed roots reggae for a new century.

One rhythm can hold dozens of performances, arguments, jokes, hits and local memories.

How a handful of session players shaped record after record.

Dancehall's rhythms, moves and slang went global in the 2010s - the argument is over who gets credited.

How the sound-system deejay's live talk-over became recorded art.

A running thread through Jamaican song: elders who hand the microphone directly to the next generation.

The electronics craft as an apprenticeship, and its journey from Waterhouse to London and New York.

The 1966 tempo drop turned a session-band music into an island of singers.