Faluma.com – Europe’s specialist on Soca & Calypso!
This type of music is rooted in the Caribbean carnival and it is very seasonal. After the festival days it disappears much to fast and music piracy makes it even harder for the artists to live off the fruits of their creativity.
Faluma’s ambition is to support the artists by presenting to an international audience this music, that was always quite hard to get hold of, partly because of missing distribution and marketing channels and partly due to the seasonal and ephemeral character of typical carnival tunes.
It all began with the Faluma Online Shop founded in 2003 by German DJs Martin Stahl aka Marflix and Johannes Kueckens aka Doob (Constant Pressure Supasoca) and Julia Deimann to present and push the music which was hardly available in Europe.
The shop offers a wide selection in the field of Soca and Calypso Vinyl, CDs, DVDs, mixtapes, books and accessoires and lots of classics and rare collectibles from diverse Caribbean islands.
If you are searching for music from Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Grenada, St. Vincent, Antigua and other Caribbean islands – Faluma.com is your place to be.
Beside Soca and Calypso Faluma also offers some very special Reggae, Mento, Reggaeton, Parang and Zouk albums.
Faluma soon also started to operate as a label and pressed some beautiful soca vinyls that were sold out in no time and are now hard to get collectors items.
Over the years the market changed a lot and and the label Faluma Digital was founded to release and distribute soca MP3s. Faluma Digital presented the first ever MP3-only soca album and made available the backcatalogue of some of the greatest bands from the West Indies as well as the latest albums of well-known or upcoming artists. (Learn how it works).
For the digital release and distribution of various other Caribbean and World Bass music styles, the Faluma crew also founded the sub-label Bacchanalism.
In 2008 Faluma joined forces with the Trinidad & Tobago Entertainment Company (short: T&T Ent), a state agency under the Ministry of Trade and Industry of Trinidad and Tobago. The aim of this cooperation is to pave the way for a greater international attention for and easier access to the beautiful and diverse musical traditions and achievements of Trinidad and Tobago.The shared vision is to digitally release music of all facettes from Trinidad and Tobago and market it online. Since T&T Ent is rooted in the local music business as well as in cultural and governmental institutions and Faluma is already offering a wide selection of soca and clypso on the net for many years and distributes it to all major MP3 platforms, the cooperation is just a logical step in promoting the musical culture of Trinidad and Tobago throughout the world.
In 2009 Faluma and T&T Ent created a very special own download webshop, where all Faluma content is now presented alongside a wide array of new T&T Ent releases, that are to be digitally released in cooperation of Faluma and T&T Ent. Due to the special mission of T&T Ent, the focus is on music from Trinidad & Tobago, but the Faluma releases by artists from all the other countries will also be available and presented on this promising new platform.