GBM Showcase Brooklyn 2013 Highlights
The GBM Showcase in New York City became one of Julianspromos’ major media coverage events of 2013, producing one of the stronger surviving collections of performances and artist interviews from the company’s early multimedia years.
By this point, Julianspromos had moved well beyond its beginnings in digital music promotion. Following its first steps into original media coverage in 2011 and continued growth through 2012, the platform was increasingly documenting full Caribbean entertainment events and developing a team capable of representing the brand on location.
The GBM Showcase became an especially important example of that growth because the Julianspromos coverage was handled by Chandelle “Chandy” De Riggs and Intrigue without Julian Hackett being present at the event. Rather than the company’s media activity depending entirely on its founder, members of the growing Julianspromos team were now independently conducting interviews and capturing coverage on behalf of the platform.
A Major 2013 Julianspromos Coverage Event
The surviving footage from the showcase provides considerably more than a single event recap.
Julianspromos captured a combination of live performances, individual artist interviews and an overall highlight package, creating a broader record of the night and the artists appearing at the showcase.
The footage includes Soca artists such as Destra Garcia, Ravi B, GBM Nutron and Cassi, along with additional performers appearing throughout the main event highlights.
What makes the collection particularly valuable today is the amount of material that survived. Many early Julianspromos events are represented by only one video or a limited group of photographs. The GBM Showcase archive preserves several individual pieces of coverage, allowing the event to be reconstructed much more fully more than a decade later.
Chandelle “Chandy” De Riggs Interviews Destra Garcia
Among the strongest surviving pieces from the event is Chandelle “Chandy” De Riggs’ interview with Destra Garcia.
Chandy was still in the earlier years of her Julianspromos media career, having joined the platform in 2011. By the time of the GBM Showcase, she had become one of the personalities representing Julianspromos in front of the camera.
Her Destra coverage combined the artist’s live appearance with an original Julianspromos interview, preserving another example of Chandy’s developing role as a Caribbean entertainment correspondent.
The surviving Julianspromos Chandy archive specifically identifies both the Destra and Ravi B interviews from the 2013 GBM Showcase as part of her media history with the company.
Ravi B Performance and Interview
Chandy also interviewed Ravi B, adding another significant artist conversation to Julianspromos’ coverage of the showcase.
Ravi B was coming out of a strong Trinidad Carnival 2013 season, including the success of “Prescription,” and contemporary reporting from that period identified the upcoming GBM Showcase in New York among his scheduled international appearances.
The combination of Ravi B’s performance and Chandy’s interview further demonstrates the depth of the Julianspromos coverage that night. The team was not simply recording stage performances. They were creating additional editorial content around the artists appearing at the event.
Intrigue Interviews GBM Nutron
Intrigue was also actively working the event for Julianspromos and conducted the surviving interview with GBM Nutron.
That footage is particularly useful when looking back at how the Julianspromos media structure was developing.
With Chandy handling interviews including Destra Garcia and Ravi B, and Intrigue conducting the GBM Nutron interview, the showcase provides a clear example of multiple Julianspromos correspondents covering different artists at the same event.
Cassi at the GBM Showcase
The archive also preserves Cassi’s performance from the showcase, adding another individual performance to the surviving collection.
Chandy and Intrigue Represent Julianspromos Independently
From a company-history perspective, one of the most important aspects of the GBM Showcase is what was happening behind the coverage itself.
Julian Hackett was not at the event.
Instead, Chandelle “Chandy” De Riggs and Intrigue represented Julianspromos and handled the media coverage without him.
That distinction matters.
During Julianspromos’ earliest media period, Julian and other team members were still learning how to build an independent Caribbean media operation with limited resources. The GBM Showcase demonstrated that the platform had developed to a point where members of the team could attend an important event, conduct interviews, capture performances and represent the Julianspromos brand independently.
It was an early example of Julianspromos becoming more than the work of one individual.
Chandy and Intrigue were not simply appearing as personalities in videos. They were carrying out the company’s media work on location and generating content that would become part of the Julianspromos archive.
That makes the showcase particularly significant when looking at the development of the team during the early 2010s.
Building the Julianspromos Media Operation
The GBM Showcase also came during a period of rapid growth for Julianspromos.
Only a few years earlier, the company had been primarily associated with digital music promotion. By 2013, interviews, performances, showcases and event coverage were becoming substantial parts of the Julianspromos identity.
The company’s surviving archive from that year includes coverage from New York, Miami, Boston and other markets, showing how quickly the platform’s media footprint was expanding. The original Julianspromos site lists the GBM Showcase among a substantial run of 2013 event coverage and confirms the original archive entry was published on March 27, 2013.
GBM stands out within that year because of both the amount of surviving material and the way the event was covered.
There was a main highlights package.
There were individual performances.
There were artist interviews.
And there were multiple Julianspromos correspondents working the event.
Together, those elements make it one of the clearer surviving examples of what the Julianspromos media operation was becoming in 2013.
Preserving an Important 2013 Chapter
Looking back, the GBM Showcase 2013 represents much more than a collection of old Soca videos.
It captures a stage in the development of Julianspromos when the company was learning how to operate as a genuine media team. The event demonstrated that correspondents such as Chandelle “Chandy” De Riggs and Intrigue could independently represent the platform, interview established artists and generate substantial original coverage even when founder Julian Hackett was not physically present.
The footage also preserves a snapshot of the New York Caribbean entertainment scene during the 2013 Soca season, bringing together performances and conversations from artists whose work formed part of that period.
More than a decade later, the surviving videos now document two stories at once: the artists and music being celebrated on stage, and the growth of the Julianspromos team working behind the camera.
