In this article, Cruise Industry News claims that Royal Caribbean Cruises will overtake the behemoth Carnival Cruises in their capacity to carry the most passengers. Given the number and the size of new ships that Royal Caribbean is planning to roll out, their estimated annual passenger capacity will increase from 3.2 million today, to 4.2 million in 2021.
For comparison, Carnival Cruises will increase their annual passenger capacity from 3.8 million this year to 4.0 million by 2021.
Looking at this from a musicians’ perspective, this can only be good. Ships need entertainment. The more ships they build, the more entertainers they’ll need. It’s that simple.
Royal Caribbean International has introduced their newest ship, Quantum of the Seas. Among the many features, bumper cars. Check out their video below.
The Maritime Labour Convention is meant to protect the rights of seafarers, which includes musicians. A list of conventions can be found on this page of the International Labour Organization. Some of these conventions will be ratified and come into force on August 20, 2013. Some of the changes that will affect musicians were outlined in this article on Berklee College’s Business Journal. Interesting read.
We are currently looking to add to our roster DJs with percussionists for cruise ship entertainment. We’d need to see video of your performances with bios and photos.
On our “jobs & auditions” page we list the type of entertainers we need year-round. At the very moment though we have a more urgent need for the following:
- Piano Vocalists
- Guitar Vocalists (acoustic only, no sequences)
- Male Vocalists to front cover bands
As of late, some cruise lines have moved to hiring guitar/vocalists that mostly perform without backing tracks. Although it is still possible to find work where you’d be required to use sequences, it’s more likely to find work if you can do the majority of your repertoire acoustically.
When you submit your demo material it’s important to show that you can do both on your video. Maybe you could even send two separate videos with sequenced material on one and acoustic on the other.
It is imperative that guitar/vocalists have a large repertoire including current songs, as well as repertoire going back all the way to the 50s.
We are currently looking for more guitar/vocalists, so send us your material now. You can check out this page for details on how to apply. You can also listen to episode 19 of our podcast for more details.
We are currently looking for the following entertainers:
- Lounge duos with and/or without sequences.
- 4 and 5-piece cover bands (top 40)
- 4-piece dance band (ballroom dance music, jazz standards, light top 40)
- Experienced Piano/Vocalists
- Experienced Guitar/Vocalists
- Orchestra musicians with strong sight-reading skills (Piano, bass, guitar, drums, lead trumpet, trombone and saxophone players doubling on flute and clarinet).
We are currently looking for lounge duos for immediate openings. These duos are ideally made up of a female and a male vocalist that play keyboards and guitar, with and/or without sequences.
Contact us for details.
Tel: 1-888-714-0964
E-mail: info@oceanbound.com
As you may know, we have a discussion forum on our site, that has provided a lot of information over the years. The idea of the forum was to have a place for us cruise ship musicians to discuss all aspects of our jobs and travels and to make available as much information as possible.
The forum is really successful in that people go there to read the information that’s there. We can tell this by the traffic the forum generates. However, we found that musicians don’t participate in the dialogue as much. In other words, they read the information but they don’t post a lot of questions and/or comments.
This is why I’m wondering if the forum is really needed. We have several options to deal with this:
- Get rid of the forum and post some of that information on our blog, twitter, Facebook presences.
- Keep the forum as is
Let us know what you think.
Thanks.
Update!
We have decided to make the forum readable only, as soon as our new site goes up. We’ll keep the forum around for a while in that state and eventually remove it.
We feel that we already have other tools that provide ways for us to make information available and we wouldn’t want people to have to go to many different pages to gather information. In order to consolidate information, we’ll be posting the important information on our blog which will then be announced on Twitter and Facebook.
You can still comment and ask questions on those services.
We are currently looking for quality bands with high energy and character. Lead vocalists should have charisma and the ability to engage a crowd.
Bands should not only play great music with a fresh new sound, but should also be visually appealing and be able to create a fun atmosphere.
Go here and click on Party Bands to find out more.
Updated February 7, 2013
-Guitar & Piano/Vocalists Needed-
We are currently looking for young, highly skilled guitar/vocalists and piano/vocalists for work on cruise ships. Visit our jobs & auditions page to learn more about the jobs and the audition procedures. Contact information is
