Maja Berovic: Commenting on These Cliques Is Just Silly
A singer who almost never talks about her colleagues has broken that habit mid summer, while every act on the Montenegrin coast is chasing the same club dates.
Maja Berovic has called out the cliques forming among Serbian singers, the first time she has done so in public. She said it in an interview in Budva on July 30, 2026, halfway through a summer season she has been working on the Montenegrin coast for over a decade.
A singer who almost never comments on her colleagues did not soften it this time.
Lately, all these pointless cliques are being formed. Who, what, with whom, who is better… I think it is completely silly for me to comment on that, and it is not collegial either.
She named nobody. She did not say who is building the cliques or who they are being built around, which leaves the statement as a description with no return address. That is exactly why it will be repeated backstage for days.
Why it lands now
The remark arrived at the peak of the season, when singers on the coast rotate through the same venues and compete for the same dates. July and August are the only stretch of the year when everyone sees, hears and measures themselves against everyone else, and that, by her account, is where the dividing lines get drawn.
Berovic has been in the music business for 20 years. She has worked the Montenegrin summer season for 12 to 13 of them, meaning more than half of her career has been spent on the coast.
If you take into account that I have been in this business for 20 years, I think I have been doing this for some 12-13 years now.
The numbers behind the remark
When the complaint comes from someone who has held the season that long, the scene hears it differently than it would from an act still waiting for a booking. Three figures sit behind her name and nobody in the industry disputes them:
- the ticket sales record at Top Hill, the largest club in Montenegro
- the attendance record at Belgrade Arena
- more than 4,000 people packed into a single club in Mostar
None of the three comes from this season, yet together they explain why one sentence about cliques cannot simply be waved away.
What comes next
Berovic is currently working on a new album. That record will land in the scene she has just described as divided, and every post, guest appearance and booking between now and the release will be read through this one line. If a colleague recognises themselves in it, the reply will arrive long before the album does.
What she listens to while working is worth a line of its own. She said Madonna’s latest album is in rotation, adding that she has always listened to music as music, without caring who stands behind it.
What she wished for herself
Asked what she would wish for herself, she named neither a hit nor a tour.
I would wish myself patience, I think that is what I lack and what I struggle with.
She also admitted to a gap in her own biography, an odd one for someone who has been filling clubs and arenas for two decades. “I would love to go and see Cola, I have never been to his concert,” she said of Zdravko Colic.
In the end she reduced everything to a single word: “Only faith, that is the most important thing.”
Cliques on the Serbian scene are not news. What is new is that they were named out loud by a singer who spent twenty years saying nothing about them, and named without a single name attached, which is the surest way to hit several people at once.
