Payola taking is a senseless and selfish act that is very detrimental to the music industry. When individual presenters take advantage of their position to siphon monies from producers and artist to enrich themselves.
These presenters are being paid by their employers to play music yet majority of them demand exorbitant monies ie bribes called payola from individuals before playing the songs. Some demand as high as 200ghc just to play a single song so calculate if you have to pay 5 presenters in that same station then multiply by 10 different stations in one region the multiply by only 5 regions ie Accra, Kumasi, Takoradi, Sunyani and tamale trust me you are talking of 50,000ghc equivalent to 500million old cedis. Some have built houses out of this corrupt practice and made most of the producers and artistes broke and this is only for radio not to talk of shooting a video and paying 2.000ghc to a single TV station multiplied by only 5 TV stations to show it for 1month you are talking of 30,000 since it takes 3months of effective promo to make your song popular. All these monies have to be paid before the song starts getting AirPlay so you won’t even no if the public would like the song for it to become a hit song.
Now the producer/artiste income is accrued from cd sales, downloads, shows and endorsements. The profit on 1 cd is less than 2ghc so no matter how much you sell you won’t brake even and the truth is CD sale have dropped drastically so you can imagine. When it comes to downloads you need millions to make a substantive income and tell me how many people use the Internet not to talk of to download your songs with their bundles. With shows and endorsements it takes only 5% of artist to make it to the top so what happens to the 95% left. One thing that payola those is if you have a bad song and you can pay then that useless song can make it locally but when it crosses the boarders those who know good music rejects it outright.
The truth is these payola takers have gradually sacked all the producers from the industry to pursue other businesses leaving many talents to their own faith. If we want to hear good music and be able to export good music as a country then TV station should support the Artist by not taken those outrageous monies and also the devilish act must stop and a total recycling of the payola takers mind overhauled since the product MUSIC is a content for their companies without which they would collapse.
In conclusion I would like to edge Ghamro to continue collecting the royalties from the music users so that the right owners get what is rightfully theirs.
by: Enoch Agyepong
