Payola taking is a senseless and selfish act that is very detrimental to the music industry. When individual presenters take advantages of their position to siphon monies from producers and artistes to enrich themselves.
These presenters are being paid by their employers to play music yet majority of them demand exorbitant monies i.e. bribes playing the songs.
Some demand as high as GH200 just to play a single song so multiply by the number of presenters that would be working for you across the country and see how much would have been spent on bribe alone.
Some presenters have built houses out of this corrupt practice and made most of the producers and artistes broke.
Aside this, the musician pays GH2, 000 to a single TV station for a month. Multiply by says 5 TV stations and you are talking of GH10, 000.
Now the producer/artiste income is accrued from CD sales, downloads, shows and endorsements. The profit on 1 CD is less than GH2 so no matter how much you sell you won’t break even and the truth is that CD sales have dropped drastically so you can imagine.
When it comes to downloads you need millions to make a substantive income and how many people use the internet not to talk of how to download your songs with their bundles. With shows and endorsements, it takes only 5% of artiste to make it to the top so what happens to the 95% left.
One thing that payola does is that 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 reject 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 fate.
If we want to hear good music and be able to export good music as a country, then TV stations should support the artistes by not taking these huge monies. DJs should also stop taking payola.
In conclusion, I would urge GHAMRO to continue collecting the royalties from the music users so that the right owners get what is rightfully theirs.
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