Renowned rapper Kwaku Nsia Boama, known in the industry as Flowking Stone, has revealed that the advent of digital media is making music promotion in the country costly.
According to him, musicians now have to pay extra money for TikTokers and brand influencers aside from the traditional media budget that they pay disc jockeys (DJs) before their songs will be played.
Flowking Stone said this in a recent interview with the media, where he disclosed that it was more difficult to promote music in Ghana now as compared to the past.
“The funny thing is that TikTok is the last hope, and they started charging more than all the others. So now the job is difficult, so you can blow on TikTok, and if you don’t have good friends on the radio, it will not go. So the original budget you need to fund has become bigger, and you, the artist, don’t have it,” he said.
The rapper also attributed the difficulty in promoting music in the country to music producers shifting their attention from music to invest in movie productions.
He observed that many music producers stopped assisting musicians financially in music promotion when the Kumawood industry was booming.
“Those days when we used to come to radio, there were the producers who used to drop our songs and fund them. Take the songs to the DJs and pay them. Now, it got to a time when the producers left to go do movies when Kumawood was at the top and music was not working like that.
“There was a change. They were not able to sell CDs; the internet was coming, and the artists were fighting with producers and a lot of stuff,” he stated.
Flowking Stone noted that musicians were left to their fate and had to fund themselves before the advent of record labels.
“There was a very long period where artists were funding themselves; it is just recently that record labels are coming in,” he added.
Source: Ghana/MaxTV/MaxFM/max.com.gh/Joyceline Natally Cudjoe
