Rapper and well-known hiplife singer from Ghana, Okyeame Kwame, has disclosed that young musicians avoid hiplife music since it is not available on streaming services.
He claimed that selling CDs was all they needed to do to promote themselves and earn money back in the day, before the advent of streaming services.“Music and marketing these days are about money. Gone are the days when we used to sell our CDs to promote our music and make money,” he said.
The rap doctor disclosed that the majority of streaming services feature genres including hip hop, Afrobeat, neo soul, soul, alternative music, African music, and experimental. This was stated in an interview on XZONE on TV XYZ. It does, however, make it challenging to market a genre that isn’t included in their music category on streaming services.
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“Now music is on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon. The online platforms have no genre called Hiplife. So, where are you going to sell your music when you call it Hiplife? There’s no Hiplife on streaming platforms; all they have is hip hop, Afrobeat, neo soul, soul, alternative music, African music, and experimental. So, if your song is not one of these categories, it’s more like creating a round product where the shelves are all in square shape,” he added.
Hiplife pioneers ought to have established a comparable platform for Ghanaian music, Okyeame Kwame said to host Afia Owusu, since this would have encouraged upcoming musicians to explore this genre.
“As pioneers, we should have created a similar platform because these streaming platforms were created by man and we can also do the same. If we had done the same with all Ghanaian genres, the younger generation would have been interested in our genres, but the white man will promote his own with stuff he created,” he emphasized.
