According to Ghanaian musician Flowking Stone, music promotion in Ghana is harder these days than it was in the past.
The musician known as Flowking Stone, whose real name is Kwaku Nsia Boama, clarified that in the past, music promoters handled all financial aspects of the industry, including booking radio and DJ positions.
He claimed that when the internet came up, CD sales fell, which had an impact on the music business. As a result, producers of music began to concentrate more on making movies, since Kumawood was also “booming” at the time.
He claimed that this allowed artists to promote their own songs and leave them to their fate, calling these artists “Indi artistes.”
The rapper added that musicians were now required to handle their own album promotion and pay for all associated expenses in an interview with Giovani Caleb on 3FM Drive and it was monitored by Atlfm news.
He claimed that because most musicians don’t have the funds for such large budgets to employ dancers, promote on radio and television, and run advertisements on numerous digital platforms and social media, this has made music promotion more challenging nowadays.
Record labels do exist now, but Flowking Stone thinks not much has changed in that regard.
“Those days when we use to come to radio, there were the producers who used to drop our songs and fund it. 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.
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“There was a change. They were not able to sell CDs, the internet was coming and the artistes were fighting with producers and a lot of stuffs. There was a very long period artistes were funding themselves; it is just recently that record labels are coming in.
“Now TikTok came and people started blowing and we were like okay. Even before TikTok, there was Facebook. There was a time even when you post a video on Facebook, they will open up to all your fans and reduce the number of people who will see. They will allow only 5% of your fans to see it unless you buy advert so we started buying advert and tipping the club DJs and radio DJs. Then TV stations came and you had to tip all the people.
“The funny thing is that the 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 radio, it will not go.
“So the original budget you need to fund that has become bigger and you the artiste you don’t have it,” he explained on Friday, August 23.
The rapper is now promoting his album “Decision,” which was released while he was in the UK last year. King Paluta, Mr. Drew, Morphty, and other artists are featured on the album.
