Alliance For Change in Ghana Music to positively revolutionize the industry

The Alliance For Change in Ghana Music (AFGHAM) is a collection of creative arts stakeholders who believe in creating a thriving and prosperous music industry.

AFGHAM is set to array modern ways of generating income for the music industry and Ghana as a whole through the creative arts, making the Ghana music industry attractive for investors again. It also seeks to recreate an industry which will significantly contribute to the economy of Ghana by restructuring how the music business is done in Ghana.

Creating music or doing anything that contributes to the music industry or music business in Ghana should be able to sustain any creator during their prime through to retirement and even their posterity. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case, and for far too long, the Ghana Music Industry has seen the majority of its stakeholders work very hard but receive very little or no income for their hard work and dedication, through no fault of theirs but due to a failed system which gets worse by the years.

According to Mark Darlington Osae – Interim AFGHAM Chairman, “in Ghana and parts of Africa some musicians, songwriters, DJs/presenters, backing vocalists, artist managers, producers, entertainment journalists, etc struggle to make ends meet or die poor after several years of dedicating their lives to a trade which should have supported their livelihood. There is also a lack of proper education and or awareness about the business aspect of the music industry across the board.“

This is why AFGHAM has been created as an alliance to advocate for, educate, and create realistic and pro-active solutions to the challenges in the Music Industry. Their objectives as shared in a May 2020 press statement include:

A) Get Ghana Music Industry plugged into the global music business to attract multinational record labels, publishing companies, booking agents, major event promoters, Investors, and also educate stakeholders in the Ghana music industry.

B) Fully digitize the royalties collection system, including implementation of radio logging/radio monitoring systems, song identification for easy logging, tracking and exploitation as well as set royalty rate per play for television and radio stations.

C) Seek modern ways of generating income for the music industry i.e. to attract digital service providers such as Spotify, Apple Music, etc. to actively and consistently support Ghanaian music on their global platforms.

D) To sanitize the music industry by ensuring transparency and accountability through the establishment of rigorous and robust checks within our professional bodies to prevent incompetence and corrupt practices and…

E) To create a booming music industry economy thriving enough to enable creative people to make most of their income in Ghana, before expanding to other countries in the world while making Ghana an attractive destination to foreigners for music events and other music associated activities. AFGHAM seeks to also partner with like-minded bodies that share its sentiments.

A thriving economy will mean creative people will be able to pay their fair share of taxes in Ghana and also contribute to national or private pension schemes, opening the door wide for a greater contribution to Ghana’s economy AFGHAM‘s Mr. Osae believes, he also encouraged people to sign their petition.