Charter house, an event management organisation last week held an open forum at the Rexmar Hotel in Kumasi to deliberate over the processes and the procedures initiated towards this year's Ghana Music Awards.
It served as a platform for Ghanaian musicians to express their views on the failures and successes of the Awards. The forum was to also create a platform for the general public to nominate artists into the 26 categories. This includes the popular song of the year, artiste of the year, and album of the year, highlife and hip-life song of the year and discovery of the year, among others.
In his opinion, Okyeami Kwaku said "I think some awards should not be given out".
Okyeami Kwaku of Okyeami and brothers fame expressed his concern saying "some awards like best artist and best song of the year, should not be given out because when you look at the previous ones, you realise that some artists do not deserve it, but because the Award is there it should be given out but in his case when the Award do not go to anybody, artists will work hard next time to receive it. Indeed majority supported this suggesting.
In an interview with some Kumasi based musicians, they had the feeling of being left out of the Awards, "last year, I and some other artist were told a night before the programme that we will be performing, but we never performed, to me it is very bad as some songs are hits here in Kumasi, but not in Accra, so at the end of the day, the Awards are given to the wrong people".
"Indeed it was a worry for these hardworking artists", Isaac a weekend news editor of Hello FM, a radio station in Kumasi who expressed his concern on the disappointments meted out to the musicians.
A similar forum will be held again with the same purpose in Accra on the March 7 and March 8 in Takoradi, and then the committee will sit down with musicians in the region and bring them together before the lunch March 18.
Nii Ayite Hammond, head of production of Charter House explained that any musician can qualify if he or she released the album within November 2006 to October 2007 and the song should have good lyrics and if it is remixed, and it should be a production that is on the market.
