Only danceable songs can be hits in Ghana – Hammer

If you want to make a hit song in this country, it needs to be something that Ghanaians can dance to, that is what beatmaker Hammer is saying.

Hammer in an interview on Hitz FM said that most Ghanaians do not appreciate other genre of music like westerners and that has resulted in this.

He continued that the love for danceable tunes by Ghanaians has made many musicians runaway from the country.

“With Ghana, the genres are very few, the taste in music in Ghana is very few. The majority like the club banger's as in the dance songs; a percentage love the Hip-hop, a percentage love the Reggae and a percentage love Classical music so obviously if you want to make a hit song in Ghana it has to be a club banger.

Rocky Dawuni had a great song, ‘In Ghana’, it didn’t do as well as Lumba’s ‘Aben wo ha’ but it was a good song so what I am saying is that if you want to make a super hit song in this country right now, it has to be a club genre.

You can’t do a classical song and expect it to blow everywhere, unless you don’t look at hits song that way and you just want to do a great song, but you need to know it is relative, you can’t make music a general thing the market counts. In America you can make a jazz hit, over here it is impossible.

Unfortunately where we are, people are quite focused on just dancing so someone who does alternative great music won’t get the attention he needs.

That’s why Atongo and the rest all ended up in Europe because Europe has a wider audience who have different tastes in music but over here, Atongo’s music can’t supersede the Tonga hit so it depends on where you are, you can’t dodge that but over here it's just club.

You can’t really define what makes a hit song because a bad song can become a hit through good promotion easily.

You have to also factor in the promotion factor because we have seen in the past that good songs have done very poorly because of bad promotion and bad songs have skyrocketed because of good promotion so with creativity you can’t really factor something in particular that makes a hit song.

Music can be good to a particular kind of people and it can be very bad to a different criteria of people.”