Top Musicians To Boycott Ghana Music Awards

NEWS-ONE has gathered that some top Ghanaian musicians may not be taking part in this year’s Ghana Music Awards as a number of them are considering pulling out from the award ceremony.

NEWS-ONE is yet to drop the name of musicians who want to take part in the action.

But the paper’s source says some of the musicians have written to the Vodafone Ghana Music Awards Board and Academy about pulling out of the award.

Charterhouse, organisers of the award, is working diligently behind the scenes to make this year’s award controversial free.

The source is however yet to find out why some musicians want to withdraw from the award.

Last month, organisers announced that it had made some changes to the award ceremony to offer a different ceremony.

Among them were three new categories including Gospel Album of the Year, Group of the Year and Sound Engineer Of the Year.

It also unveiled the award’s technical preview team which consisted of: Amandzeba, George Gyimah (Phamous Philms), Nacy (No Tribe), Kwame Faakye, Kiki Banson, Bessa Simons, Richie Mensah (Lynx), Diana Hopeson, Abraham Ohene Gyan, Fred Kyei Mensah, David Kyei (Kaywa) and Joseph Addison (Killbeat).

The rest were Sammy Forson, Okyeame Kwame, Arnold Asamoah Baidoo, Paul Nuamah Donkor (Jay So), Appiah Dankwa (Appiatus) and DJ Andy Dosty.

Currently, the number of award categories has shot up from 26 to 29 categories. The categories for the VGMA were also reviewed to include 15 public voting categories, 12 industry voting categories and 3 honorary categories.

Generally, there have been some significant changes. The term ‘commercial release’ was redefined to take cognizance of new digital channels of music distribution, for example Youtube, Facebook, twitter and RBT/CRBT.

As a result, the word ‘commercial’ was dropped because some of the channels are non-commercial e.g. Twitter, Youtube etc.

The VGMA calendar year has also changed from November to December 1, 2010 to December 31, 2011; hence to be eligible for a VGMA 2012, an artiste’s work should have been released from December 1, 2010 to December 31 2011.

Meanwhile, the VGMA will maintain the 3-tier voting system; the public, the VGMA Academy and the VGMA Board.

With public voting awards, the public has 40% votes, VGMA Academy (selection committee) – 30%, and the VGMA Board (planning committee) – 30%.

Industry Voting Awards comes with 50% for VGMA Academy and another 50% for VGMA Board.

Honorary Awards: VGMA Board – 100%. Sound Engineer, Music Video, Music Producer: VGMA Board and Peer voting and finally Most Popular Song will be decided by public which has 100%.

Other new changes in the voting system include the addition of new channels like online voting via www.ghanamusicawards.com and voting on mobile phone via short code.

The award ceremony will be held in April after a huge nominations party.