Music these days is a big venture and once you tune on your TV sets and see international musicians flaunt the best of clothes, jewelry, cars, attend the best clubs in town, and live in plush houses, and you wonder where, exactly, all that money is coming from.
With that you bring your mind back to Ghana and ask yourself, how much does the artiste make from CD sales?
When an artiste sits down to write a song, a whole lot runs through his or her head, he or she calculates what is going into it and what he or she intends to get from it. We shall be looking at the role we play as an internet media in making our music celebrities get what they deserve. Making money in the music industry is tricky.
Unlike other forms of intellectual property, music royalties have a strong linkage to individuals from the artistes to the very man who sells the CD on the street.
In Ghana no person or entity, other than the copyright owner, can use or employ the music for gain without obtaining a license from the composer/songwriter.
Naturally, as copyright, it confers on its owner, to make copies of the songs through print or recordings, to distribute them to the public for profit, to the "public performance right"; live or through a recording, to create a derivative work to include elements of the original music.
You might be surprised to know that recording artistes don't earn royalties for their public performances. They'll earn royalties off sales of their CDs and downloads, but when the songs they perform are played in public, such as in TV commercials or on the radio, the recording artists get nothing.
With the advent of the internet, an additional set of royalties has come into play: the digital rights from simulcasting, webcasting, streaming, downloading, and online "on-demand service."
GhanaWeb is soon bringing a mechanism where musicians from all spheres of live can upload their music online and then get over 45million people to listen to your song once it is uploaded, as well the musician gets to make money out of his or her song.
