Flowking Stone: Music promotion is difficult in Ghana

Ghanaian musician, Flowking Stone has said promoting music in Ghana is more difficult now compared to the past.

Flowking Stone whose real name is Kwaku Nsia Boama explained that in the past, artiste’s producers were those funding music promotion and sorting out all the financial aspects of promoting music which included paying for slots on radio and with DJ’s.

He said with the advent of the internet, the sale of CDs dropped which affected the music industry and music producers now shifted focus to producing movies because Kumawood was also ‘booming’ at the time.

According to him, this left artistes to their fate and promote their own music such artistes, he said were labelled as “Indi artistes.”

Speaking in an interview on 3FM Drive with Giovani Caleb, the rapper said artistes were now forced to be in charge of their own music promotion and bear all the financial costs which comes with it.

This, he said has made music promotion more difficult now because most artistes don’t have the financial means for such huge budgets to pay dancers, promote on radio and tv, and run ads on the various digital platforms and social media.

Although there are record labels are now, Flowking Stone believes the situation hasn’t changed much.

“Those days when we use to come to radio, there were the producers who used to drop our songs and fund it. Take the songs to the DJs and pay them. Now, it got to a time when the producers left to go do movies when Kumawood was at the top and music was not working like that.

“There was a change. They were not able to sell CDs, the internet was coming and the artistes were fighting with producers and a lot of stuffs. There was a very long period artistes were funding themselves; it is just recently that record labels are coming in.

“Now TikTok came and people started blowing and we were like okay. Even before TikTok, there was Facebook. There was a time even when you post a video on Facebook, they will open up to all your fans and reduce the number of people who will see. They will allow only 5% of your fans to see it unless you buy advert so we started buying advert and tipping the club DJs and radio DJs. Then TV stations came and you had to tip all the people.

“The funny thing is that the TikTok is the last hope and they started charging more than all the others. So now the job is difficult so you can blow on TikTok and if you don’t have good friends on radio, it will not go.

“So the original budget you need to fund that has become bigger and you the artiste you don’t have it,” he explained on Friday, August 23.

The rapper is currently promoting his ‘Decision’ album released last year while he was in the UK, the album has songs featuring King Paluta, Mr Drew, Morphty and others.

Source: 3news