Special Feature: Mixed Grill
Payola - Who Is Harming Whom
By Okyem Duku(Okyemnana)
Jun 17, 2004, 14:41

A lot has been said recently about payola but let us look at a few things concerning payola.

The relation between the broadcasting media and the music industry was or is supposed to be a symbiotic one ie we scratch one another's back,but in Ghana this relation is lopsided in favour of the broadcasting media - more specifically DJs. No broadcasting setup can survive without music, be it Ghanaian music or music from Mars. Why then is it that DJs demand payola before playing your music?

First of all what is payola?  I myself do not know the origin of this word, but I do know that it is :- in diplomatic parlance, an incentive or inducement to DJs to give a particular song an unmerited airtime or airplay, to put it bluntly, a bribe paid to DJs to play a particular record.

The question is why would a musician want to pay bribe for their record to be given airplay?  The only plausible answer to me is that the musicians who do that do not have faith in their own songs and doubt whether their songs would make any impact on its own.

I doubt if the Kojo Antwis, Lumbas and the Nana Tuffours pay any payola but their songs get enormous amount of airplay so this shows that if a song is good enough, it will sell itself.  Payola is also the reason why there should be a united front from the musicians to take on the broadcasting media; Rex Omar initiated something of the sort sometime ago be he did not get any support. 

Music is a work of art and like all other works of art, it should attract royalties for commercial use.  Dare the broadcasting stations to stop playing all music for one week and see the results.