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Three-time Ghanaian Grammy Awards nominee, Rocky Dawuni, has broached the subject on the relevance of record labels to musicians.
Speaking at the African Music Week Accra on December 27, 2024 at the GIPC Conference Room, the ‘In Ghana’ singer said music business has undergone a huge transformation, making it quite easy for individual artistes to survive.
According to him, when MySpace and other digital platforms came, he was at the height of his breakthrough in America so a lot of the time he got to play on shows for this turn of the digital media.
Rocky indicated that African musicians do not necessarily need record labels to thrive in recent times.
“Then the revolution started because the Artiste and Repertoire people were no longer the gatekeepers. When an artiste makes music and puts it online, the music becomes global instantly so the music does not go through a gatekeeper. So the digital world brought with it an opportunity for African music to not only go through record labels, but target the audience directly.
Right now what we need to know is that we don’t really need record labels as a continent. We just need to be very well organised, have our music monitised and also have a means to market our music directly to the listening public,” he said.
The issue of signing on to record labels has been topical in recent times. While some people believe records labels don’t really seek the well-being of artistes, others have enumerated many advantages that come with being affiliated to a label.
source: myjoyonline.com
