Director for Creative Arts at the National Commission on Culture in Ghana, Socrate Safo has advised Ghanaian musicians not to relegate the traditional way of selling their music to the background by focusing only on selling their music digitally.
According to him, there is a bigger market for CDs than the various digital platforms musicians subscribe to and believes the digital platforms only exist to make money off of musicians.
Speaking in an interview with Happy 98.9 FM’s Doctar Cann, host of Showbiz Xtra, he said, “Compare the profit you gain from 100 people streaming your music to how much you earn from selling CDs and you will realise that CD sales are more profitable.”
He furthered that it is a great misconception for musicians to say there are no customers for the CD market. “Consumers are still there. They buy CDs and we shouldn’t only spend time to promote and sell music on digital stores.”
Socrate citing Stonebwoy’s ‘Anloga Junction’ as a typical example of a record that could have made a lot CD sales with proper promotion noted, “The album is being sold on CDs at filling stations but he is not promoting it with tweets and other social media platforms.
People sell pirated copies of the album in traffic and a lot of people are buying it.”
The film maker revealed that the same people pirating and selling music and movies on CDs were those who retailed for Opera Square. This is going on because there is a market for CDs and consumers are not getting the product, he added.
“Ghanaian artistes should promote CDs more rather than sit somewhere and promote their music in digital stores and complain people are not buying from the digital stores. The digital stores are taking advantage of the work of our artistes,” he reiterated.
In recent times, the focus of music promotion and sales have moved from the conventional CDs to the use of various online and streaming platforms.
This has led to a high decline in the sale of CDs and has adversely affected retail outlets and many other businesses in that space.
