Music has grown and evolved over the years. It has its ethos world wide with different genres. African music has not been excluded from this evolvement and growth especially Ghanaian music.
As music has evolved, so have most artistes gotten themselves fanbases who support their crafts.
Some Ghanaian artistes have larger fanbases while comparatively, others also do not have at all and then, there are the music lovers.
Music lovers are the individuals who like a particular music but not necessarily the artiste. When they do not have a hit song in the system, they do not really care about you. They rather care about the one with the hit song.
The three(3) biggest fanbases in Ghana undoubtedly are the Sarknation of rapper Sarkodie, the Shatta Movement of reggae dancehall artiste, Shatta Wale and Bhimnation of the reggae dancehall artiste Stonebwoy. Other fanbases include; Team Move of Kofi Kinaata, High Grade Family of Samini, GbevuNation of Edem etc.
These elite fanbases make their artistes relevant irrespective of having a hit song or not. They stream their songs on all digital platforms whether it’s a new song or old song and attend their concert no matter where it is being held in the country.
Social media has become a very big tool for promoting Artistes and these fanbases do so in style.
One major concern is the disunity amongst the fanbases when it comes to promoting artistes who are not their favorite especially when the artistes in question are at logger heads with each other.
They troll and disrespect other artistes’ hard work and reputation built over the years if it is not their favorite’s.
To conquer the world with our music, these fanbases need to come together in a unified force and push every artistes irrespective of the camp he belongs to.
There was a fraction of Sarknatives who trolled and rubbished the hard work of Shatta Wale and Stonebwoy when Sarkodie won the Black Entertainment Television (BET) best international flow award. We witnessed the same thing after the collaboration between Beyonce and Shatta Wale when the Shatta Movement trolled, rubbished and disrespected Sarkodie and Stonebwoy’s hard work they have done over the years. Bhimnation also did same after Stonebwoy won the Billboard mementos.
These attitudes of disrespecting our artistes because he or she does not belong to our camp is not the way forward if we want to conquer the world with our music. Fanatics are allowed to troll but there should be a certain level of respect to these musicians and their crafts.
Structures are not in place in our music industry like other countries and we do not have the numbers, but with a unified force to push our music and our musicians whether he or she is our favorite or not will be a big win for Ghana.
The insults and disrespect to our artistes on social media by these fan bases are not the way forward as an industry rather putting our differences aside and promoting every artistes we have here in Ghana is the way to move as an industry.
Together we have a future, divided there is no future for our music industry.
