Why Use Expensive Artistes When DJs With A Hype Man Can Give The Same Experience?

What is the issue?

Over the years, most Ghanaians and musical concert followers have been complaining about the subpar performance of some Ghanaian artists on stage. While most of them charge thousands of cedis to show up on stage, the quality of performance doesn’t correlate with the amounts they charge.

Patrons of such events don’t get any new experiences at events since most artists in Ghana do not give any creative performance on stage, nor even perform their songs with a live band for a different feel. In most cases, artistes come on stage with a lot of entourage who are neither backup singers nor dancers, these people crowd the stage leaving little or no room for the artist to utilize the stage.

As if that was not enough, these artists end up miming their songs the entire performance for some few minutes, get tired and leave the singing to those in the auditorium while they scream “minti o minti oo, Osi den osi den.”

Staunch followers and patrons of such shows are able to predict performances and even the order of songs of some artists on various stages.

Why is this worth discussing?

In a publication by Ghana Web, CEO of Media Excel productions, Kwesi Ernest has called out Ghanaian artists to justify their high charges for their shows. Like others, Ernest does not see the correlation between the high charges of artists and their low standard performance.

To corroborate this, the Director of Editorial of Muse Africa, Nana Yaw Wiredu, in a recent interview explained that event organizers should be blamed for putting such hit artists on stage for them to deliver so poorly. According to him, the current crop of events in Ghana rides on the backbone of artists with hit songs at that moment. So patrons are convinced to come to the show to see these artists instead of convincing them to come and have a good show in spite of if the artist billed has a recent hit song or not.

What is the way forward?

To Nana Yaw Wiredu, event organizers should be strategic in billing artists for their shows, since most of them end up billing the same group of people for all events despite how tired they may be.

He also advised that instead of paying huge sums of money to hit song artists to come and jump on stage and scream, why not get a DJ to play the songs just like they do at events and then get a hype man who would be doing the screaming, jumping and boosting the morale of the people at the event for less the price they give to these artists?

He further said that, if event organizers decide to use hit song artists for events, they should blend them with other artists who don’t have hit songs at the moment or those who won’t be so busy that season so they fill in the loopholes created by these tired hit song artists.