Popular Ghanaian sound engineer, Ball J Beat has pointed out that Azonto was Ghana’s music industry’s biggest chance to blow internationally.
The former rapper and beat maker in an interview on Showbiz University Podcast with King Kwaku Mensa wailed bitterly that Ghanaians felt Azonto was nothing but a dance Craze and not a genre of music therefore losing the opportunity to make it big like Afrobeats.
“My pain is that people do not understand music the way I do. Azonto was a chance to blow it up. Fuse did it and so did Guru but the problem is that people thought it was a dance. Fine, it was dance but we still should have used that opportunity to put it inside the categories,” Ball J lamented.
According to the music producer, when a genre of music brings money to the table, the right authorities should add it to the award categories. “When azonto was out, people were like ‘Azonto is the biggest in Africa’. What happened to Azonto? When we make money from a genre, put it in your awards,” he advised.
Clearly affected by the neglect of azonto as a genre of music, Ball J identified some flaws evident in Ghana’s music industry. “Ghana doesn’t understand categories in terms of music. Rather, they really understand dance. Ghana is all in the category of dance but they don’t look at the genre of music and that’s our downfall”, he said.
To conclude his submission, Ball J Beat pointed out that in the future, the music industry needed to pay attention to everything, work on it and not wait till it’s used by their competitors, after which they’ll begin to complain.
“The next time, even if a dance comes to Ghana, we should try and put it in the category. With what I am saying, they hear it but not do anything about it. The Nigerians will take it and we say they’re better than us meanwhile, we are all the same just that, we are not doing our homework well,” he concluded.
