Imagine if Sarkodie was Nigerian, or South African, could you imagine how much more global his appeal would have been? The support he would have received from his countrymen and the big projection his visibility, both online and off-line would have been?
But alas he is only Ghanaian.
This piece is not necessarily about only Sarkodie as a Ghanaian artiste, as his name could have been replaced by Stonebwoy, Shatta Wale or Obrafour and the point would have still been valid, however I will use him as a focus point as he is indeed the cream of the current crop of authentic Ghanaian music superstars.
Michael Owusu Addo might not be the greatest Ghanaian musician, however one cannot deny the fact that he is Ghana’s premier resident super star. He has been a mainstay in the Ghanaian rap scene for at least 13 years since his debut album ‘Makye’ came out in 2009. He has 5 studio albums and 1 EP under his belt, in an interview with renowned YouTube hip hop culture platform VladTv in 2020 Sark admitted to host Dj Vlad that the track ‘ADONAI’ which featured the late (is it ok to refer to Castro as ‘late’ now?) Castro is his biggest track ever and a quick search indicated that ‘Adonai’ is indeed Sark’s video with the most YouTube views at 84million views (at the time of said the interview it had 74million views).
Sark has featured with all the big names in Africa from South Africa’s AKA to Kenya’s xxxx to Nigeria’s Yemi Alade and Ice Prince and Burna Boy, he has also collaborated with hip hop artistes AceHood and E-40. It is safe to say that his standing in global music space is that of one of Africa’s known rappers. However consider that Nigeria’s Tekno, a rapper who does not have Sark’s global renown has a song known as ‘Pana’ with 171million views on YouTube having being released in 2017 as against Sark’s ‘Adonai’ which was released 2years earlier in 2015.
Now this disconnect between the YouTube views Ghana and Nigeria’s biggest artistes is not even limited to the rap genre of music.
Because a careful look at the Afro Dancehall genre on the music views spectrum follows a very similar blueprint.
Stonebwoy is arguably Ghana’s biggest Dancehall artistes and I still cannot believe that he put the legendary Sean Paul on a track and still only got 2.5million YouTube views, it gets even more weird when you realize this is arguably Africa’s biggest dancehall artist on a track with arguably the world’s biggest dancehall artiste, now contrast that with Nigeria’s biggest dancehall act Patoranking who has 51million views on his ‘Love you die’ tune which features Kenya’s Diamond Platinumz. That important little detail because Diamond Platinumz is one of Africa’s biggest names in music with 13million followers across his social media handles and it makes sense to have huge views on a YouTube video when you’re combining the views of the fans of 2 big artistes.
Shatta Wale
It is about time Ghanaian entertainment pundits and critics begin to analyze the relatively low views our artistes get on their media uploads and try to remedy it.
Could it be apathy? Or perhaps poor internet connectivity and/or availability to some part of the entertainment consumer?
Could it be poor marketing and promotion from these artistes’ management teams?
Whiles these questions no doubt make for some prejudiced thoughts and pre-directed thinking, a look at the statistics and one will almost immediately be met with a dispassionate reality. the whole truth is Ghana fails at the numbers game, and lets be honest ‘YouTube views’ is as numbers as statistics gets.
Whiles my heading pre-suggest that I might attribute this problem to Ghanaians simply being stingy with their attention to Ghanaian entertainers on YouTube ( for the purposes of video views), there is a big possibility that a few other factors could be contributing to the poor views our artistes historically and continually get on their visual projects relative to other artistes in other African countries.
Below is a table that simplifies the numbers in such a way as to let the Ghanaian understand immediately why our top artistes get relatively unimpressive views on their videos.
Country Population 2022 Internet Penetration (IP) % Raw IP
-Ghana 32,395,450 46.5% 15,063,884
-Nigeria 214,013,220 73% 156,229,651
-Kenya 55,597,047 85.2% 47,368,684
-South Africa 61,450,000 57% 32,000,000
It does’nt take more than a quick glance at the above table for one to understand Ghana’s poor performance on the numbers league. Firstly, the mere fact that our population is the lowest among the 4 countries means their views would dwarf ours. Secondly, and the most significant metric, and Ghana has the poorest internet penetration among the compared countries. Compare this, that whiles less than half Ghana’s population had access to internet connection, close to 100% of Kenya’s population have internet access.
So the simple fact is that not only are Ghanaians not having enough kids, our leaders also fail us when it comes to something as globally ubiquitous and necessary amenity namely internet connectivity.
References
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1124283/internet-penetration-in-africa-by-country/
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