State, creative arts industry marriage long overdue - 3Music CEO

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of 3Music Awards Sadiq Abdulai Abu has indicated that it is high time the government got actively involved in the creative arts industry.

He told Prince Benjamin on Class 91.3FM’s Class Drive show on Monday 17 August 2020 that stakeholders and players in the creative art industry must have a healthy consultation to get the government “to see the vision or try to connect the arts industry which is mainly private driven to state actors in helping to enable it.”

He explained that products churned out by the creative industry players, musicians especially, can be classified as exports because of the massive numbers they command physically, on social media and on various music streaming platforms.

Citing the huge numbers that award-winning rapper Sarkodie pull at his just-ended Blacklove virtual concert, he opined that the state must fund creative arts contents because of their exportable value.

“I made the argument that if you look at the numbers Sarkodie pulled for his event and you look at the numbers that some of us are also pulling in terms of the content that we put out and where it is coming from, if you take a look at the numbers the musicians have been getting across all their streaming platforms, from here and abroad, it reinforces our belief that our creative content is exportable or has exportable characteristics.

“To that end, if we have Exim Bank for example, which is supposed to fund exportable products to continue to create value for an industry or create wealth in a particular country, then creative products should be one of it,” he noted.

Mr Sadiq Abdulai Abu, however, noted that there is a situation where the legislators who make laws for the creative arts industry are not abreast with how the creative space operates, thereby making implementation difficult.

He thus stressed on the need for “a certain enhanced understanding of the space to enable industry create wealth and create jobs for young people.”

He opined that “the state, for instance, should have been involved in this Sarkodie event either as a way of enabling it because when you take a look at what Sarkodie was doing he was broadcasting creative contents to the world.”

Mr Abdulai Abu, whose office set the pace for virtual concerts in Ghana with the 2020 edition of 3Music Awards in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, hinted an upcoming Social Distancing Fun event.

The event, first of its kind in the country, is expected to be in October this year.