Bright Dwomoh: Fixing Discovery Could Help Ghana’s Music Industry Fight Piracy
Ghana’s music industry is worth an estimated $150 million and has been growing at roughly 10% a year, powered by Afrobeats, Hiplife, Highlife, Amapiano and gospel artists building audiences far beyond Ghana’s borders.
PAY ATTENTION: Mark YEN.com.gh as a preferred source, and our content will appear higher in your Google feed!
Source: UGC
But industry reporting over the past year keeps circling back to an uncomfortable truth: a song going viral in Ghana does not reliably translate into money for the artist who made it.
Part of the problem is structural. Streaming payouts are famously thin — often cited at around GH₵0.05 per stream — meaning an artist needs enormous volume just to cover the cost of the beat, the studio time, and the video that got the song made in the first place.
Royalty collection through the Ghana Music Rights Organisation (GHAMRO) has also drawn repeated criticism over the years for being slow and opaque, with some artists publicly saying they don’t trust the payout process at all.
GHAMRO has pushed back on that narrative with visible progress: in July 2026 it announced the distribution of over GH₵1.4 million in royalties, described as among its highest-ever digital royalty payouts, alongside new personalised statements meant to improve transparency for members.
The other part of the problem is piracy, and it’s the harder one to fix. Industry estimates put annual losses to unlicensed distribution in Ghana at more than GH₵10 million, and when the government floated the idea of a dedicated national streaming platform to help close that gap, the effort struggled to get traction — hampered by the same piracy ecosystem it was meant to compete with, plus high data costs and thin local catalog access compared to platforms like Boomplay and Audiomack, which already dominate music streaming elsewhere in West Africa.
What all of this points to is a discovery problem as much as a distribution one. A fan who hears about a new song has, historically, been just as likely to land on an unofficial “download MP3” blog as on the artist’s actual Spotify, Apple Music, Audiomack or official YouTube page — and every time that happens, the artist loses the play, the royalty, and the data that streaming platforms use to decide who to promote next.
It’s a gap a handful of smaller Ghanaian and Pan-African platforms have started trying to close from the discovery side rather than the enforcement side.
One of them is ghanasong.org, built by Ghanaian founder Bright Dwomoh, which covers new releases from more than 300 Ghanaian and Pan-African artists but deliberately avoids the unofficial-download model — every feature embeds the artist’s real, official YouTube video and links straight through to their actual streaming platforms, rather than hosting or redirecting to a download file.
“Piracy doesn’t usually start with someone trying to steal from an artist — it starts with someone just trying to find the song,” Dwomoh said. “If the first link a fan sees after hearing about a new release is a real Spotify or Apple Music link instead of a download blog, that’s one less stream the artist never gets credited for. It’s a small piece of a much bigger problem, but it’s a fixable one.”
It’s not a solution to GHAMRO’s transparency questions, and it’s not going to replace the policy work Ghana’s music industry still needs on royalty collection and enforcement.
But as artists, platforms, and regulators keep looking for ways to make sure a hit song in Ghana actually pays the person who made it, tightening the path between a fan discovering a song and that fan landing on the artist’s official page is one of the more practical places to start. Readers can see how this plays out in practice at ghanasong.org
Don't miss out! Get your daily dose of sports news straight to your phone. Join YEN's Sports News channel on WhatsApp now!
Source: YEN.com.gh
