Fallen stars that felt the name music was a thing that could send a clear message rather than holding the mic like a politician and making promises. These young men and women stood up to make some ends meet as they put in their all to make music, create video contents and branded themselves to get more fans and followers. One of the oldest artists who was once a basketball player known as Private Eye said “The Game is Not to be told but to be sold.” – P (Private Eye). He was telling this to all, now the game has shown itself not to be told anymore but it is to be sold.
Ten years in the game, a lot of changes has come and too many artists has fallen low to the market, the aspect of remaining in the game as they were rated as best artist of the year, new coming artist of the year and most played songs of the year. This is the life of our Liberia musical industry.
From the past records of music in Liberia we all know it was through beach jams, house parties, wedding and other gatherings brought change to the pockets of these artists, till they got themselves selling their own CD’s while the street DJ’s helped them sell it to their fans on the road side.
Later came websites that were was uploading songs for everyone to reach to, sites like Gossip Liberia, HitzLib, and the most trending site that used its name as a tag for people to know where the songs were downloaded from, Tunes Liberia.
This help was remarkable, it grew and give artists more chance to make their voices be heard all over the world, wherever Liberians were and were able to access the internet and download a song. This has been like 7-10 years ago, a cry for change has come where these websites have been seeing as no help gained by generating money from music downloads.
The cry for music sale has reach to the peak where young and older artists are bother by the most they be getting in music making and can’t gain a cent from their record. Now they have channeled their audio to YouTube and that’s good but they are now linking all their songs to iTunes and other international music sites.
How The Music Go Base On Population
We have 4.5 million citizens in Liberia and out of that only 700 Thousand are always on the internet and out of that only 105 thousand might likely have access to getting songs placed on the internet and out of that 105 thousand it is clear that almost that number only 10% of it can get music from right in Liberia on their credit cards and the rest are depending on people in the diaspora to help linked their account to international platforms to download or buy songs. This is clear that even an artist makes a sale on iTunes, he/she will likely make $200.00 a year or even less than that while the platform will make thousands of dollars from just playing without downloading or buying the songs.
People are suggesting that we focus on getting our old music sites to sell music instead of running to the foreign platforms that take more from us and we get less due to the number of people that will be willing to buy online.
Should we go back to selling disc since we can’t get our music stores or online music stores selling songs in Liberian dollars?
Where the Music Union of Liberia comes in
This is a major concern that needs to be handle by the music union of Liberia, everywhere on the web, fans, artists, managers, and promoters are talking about this but there hasn’t been a way to settle this and bring a solution to the table.
GSM companies don’t have a great way to buy, it is complicated and has too many processes to buy a single song, this leaves fans downhearted and feels discouraged by following too many processes that will end up causing them to leave buying a single song cheaper but rather buy it on some international platform like iTunes that seems too easy.
Liberians over the years have learned to support their arts and culture in it’s the best way, the call for this has increased to an extend artists rather have their music-making $1.00 a month and still don’t care but they see this as a better way to gain some cash even though it is small. Liberian artists have turned to audiomac where they see as a more professional place to put their songs along with other international artists.
Tunes Liberia is gearing up for a big change in music sale, Bewtwind is ready to make it happen but it is still in progress and the list goes on.
