Bessa Simons
The Musicians Union of Ghana (MUSIGA) has announced plans to introduce a national annual highlife music competition for all singers of the genre.
This is part of the union’s agenda to promote and make highlife music Ghana’s top genre and more relevant across the world.
For this reason, the President of MUSIGA, Bessa Simons, disclosed that the union has committed itself to projecting the genre and is putting measures in place to inaugurate a yearly national contest among artistes within the field.
“We’re going to launch a music competition every year, and the winner will get something very attractive,” he stated.
He, however, revealed the union’s plan to support the highlife category in the Telecel Ghana Music Awards (TGMA), making sure that the prize to be placed on the genre will be appealing to the winner.
This, he said, will draw other artistes’ traction towards putting in more effort to produce quality highlife music and creating authenticity from it.
For the veteran highlife singer, if Ghana is able to claim its origins by prioritising highlife as a major brand, music lovers across the globe will channel their attention to the genre and listen to Ghanaian music.
“Once we intentionally make highlife a national brand so that wherever you go, you’ll hear highlife, and we’ll channel highlife to Ghana, that will help us because people will come looking for us rather than we going looking for them,” he disclosed.
The MUSIGA President pleaded with Ghanaians to rally behind and support the highlife genre by listening to it and partaking in its promotion, to encourage all musicians to infuse the beat in other genres.