IN fulfilment of their core responsibility as convener of the MTN Ghana Music Awards Academy and organiser of the prestigious music industry awards festival, Charterhouse launched a campaign to collect entries for consideration for the 11th in the series of the awards scheme.

To ensure that due diligence is made, Charterhouse set up a collation team whose responsibility it was to collect works that were released during the year under review. This team went to music sales points, radio stations, television stations, and recording studios, DJ’s among other places across the country to achieve this.
According to Miss Juno Abena Turkson, Public Relations Manager for Charterhouse, the team collected data on songs, artistes, albums, videos, recording labels and recording engineers that were hard at work all year through.

“The data collected set the tone for Nomination and Categorisation Committee’s meetings and made their work a little less tiring”. She said.

The committee had three sittings, where through a pain staking process, each entry was played, analysed and placed into their appropriate category - an arduous tasks that once completed was forwarded to the Planning Committee or the GMA Academy fine tuning.

The Nominees list will be unveiled at the Launch of the MTN GMA 2010 scheduled to come off on the February 26, 2010 at the Golden Tulip Hotel from 6:30PM Categorizing songs in the Ghana Music Awards scheme is tedious for the most part because the Artistes themselves are not sure what genre of music they produce. A typical case is Hiphop versus Hiplife confusion. There is such a thin line between the two categories that an argument ensues every time a song in that genre comes up.

A classic example is the song The Game by Obour featuring Okyeame Kwame which is in honor of Hiplife but is easily categorized as Hip-hop because of the beat and the style in which the song is rendered.

The 11th in the series of the GMA will indeed be exciting. One thing to note throughout the campaign is that for the Public Categories, the general public makes up 40 per cent of the decision of who wins what while the Planning and Selection Committees share the remaining 60 percent. The Industry Categories which are more technical and require expertise rather than popularity, the decision on who wins what rests on the Planning and Selection Committees which is made up of industry professionals.