Royalties an attack on churches – Gospel musician tells GHAMRO

Gospel singer, Patience Nyarko, has described the decision by the Ghana Music Rights Organisation (GHAMRO) to take royalties from churches as an attack.

“This is an unthinkable attack,” she replied after the new policy by GHAMRO.

GHAMRO had announced that it would soon take royalties for songs performed in churches.

The Chief Operations Officer (COO) of the Organisation, Abraham Adjartey, insists that songs used for church services are commercial music; hence churches must be licensed and billed to use such copyright content.

“If a church invites an artiste to its premises and pays the artiste to perform, at that moment, the church is not holding a church service. It’s holding an event, and that is what royalties must be paid for,” Mr Adjartey noted.

But Patience Nyarko disagrees.

According to her, taking royalties from the church will destroy the relationship between gospel artistes and churches.

She insists that most gospel musicians recycle old songs belonging to the churches, and therefore, it will be inappropriate to charge churches for using their own songs.

“If the churches ask gospel artistes to stop recording or singing their songs or even ask every artiste that has commercially recorded songs belonging to them (church) to pay royalties to them, that money will be so huge that gospel musicians cannot pay,” she noted.