We didn’t err with ‘Gboza’ nomination category – Charterhouse replies DopeNation

Charterhouse, organizers of the annual Vodafone Ghana Music Awards(VGMA), has responded to a claim made by Ghanaian music duo DopeNation concerning the genre classification of the single ‘Gboza’, released in 2022.

DopeNation was of the view that Charterhouse placed the track under the wrong category for the VGMA nominations for the next awards event.

DopeNation said ‘Gboza’ is a combination of House music, Afrobeats, and Amapiano and thus should not have been nominated under the Best Afro-pop Song category.

They suggested that Charterhouse should do proper research on music to get it right on classifications.

However, Charterhouse maintains that ‘Gboza’ was placed under the correct category.

The Public Relations Officer (P.R.O) of Charterhouse, Robert Klah, explained that genres such as House music, Afrobeats, Amapiano and Alternative tunes are all placed under the Afro-Pop category under the VGMA awards scheme.

“Afro-pop is actually a fusion of different sounds situated within Afromusic, so when they say it’s House and a fusion of Afrobeats and Amapiano, this is exactly what it is under the scheme,” he justified.

“It is just a matter of them having to understand how we describe certain things or our operational definition of how we describe the categories, and that would have settled matters. There’s a guideline, and that’s what we work with”.

“One of the functions of the board and team is classification, so what we do is that once a song comes through, it is classified under the category that is most appropriate for,” he disclosed in an interview monitored by The Ghana Report on TV3.

The 24th VGMA is scheduled for Saturday, 13th May 2023, at the Grand Arena of the Accra International Conference Centre.