The Ghana Music Awards began in 1999. At the first ceremony, the country’s music industry gathered to recognize itself in a format that had been borrowed from international award culture but was being built locally, with local criteria, local judges, and local stakes.
Twenty-five years later, the Vodafone Ghana Music Awards (the name has changed with sponsorship) is the most significant recognition event in Ghana’s music calendar. It is also one of the most controversial. The two things are connected: no award that does not matter generates the level of feeling that the VGMAs consistently produces.
What the Awards Were Built to Do
Charter House, the entertainment production company that organizes the VGMAs, established the awards with the goal of creating an industry recognition structure that would professionalize Ghana’s music sector and provide a platform for its commercial development.
The underlying commercial logic is the same as any major music awards ceremony: recognition drives sales, airplay, and booking fees. An Artist of the Year title increases an artist’s market value. A Best New Artist win provides a commercial launch that radio and label relationships alone cannot replicate. The awards are not purely cultural. They are also economic infrastructure.
The Artists of the Year
The Artist of the Year award is the VGMA’s most contested category. Looking at the list of winners across the awards’ history is one of the more accurate ways of understanding how Ghana’s music industry has changed across twenty-five years.
Daddy Lumba’s wins in the early years of the awards reflected his dominance of Ghanaian music through the late 1990s and early 2000s, a dominance built on consistent quality and a specific relationship with the Ghanaian popular taste for highlife-inflected contemporary production.
Sarkodie’s multiple Artist of the Year wins through the 2010s track his position as the central name in Ghanaian hip-hop and, beyond hip-hop, as the artist whose commercial profile was most consistently significant in the industry across that decade.
Stonebwoy and Shatta Wale’s wins in the latter 2010s reflected the rise of reggae-dancehall and afropop as the commercial dominant genres of contemporary Ghanaian music, replacing hiplife’s centrality from the earlier era.
The 2019 Incident
The most significant single moment in the VGMAs’ twenty-five year history happened at the 2019 ceremony and did not involve a song or a performance.
Stonebwoy won the Reggae/Dancehall Artiste of the Year award. Shatta Wale won Artiste of the Year. During the ceremony, an altercation developed between supporters of both camps that escalated until Stonebwoy drew a firearm on stage. Both Stonebwoy and Shatta Wale were subsequently arrested. Both had their VGMA awards revoked.
The incident was covered internationally. It was the moment that the long-running tension between the two biggest names in Ghanaian popular music became a news story rather than an entertainment industry subplot. The awards they had just won were taken back before they could leave the venue with them.
Both artists have continued their careers. The relationship between them has been managed publicly through a series of truces, collaborative gestures, and subsequent tensions that has made it one of the more continuously discussed storylines in Ghanaian entertainment across the years since.
The 2019 VGMAs incident fundamentally changed how security is managed at the ceremony. It also produced a public conversation about artist rivalry in Ghana that had not previously been conducted at that level of explicitness.
The Gospel Category
The Gospel Artiste of the Year category at the VGMAs has been one of the most competitive on the night across multiple years. Diana Hamilton’s wins in the category reflect the scale of Ghana’s gospel music industry, which is large enough and commercially sophisticated enough that its competition for recognition is as serious as the secular categories.
The gospel category’s consistent presence and competitive quality at the VGMAs is a recognition that Ghana’s music industry is not primarily a secular entertainment industry but an industry that serves a population with deep religious commitments that shape their consumption of music. An awards show that did not take gospel seriously would be misrepresenting its own market.
The Snubs and the Arguments
No awards ceremony with twenty-five years of history is without its controversial omissions. The VGMAs have generated industry arguments about particular results across multiple years.
The treatment of hiplife artists from the founding generation has been a recurring point of tension as the genre’s commercial centrality faded and the awards’ attention followed the commercial moment rather than recognizing sustained historical contribution. Artists who built the genre find that the awards cycle has moved on from the sounds they pioneered.
Regional representation has been another consistent point of contention. Northern Ghana’s music scene, Volta Region artists, artists from outside the Accra-Kumasi axis, have periodically raised questions about whether the judging process adequately accounts for the range of Ghana’s music geography.
The Best New Artist category has produced several examples where the artist most commercially prominent at the time of the nominations was not the one who won, which generates a specific kind of criticism about whether the awards track commercial reality or some alternative assessment of quality.
What Twenty-Five Years Shows
The VGMAs have survived a quarter century because the Ghanaian music industry, whatever its criticisms of specific results, has not found a better alternative and continues to invest in the ceremony with attendance, press coverage, and emotional stakes that make it the most significant night in Ghana’s music calendar.
An awards show that nobody cared about enough to argue about would be easy to dismiss. The argument about the VGMAs is itself evidence of the ceremony’s importance. The industry argues about it because it matters.
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