"Gospel Album of the Year", "Music For Development" scrapped

The Vodafone Ghana Music Awards' board has made a few changes in this year's award categories. The "Gospel Album of the Year" award which seeks to recommend and promote Ghanaian Gospel music and "Music For Development" award which seeks to promote development has been scrapped from this year's categories.

Two awards; "Lifetime Achievement" and "MUSIGA Merits" awards have been merged. The two will now be known as "VGMA Lifetime Achievement Award".

This was made known through a press statement published on their official website today (Feb. 25).

Read the full statement below;

This awards scheme has over the years gone through a lot of changes. Indeed, ardent followers would admit that many categories have been added, renamed, restructured and discontinued in line with existing trends in the music industry. In this regard, the public is hereby informed to take note of the following reforms for 2016.

This category is the only remaining genre-specific one as all the other genre specific album of the year categories have been discontinued. However, this year, we did not get enough albums with a minimum of 3 hits to meet our minimum nomination requirement of 5 nominations per category. It is therefore not viable this year.

The board would like to observe this trend for another year before deciding whether or not to discontinue it so that all viable albums compete in the album of the year category.

At the industry level, it has also come to our notice that the awards have sought to serve the same purpose over the years. The two have thus been merged as the

Making music with positive lyrics isn’t enough. It must be backed by viable projects that support the message. Again, it was difficult filling up the nominations for this year so it will not be awarded for 2016. The board is therefore contemplating making it an honorary award going forward.