SA Musicians Urge SABC To Play Their Songs On Radio
Musicians from different organisations teamed up and marched to SABC to have their music play on radio. In most interviews SA musicians often complain about how the radio don’t play their music and that music is their career and the craft they want to introduce to the world in all ways possible.
“We as artists of South Africa believe it is our right to showcase our craft through radio stations. Our craft/music is our career,” stated the memo of the march. Auckland Park was crowded with over hundred musicians who were marching with the aim of having SABC change or fix few problems with their way of doing things especially on radio. SABC is a national broadcaster, it has 18 radio stations that broadcast in different languages. It is gauranteed that if your song plays on any of the stations a large number of people from SA will know about it.
In an interview with the publication TshisaLive the representative of the march Glodine Makapela stated they are done complaining behind closed doors because then they are not being taken seriously. “We are done complaining behind close doors with no action. We are now handing them a memorandum with complaints and we have suggestions of how to redress the issues at hand. We’ve been submitting music for a long time but it never sees the light of day and now we are just gatvol. Just because we don’t have the support of “payola agents,” big music labels, then our music is not played,” she said”.
One famous artist that attended the march was Eugene Mthethwa from the Kwaito group Trompies who openly stated that “My kids will be coming into the industry. That is why I am standing here today to say, up and coming or not up and coming artists, I need to fight for this because my kids will spit on my grave and say ‘why didn’t you fight for something’ so we need to move for [this movement]”.
In conclusion Glodine said that they have put a deadline for SABC and said that they can shut it down if their requests aren’t being met.”We can shut down the SABC if we want to and we are nearing that point. However for now, we want their compilers to go, we know them by names. What we have said to them is on October 1 2017, we want all SABC radio stations to have fresh new playlists featuring new artists,” she said.
