Sarkodie Helped Me, When Everyone Exploited Me - Akwaboah

Akwaboah has explained how he learnt the best practices of the music industry.

The super talented highlife artiste gave all the credit to his colleague Sarkodie, whom he said taught him everything he needed to know about making money from music.

According to him, before his "Mary" album, people had been using his talent without paying him to behave they knew he was a novice in music and could be easily exploited.

He pointed to a few songs that he had written without any pay; tracks "Daa K3 Daa" and Efya's "Best In Me", these songs, which he wrote for Becca, SP Kofi Sarpong and Efya, he did without any royalties, he claimed.

While speaking an interview with MzGee on Simply Showbiz on TV3 he recalled how his collaboration with Sarkodie on the "Mary" album got him half of everything Sarkodie got from his work as it should be.

“So basically, this is me entering the music industry, not knowing so much about it. So my first one was “Daa K3 Daa”, I didn’t even know I had that gift of writing songs. One evening I went to Kiki’s place, I spoke to him about it, Kiki listened to it, he said, ‘this is a good song’, they hit the studio and the song bam(was a hit).”

“And from that day, I realized I have that gift, and I didn’t know, so I didn’t make a dime because I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t even know what royalties were. I knew so little about how royalties worked. Because I wanted fame then, I felt so good about the first one, oh! I wrote “Daa K3 Daa. I wanted to do another one, and then ASP Kofi Sarpong’s came. That also became a hit, no royalties from that camp too. Because I was now entering the industry, I didn’t know,”  he explained.

The 'Posti Me' hitmaker admitted that the industry is a cruel place and artists who wanted him to ghostwrite for them only wanted to pay him a pittance to keep the songs and all the associated proceeds.

He has now decided to write for himself. 

“I went to Richie’s place. I was going to do my song one evening, and Richie was like, he almost signed Efya onto his label. So he needed a song for Efya, I had to stay there that night, and I wrote “Best In Me”, Efya sang it."

"No royalties, nothing from there too, you get my point. So I was like, Ummm! I’m being foolish. So most of the songs, I didn’t really get anything until the “Mary” album came. That was when Sarkodie started showing me how these things work. He taught me how the royalties worked and how we had to split it and everything, so it was literally 50/50 between Sark and I,” he concluded.