Ghanaian media executive and culture curator Ruddy Kwakye has said in a recent interview on Joy FM that many Ghanaian events don’t make gains because too many free tickets are given out.
Ruddy told Kwame Dadzie on Showbiz A-Z that several Ghanaian event organisers usually give out tickets for free just to fill up venues.
“You charge a 100,000 cedis to do a show in Ghana but the reality is you can’t sell 100,000 dollars’ worth of tickets. Half of your December shows by your favourite artistes were all free.
They just gave tickets to people to fill it up. It’s an ego trip. Because there is a system — if you market in a certain way, you would get your money back. But there is no shortcut around it, thinking we sold the tickets, therefore we should make profit,” he said.
He made this statement while discussing why many event organisers usually complain about making losses from their events after claiming they sold out their venues.
For playwright Latif Abubakar, making profit from events goes beyond just ticket sales. He said on the show that there are other avenues for raising funds to complement ticket income.
“I always say tickets are insignificant to the cost of a production. Because the amount of money we charge for ticketing is very small. You can’t depend on tickets to produce your events.
There are other elements of raising funds for production. We talk about sponsorships, partners, investors, and then you create other portfolios,” he said.
Latif noted that he creates a portfolio for exhibitions, where companies exhibit their wares and pay him.
For most event organisers, taxes imposed by the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) also put a lot of pressure on their operations.