MTV Africa Music Awards are not an annual event, says Fatima Beckmann, communications director, Viacom International Media Networks Africa.
VIMN Africa handles the MTV music channel amongst others.
The awards, coined MAMAs, did not hold in in 2017 for the first time in three years following a prior three-year hiatus.
The MAMAs were established in 2008 to celebrate the most popular contemporary music in Africa.
Speaking on its ‘deliberate inconsistency’, Beckmann told TheCable Lifestyle that “we don’t actually hold the event every year. It’s not an annual event”.
Beckmann made this known at a recent meet and greet session held in Ikoyi, Lagos.
She said: “Last year, we didn’t hold the event because we wanted to take the opportunity to reinvent the MAMAs. So much has changed in the industry and we wanted to use that opportunity to create an imaginative MAMAs.”
When asked if the event would hold this year, she said, “yes, it would”.
Pay for Play
Of late, Nigerian artistes have levelled allegations of pay for play against the major music channels in the entertainment industry.
‘Pay for play’ is the act of demanding a fee to air an artiste’s music video.
A couple of artistes recently took to social media to make claims of not having their videos aired even after making payment.
Trace TV, a music channel that was also accused of pay for play, recently issued a denial.
Speaking in the same vein, Bada Akintunde-Johnson, country manager for Viacom in Nigeria, said the act is unheard of at MTV.
Akintunde-Johnson said: “I don’t know of any Nigerian artistes putting out visuals that we don’t play. In fact, we pride ourselves as that one channel where if you meet our standards; which we think are aligned with the standard of the discerning audience, we’ll play it.”
He, however, admitted that “we cannot pretend this anomaly doesn’t exist.. they are there”.
Akintunde-Johnson added that MTV constantly runs “informercials warning [artistes] against falling prey to such”.
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