The Ghana music industry is set to receive a major boost as plans are on course to establish a Copyright Investment Bank (CIB) in the country.

The CIB will give long term financing to producers and musicians with their respective copyrights at collateral as well as provide loans for copyright based project, such as creation, marketing, distribution of music, visual arts, audio-visual and arts software or for the capitalisation of existing copyright.

If this is done, Ghana will be the first country to have such a facility, which is being put together by the Ghana Association of Phonographic Industries (GAPI) and Bach Technology of Norway.

At a press conference in Accra last week to announce the project, the General Secretary of GAPI, Francis Mensah Twum, said the banks and local financial institutions have been paying lip service to financing musical works and musicians in the country.

“Imagine how much money banks would have made if they supported musical works and in turn persuaded great local musicians to become their clients and save with them,” he said.

He said it was after so many fruitless attempts by the music fraternity to attract the banking industry to their aid that they decided to take that giant step and emphasised that the project would be a very viable one because copyright by itself has a continuing value for as long as the copyright life lasted.

“Copyright life for recording is 50 years after its first release, and the copyright life for a written work is the life of the creator plus another 70 years,” he noted.

Mr. Dagfinn Bach, Technical Projects Manager, said the issue of copyright has a very significant potential, especially in developing countries.

He said if taken seriously, the African continent can leapfrog through the right exploitation of the full potential in the music industry but warned that the biggest threat to the music industry in any country is the issue of piracy which needed to be addressed.

Mr. Bach said Ghana was selected to start the project because it appeared to be well organised and also there were not too many multi-national companies to thwart their efforts.

“We are expecting that within the next six months, we will be able to organise and start the project,” he emphasised.