Ghanaian media executive and culture curator, Ruddy Kwakye, has said in a recent interview on Joy FM that a lot of Ghanaian events don’t make gains because they give out too many free tickets. 

Ruddy told Kwame Dadzie on Showbiz A-Z that a number of Ghanaian event organisers usually give out the tickets for free so they could fill the venues. 

“You charge a 100, 000 cedis to do a show in Ghana but the reality is you can’t sell a 100,000 dollars 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; you market in a certain way you would get your money back but there is no short cut around it, thinking we sold the tickets, therefore [we should make profit],” he said.

He made this statement while discussing why a lot of event organisers usually complain they made losses from their events after announcing 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 of raising funds to complement ticket sales.

“I always say tickets are insignificant to the cost of a production. Because the amount of money we charge when it comes to ticketing is very small. You can’t depend 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 of exhibition where companies exhibit their wares and pay him. 

For most event organisers taxes taken by the Ghana Revenue Authority put a lot of pressure on their enterprises.