About the festival

More music than rooms

Chorus exists because this country makes more music than it has stages to hear it on. Everything below is how we try to close that gap without going broke.

Drummers in beaded costume carrying their drums through a street procession

Since 2016

It started as

one night in Osu

Six of us hired a compound off Oxford Street for a Saturday in 2016, put four hundred cedis behind a bar and asked eleven bands to play for whatever we took on the door. Two hundred and forty people came. We made a loss of ninety cedis and every one of the eleven bands asked when the next one was.

Ten editions later Chorus takes over Black Star Square and the beach behind it for three days every November. What has not changed is the reason: there is more music being made in this country than there are rooms to hear it in, and most of the good rooms only book the acts that already sell.

We book the ones that should. Half the bill every year has never played a festival before, the Drum Circle is free inside the gate, and every act is paid inside ten days of coming off stage.

How we run it

Three rules we

have never broken

Everyone is paid in ten days

Fees agreed in writing before the poster goes out and settled within ten working days of the last set. No festival should be a loan from the people playing it.

Half the bill is new

Twenty of the forty slots go to acts who have never played a festival. It is the only rule that has survived every edition unchanged, and it is the reason the bill is worth reading.

The drums are free

The Drum Circle costs nothing beyond the gate and the ensembles are paid the same rate as the main stage. The traditions this music came from should not be the cheap seats.

Six became four

The people

who run it

A man in a white shirt with folded arms against a grey wall

Kwame Ofosu

Festival director

Booked the first eleven bands in 2016 and still books the main stage. Answers the phone himself.

A woman in patterned cloth against a green backdrop

Efua Adjetey

Programme & the Drum Circle

Twelve years at the National Theatre before this. Knows every ensemble in Greater Accra by name.

A man in an orange shirt smiling against an orange backdrop

Selorm Agbeko

Production & site

Runs the build, the power and the two hundred people who make the ground safe by Friday noon.

A woman in a blue headwrap against a bright backdrop

Naa Lamptey

Partners & box office

Handles every partnership and every refund. If a ticket goes wrong it is her inbox it lands in.

10

Editions since 2016

40

Acts on the 2026 bill

32

k

Through the gates last year

210

Crew and stewards on site

Highlife

Afrobeats

Gospel

Drill

Palmwine

Hiplife

Fontomfrom

Kpanlogo

Highlife

Afrobeats

Gospel

Drill

Palmwine

Hiplife

Fontomfrom

Kpanlogo

Where a hundred

cedis actually goes

Published every February in the annual note, alongside what we got wrong.

46%

Artist fees and travel

31%

Site, power, sound and light

15%

Crew, stewards and medics

8%

Everything else, us included

Ten editions in

What people

say afterwards

Early-bird passes

close on 30 September

Weekend passes go up by eighty cedis at the end of September and the Late Room sells out every year before the lineup is even announced.

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