Over 44 dancehall artistes enter Zima

HARARE – Recently launched Zimbabwe Music Awards, Zima has received overwhelming support for their 2014 edition.

According to Zima production assistant, Kganya Ndlovu, they processed close to 600 submissions from artistes who want to take part in this year’s awards.

“Just looking at the figures, it is clear that Zim dancehall has become extremely popular with 44 entries for the Best Dancehall award.

“Following behind dancehall was the Afro-pop category, more commonly known as urban grooves which had 30 submissions,” Ndlovu said.

Some genres, however, did not fare as well. One such genre was Tshibilika which is the Southern region’s equivalent to Sungura.

The genre recorded only two entries and according to organisers, had to be moved to Sungura.

Ndlovu said: “The judges felt it would be unfair to dismiss these two entrants because there were no other competitors.

“Therefore, the judges made a decision to include them in the Sungura category because the sound is essentially very similar.”

Commenting on the statistics Ndlovu said, apart from dancehall and Afro-pop, most of the categories had entries that ranged in the 20s which made for good competition as the nominees will comprise the top five in every category.

The least performing genres were acapella with only eight entries and contemporary choral with 10.

In the other non-genre categories the top performers were best Music Video with 100 entries, Best single with 101 entries and best collaboration which had 55 entries.

Ndlovu said: “We noticed that a number of artistes, particularly the younger up-and-coming ones where not able to release albums in the period under judgment which was August 2012 to August 4, 2014.

“Many cited financial handicaps. However, they still showed interest in taking part in the awards by submitting their singles and best collaboration categories. Response in these two categories was really quite phenomenal.” Weekend Post