I was part of the programming brainwork team for YFM -Nockus

Yfm presenter, Nana Kwame Osei Sarpong, also known as Nockus, has confessed that he was the brain behind the programming on YFM which saved the entertainment scene in Ghana.
Interviewed on the Late Nite Celebrity Show with host, Foster Romanus, he shared the history of how Ghana’s number one urban radio station, YFM, was born.
“12years ago, I was just about leaving one radio station. I was going home with the main intent of writing my resignation letter and I got a call from Global Media Alliance. You know, GMA and Silverbird are partners so they were advertising on other stations that they were doing free movies at the food court just to warm up the fact that there was a cinema coming up for the first time in a long time.
So I got the call and they were like ‘we want to talk about what you’re doing for us’(ie advertising about their free movies on the radio he worked for) and I told them to call Atlantis because I just signed off. They told me, come over on Friday and let’s talk; we have a station coming up, and that was what happened”, he narrated.
Nockus continued that he went for that meeting, which apparently, was a brainstorming session to discuss the programming for the new radio and things that people wanted in radio but were not getting.
“All through my years, I had been fighting to get music that wasn’t played on radio. There were a lot of young people doing music but radio was a mafia. It was a group of big people who had the DJs in their pockets so if you’re an artiste not from them, you didn’t get airplay”, he said.
In accordance with this, Nockus revealed that he had always been fighting to get airplay for the young and upcoming artistes so he made his colleagues in the meeting understand the new kind of music that was out there, and they were attracted to it. That was how he got the job of putting together the programming for an urban music station.
YFM is now Ghana’s most innovative and number one urban music station which gives airspace for young, great talents to bloom.
By: Maureen Dedei Quaye