Ken Agyapong Jr., the co-founder of Afrochella, one of the largest music festivals in Africa, has confirmed that his organization has prevailed in the legal battles against Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and Goldenvoice, the festival’s promoter, that have been fought.
Mr. Agyapong refused to provide specifics but said everything was okay with his outfit.
He revealed this in response to a question from Day Break Hitz presenter Andy Dosty on January 10, 2023.
“I can’t speak much about it but we’re good. We won the cases,” he said.
Despite winning the case, many have asked why his outfit would change its name from Afrochella to Afrofuture and Ken had an answer.
“This is a rebirth, starting something new. The future is Africa and we want people to come to Africa, so that is why we wanted to do AfroFuture. The future is bright and we want more people to come to the continent,” he explained.
Mr. Agyapong asserted that there was no connection between the case and AfroFuture’s rebranding from Afrochella.
Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and its organiser, Goldenvoice, filed a lawsuit in October alleging trademark infringement against Ghana’s Afrochella.
On Wednesday, October 5, the lawsuit was submitted at a federal court in California.
In the suit, Coachella and Goldenvoice claimed that Afrochella is “intentionally trading on the goodwill of [Coachella and Goldenvoice’s] well-known COACHELLA and CHELLA festivals and trademarks by actively promoting music events in the United States and in Ghana using the confusingly similar mark ‘AFROCHELLA’ and by fraudulently attempting to register Plaintiffs’ actual trademarks as their own.”
Meanwhile, the event will return in 2023 as ‘AfroFuture’.
Explaining why, Mr Agyapong said “at the beginning of last year (2022) in February, when we dedicated that the theme for the year will be Afrofuturism, that is when we actually came up with the idea of changing names. Because, in the long run, we knew we were going to change the name,” Mr Agyapong told the host Andy Dosty.
Source: myjoyonline.com
