Nokia Ghana has initiated the “Don’t Break Da Beat” competition aimed at discovering the best rapper in West Africa’s two biggest entertainment centres, Ghana and Nigeria.

David Anku, the Retail and Customer Marketing Manager for Nokia Ghana, said the competition will be used as a way to unearth and discover more rap talents to boost the entertainment industry in both Ghana and Nigeria.

The contest known as ‘DBDB’ i.e. ‘Don’t Break Da Beat’ which is open to rappers in Ghana and Nigeria is a winner-takes-all affair. The winner gets $20,000 and a coaching session in Atlanta in the US, with a recognized US producer.

Participants, according to the Marketing Manager for Nokia Ghana, will send their rap lines via an entry form via the DBDB tab on the Nokia Ghana Facebook page.

He also noted that so as to test participants’ ability to improvise, the rap lines have to include WhatsApp, Dual SIM and Wi-Fi, which are three key features of NOKIA’s ASHA 210 Dual SIM QWERTY phone, a trendy, inexpensive social networking friendly smartphone purposely built for the youth market.

In the next three months, judges working within Ghana and Nigeria will shorten the entries down to 100 contestants. This final select squad of 100 will subsequently send in audio messages of their best lines.

Depending on the judging, this list will be further reduced after two more rounds to four contestants for the grand finale in Lagos, Nigeria. The mode of judging will include voting by the general public. In addition to the voting, the public will be able to keep the ‘Never ending beat’ alive from the 1st of October to the Grand Finale on the 23rd of November by creating their own beats.

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