Pop! goes the sound

Indie music in India has been through several ups and downs. In the recent past, some of biggest music festivals were embraced with unprecedented fandom. But as a influential music TV channel announces its shutdown, we wonder if it’s a blow that the musicians can handle.

The indie music revolution had taken the West by storm as it opened doors for several musicians who otherwise would have found it difficult to release their own albums. Back home, MTV Indies, a music channel, was launched two years ago with the hope to provide a national platform for independent artistes in the country. Recently, the channel has announced that it will go off air from next month. The channel also announced that it will be paving the way for its more popular counterpart MTV Beats, which will play mainstream Hindi film music “with an eye to take the brand to the masses”. Though indie music may have the ears and attention of many Indians, film music’s dominance over alternative music has once again raised a pertinent question: will indie artistes continue to exist only in the fringes And will the battle between indie and Hindi film music be an overlasting one in the country

With big-budget Bollywood films and their music ruling the roost there is little or no scope for alternative music in the country, music composer Ehsaan Noorani thinks this incident should ring a warning bell, “Every channel needs revenue to sustain them and it is up to the sponsors to decide. Maybe MTV Indies was not receiving that kind of visibility on TV. People’s concentration is now completely shifting to Bollywood. Thanks to sky-high budgets, record labels prefer investing their money in film music instead of records. And, I must say, this is not a healthy market to be ruled by just one form of entertainment,” he states, ruefully.

It is difficult to make indie music mainstream as the core audience in the country prefers listening to Bollywood and regional music, asserts Bobin James, who was a member of the MTV Indies launch team in 2014. “There is a miniscule number of people who listen to indie music. From the numbers point of view what the channel has done, definitely makes sense. At the end of the day, it’s all about sponsorship you bag, and if you are able to find enough takers within the music eco-system.”

Kartik Shah the lead guitarist of Maati Baani, a band combining elements of Hindustani Classical with various styles of folk music and new age sounds, believes that it’s time the music industry starts planning a revenue model for monetisation, “For an independent music channel to sustain itself for two years is a big deal. However, in the end it’s only the balance sheet that matters. I think they had to shut it down over economic issues. Independent musicians in the country need to figure out a way to monetise their model. Only then they will be able to touch the boundaries of mainstream music and reach to the masses,” he says.

Kabir Café’s mandolin player Raman Iyer feels that the a channel shutting shop is just another incident and independent musicians have learnt to move on, “TV was a fantastic medium but it has its own set of business dynamics. For independent artistes like us it was a huge platform and we are sad that it shut down, but the brighter side here is that they are going digital and with the booming platform like the Internet, we now have more opportunities and it isn’t a cause of worry.”

“Unless there are visionary content makers in the industry, their music will always remain niche,” says Karthik.

According to him, the musicians will also have to resort to other means to broadcast their content. “We have had Colonial Cousins, Silk Route, Euphoria, Indian Ocean who were sensations on their own way. The present bands need to put in a little more hard work to reach that level.”

“May be now we’ll have to run our own music channels on YouTube and use crowd funding platforms to fund our ventures and reach to the audience. The channel gave us platform but now we will have to resort to other means,” he adds.

“For all of us who were in the launch team it was more of a passion project and purely came from the fact that we wanted to give indie musicians a larger platform. It is always nice to have a national channel that provides a platform to indie musicians but I don’t think that the shutting down of a channel would affect the indie scene at all. They are far more resilient on their own and are therefore called independent musicians,” Bobin concludes.