Monday, December 16, 2013

MUSIC SPECIAL ...................They Work Hard for the Money


 They Work Hard for the Money 

Digital music sales backed by a string of live events are the most viable combo for musicians in India 

    Devraj Sanyal is not someone who believes in the waiting game and, if there is money to be made, he would rather see some of it today than wait for results that would arrive a decade later. But when he took over as head of Universal Music India and Saarc, Sanyal had a dilemma on his hands. He wanted his business to make money and quickly but recorded music or physical music as it is known in the industry was dying a slow death when he took over in 2011.
    Thanks to YouTube and other websites that allow people to download or stream music at will apart from a host of new music channels and radio stations, the audio CD — the mainstay of the music industry — was fast becoming a museum piece.
    Sanyal is a fast-talking man and his expletive-ridden “call-a-spade” speeches give away the fact that he has a heavy metal background, being a vocalist with Brahma, one of the better known bands in the country. He is known for being ahead of the curve in the music industry and had started the Sunburn festival four years ago when he was with Percept. The festival, the largest music festival in the country today, commands a global audience who hook on to the Net to watch the performances live. This is apart from the 1,50,000 people who travel to Goa where the main concert takes place.
New Formats
As the obituary of the CD was being written, Sanyal’s contemporaries in the industry were thinking of the future and discussing ways of making money through digital music in the form of ringtones, streaming and downloads.
    Sanyal agreed about the need to innovate and set up new segments within Universal. But unlike others, he was obstinate that first money had to be made and now. The idea that came to him, ironically, had to do with the audio CD, which most people had written off.
    He started researching spiritual music in India and zeroed in on spiritual leader, Gurmeet Ram Rahim ji Insaan who has a phenomenal following in rural India. Universal soon cut a deal with the spiritual guru and released an album. It sold 7.5 million copies in 2013, mostly in smaller towns and villages.
    At Universal, Sanyal has also set up new verticals in order to approach the music business from a new perspective. So instead of behaving like a traditional music producer who signs contracts with musicians to release albums, Universal has in place several other businesses as well.
    For instance, the company has started focusing on harnessing the talent available to them (music stars such as Sunidhi Chauhan, Sonu Nigam, Mohit Chauhan and Shaan for instance) to make ad films and jingles. Universal has also launched more than 70 music apps, half of which are free to use apart from music merchandising and live events divisions.
    Internationally, the death of the physical format was highlighted when British music retailer HMV recently filed for bankruptcy after spending more than 90 years in business. HMV succumbed to stiff competition from online retailers and digital downloading services. It had been closing stores and selling subsidiaries during the past few years, as digital music sales in the UK surpassed physical sales for the first time in the first quarter of 2012, as per the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).
    Even as record labels are struggling to make money out of an audience who get to download music for free and at will, bands — both local and international — are also trying to come to terms with the new age of the internet and digital music. Most bands have realized that while the internet provides easy exposure, it also makes life all the more difficult for a musician to earn a living playing music.
    Stefan Kaye, who is from the UK, and has been in India for the past seven years is associated with 10 bands in one capacity or the other. He is part of four bands as a lyricist, piano player and vocalist while he organizes gigs and manages several others.
    But Kaye is matter-of-fact that he finds it difficult to find time to actually sit down and create music. When his band Ska Vengers wanted to cut an album, the musicians had to fork out about 3.5 lakh to produce the album. The recording company said they would only help with promoting the album and could not invest. The album went on to win an MTV award. Capitalizing on Concerts
Despite the recognition, Kaye says he is aware that the road ahead is a challenging one. The reason is that in the age of free music, it has become nearly impossible for bands to make money by cutting albums. And the only way to survive in the world of music is to perform live. “The only way to lead a reasonable life,” he says, is to “join more bands”.
    But then Kaye’s music has been about effort. After he mastered the piano, he spent 10 years learning the sitar watching tapes of Pandit Ravi Shankar in London.
    “The objective now is to get as many well-paying gigs as possible and that too at the right places as we have to consider the band’s image as well.” So despite the fact that they are in constant demand at some of the well known pubs in Delhi, Kaye says he is more focused on the festival circuit. “Today there are some 20 major music festivals in India and every year it is growing. Live shows are not the future of music, it is the present.”
    Another case in point is that of Irish instrumental band God is an Astronaut. Labelled “post-rock” they play instrumental rock music and are known for their experimental sounds. The band has been getting rave reviews around the world.
    Thanks to YouTube, the band has a substantial following in India but God is an Astronaut is yet to capitalize on this exposure as the concert circuit in India has begun to take-off only in recent times and organizers usually prefer to get the Metallicas of the world as they are a sure bet.
    One of the band members, Niels Kinsella, says that YouTube has been a curse as well as a boon for them. “It is difficult to control illegal uploading and file sharing and it offers nothing to the artists. In fact, illegal file sharing sites are profiting,” he says.
    However, the band is happy that it has found an audience outside of Europe and the US with almost no effort. “In the ’90s, music was about television [MTV] and it was difficult for a new band to break into the space. YouTube has given control back to the artists,” he adds.
    Kinsella says that they received a couple of inquiries from organizers in India which are yet to materialize. “As of now it’s the revenue from iTunes that keeps us financially going. It is very important for us today.” The falling sales of CDs have affected Europe as much as the rest of the world. “In Ireland there are almost no record stores left. There are only two in Dublin,” he adds.
India Report Card
The drop in sales of CDs has affected popular rock bands in India as well. The top rock bands in India have always struggled to make money despite their popularity. This is because in India, record labels have always preferred Bollywood music — which is considered more saleable — to the likes of Indian Ocean, Avial, Parikrama, Motherjane and other such.
    Most of these bands were already angry with some producers for being niggardly with the percentage. And when the market for CDs started drying up, they were forced to seek other options.
    Two years ago, the legendary Indian Ocean was so cut up with the industry that they decided to give away tracks from their album 16/330 Khajoor Road for free as MP3 downloads from their website. The plan was to then launch a CD that would ride on the promotion offered by their website. The project did not take off as expected, given that the album was not promoted at all.
“Musicians never made any money from recorded music anyway. The future is in digital and live performances,” says Rahul Ram, the senior-most member of the band which has been playing for over two decades.
Indian Ocean now plans to produce its own music and hand it over to aggregators such as iMusti and Hungama who could help reach a wider audience. Thankfully technology has now made it possible for bands to produce their music by themselves and given that digital music is already making waves, it is perhaps the kind of opportunity that musicians have been waiting for.
A popular Bollywood song could easily command a market of around 1.5 crore with a million downloads and the artists can command 25% of the fee, says Ram. The musician says that some singers have even started singing for free for Bollywood films. “The idea is that if the song were to become a hit, then the musician would command a hefty fee on the concert circuit.”
    A report produced by Ficci and KPMG says that digital music revenues grew 16% to 600 crore in 2012. “Currently at 57%, the share of digital music sales is expected to rise to 72% by 2017,” says the report.
    Further, digital music — ring tones, streaming and downloads — is consumed either via a mobile handset or the internet. Consumption of online music has seen consistent growth in recent years and the mobile segment has grown rapidly. The report further says that currently mobile contributes around 85-90% of total digital music consumption in India: “Moreover, in 2012, mobile internet surpassed desktop internet traffic in India. The explosion of smartphones and high speed 2G and 3G connections in urban markets has largely contributed to this. Currently, there are around 40 million internetenabled smartphones and tablets in India. With the launch of new services in the industry such as Flipkart’s Flyte and Apple’s iTunes, we will see online music growing further.”
CD’s Swansong
While physical music sales have been overtaken by digital music sales, the physical retail model still exists in the smaller towns and pockets of metro areas, where internet penetration is low and people still depend on physical formats like CDs for music. Poor sales volumes have pushed retailers to reduce the depth of their catalogue as well.
    Whilst digital is clearly the largest slice of the music pie, the live music piece is growing rapidly. The Ficci-KPMG study expects the ‘public performance’ segment to register the fastest compounded average growth rate between 2012 and 2017, of 22% (the projection for the digital segment is 21.7% and for the total music industry the estimated growth rate for this period is 16.2%).
    Rex Vijayan of Avial, a Malayalam rock band with fans across the world, agrees that live performances indeed are the major source of sustenance for contemporary bands. Avial was formed a decade ago by a bunch of youngsters from Kerala. The band shot to fame after a music video that played on local music channels created a storm. Soon, the band found a producer in Phat Phish Records.
    Once again, YouTube seems to have discovered for the band — which sings only in Malayalam — fans around the world. Malayalam is not a language that is familiar to people outside the country nor is it easy to understand and yet there are people from Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia apart from the United States and Europe grooving to their music. Over the years, Avial has also hit the concert circuit hard playing at multiple festivals across the country and in Dubai, Mauritius and several other venues abroad.
    The emergence of a new wave of pubs such as blueFROG and the Hard Rock Café which provide space for live performances has also helped bring more people to attend concerts.
    “The future is all about the concert scene. But still cutting an album is a must for me. I need to see the album, especially its cover design. That’s a special feeling,” says Vijayan.
: KP Narayana Kumar ETM 131208



No comments: