In India, anything and everything that isn’t Bollywood is independent or indie music,” declares digital head, EMI, N.S. Padmanabhan and adds, “However, as long as there is music, there will always be an indie music scene.” Indie (not to be confused with the tag sometimes used to pigeonhole bands like Oasis and The Verve) at its very basic level, refers to any sort of music that is written, recorded and distributed in an autonomous manner, without any reliance on major commercial record labels.
With the major commercial record labels (arguably) yet to make a dent in the Indian music scene, most of the successful “big” bands and artistes in India have either had to adopt the D-I-Y approach to getting their music out or have relied on one of the many independent record labels that have been mushrooming over the years. But now, questions are being raised about whether one really needs record labels to be a success in the music biz, considering how acts like Indian Ocean and Motherjane have recently been giving away their music online.
It’s perhaps appropriate then that the contentious role of record labels in today’s music was one of the most eagerly anticipated panel discussion topic at the three-day music conference Soundbound (November 19-21) that was organised at the Ravindra Natya Mandir by the Goethe-Institut, the British Council and Only Much Louder.
“If a small band was to try and give away one song a month online a la Indian Ocean, I don’t think the band would do very well at all. It took years and years for Indian Ocean to get to a position where they can do something like this,” says Gaurav Vaz, who is the bassist for the Raghu Dixit Project (among the scores of other hats he wears).
One of the major complaints levelled against record labels by artistes is that record sales figures are often fudged or accounts are kept in a haphazard way, thereby denying the latter their rightful earnings. Indian Ocean manager Dhruv Jagasia elaborates, “Kandisa (Indian Ocean) is the largest selling indie album in India to date, with over 4,00,000 CDs and cassettes sold. The label Times Music sells each CD for around Rs 500. But we were only given `10 lakhs (which is around `5 per CD). How is that even remotely fair?”
At this point, Vaz chips in with an anecdote of his own about Saregama Records, saying, “At the start, when we were on Saregama, we discovered one day that our music was already on iTunes, which was something we hadn’t agreed to.” What made matters worse was that RDP tracks were appearing on a lot of websites. “I don’t know how my music ended up appearing on hummaa.com,” laments Vaz and adds, “After denying any involvement, eventually, it transpired that Saregama themselves had given the music to another company, who passed it on to iTunes. The label wanted worldwide distribution rights, but they couldn’t even take the music to Nepal.”
The job of a record label isn’t only to distribute music, but also to keep its roster fresh and scout new talent. That’s where the Artistes and Repertoire (A&R) division comes in. At times, A&R people with an ear to the ground have gone on to massively influence the direction of popular music, like Geffen Records’ Gary Gersh, who picked up Nirvana for his label after watching the band live, at a time when alternative rock wasn’t very popular.
But that was back in the days before the Internet invasion. Now, a quick perusal of an artiste/band’s MySpace page is enough to give record labels an idea of what they sound like and maybe even look like when performing live. In addition, the talent that is waiting to be scouted need not live in fear of the A&R guy missing their show because the music will be online 24 hours of the day, waiting to be discovered. Gaurav Malaker, the label manager of Qilla Records, one of the few electronica labels in India, believes that his label is as much a marketing agency as a record label. “We help electronica artistes get noticed, so that they can get shows, which is where the money is,” he says and adds, “One way is to take a song done by them and send it to a major electronica artiste in say, Europe and get that person to remix it. Then, when people search for the famous artiste’s music online, the remix will definitely come up, giving our artiste some exposure.” Digital media and music consultant Mandar Thakur tries to tie it all together and says, “Record labels are not dead. It’s just that their way of doing business is changing.”