Not only India, but the entire musicians’ community across the world is now forced to rethink and reinvent their positioning and marketing strategies in post-COVID-19 era.
Given this fact of life, we also need to acknowledge that the awareness and importance of the digital world have always been more with International musicians than with Indian Musicians. There are number of reasons for this. India has recently started making its presence felt on the digital world with regard to the penetration and bandwidth capacities across the Nation. Thanks to domestic and international telecom companies for making the internet network available to every Indian and along with that, the internet bandwidth as a freebee. The robust and business side of this revolution is ‘today we are all connected’ which has created access to knowledge and information equally to everyone. However, the flip side of the entire online digital world is flooding or excess supply of tangible and intangible products and services in every space irrespective of demand.
That is where musicians need to understand the nuances of the digital world. There are two major aspects which need to be understood, one is, they represent the industry as a whole so they have to streamline their digital actions and second is stay cautious with regard to their visibility and content on multiple social media platforms. This may sound little stringent but will certainly help in the long run.
Now talking about the Indian Music space, unlike the International music scene, Indian Music per se consists of multiple music genres and sub-genres with the abundant talent available in every genre. Another aspect is, online digital media is available to every talent in every genre irrespective of the quality of talent. Further, ‘social media live concerts’ doesn’t cost an artist therefore every artist explores this space left, right and centre because it’s free popularity. This creates a catastrophic situation of good talent of getting lost in the crowd.
What is the remedy for this situation? Musicians Federation of India in the recently hosted an International seminar on streaming music and deliberated on this subject. The seminar was attended by Copyrights Board of India, IPRS, ISRA, PPL, IMI, International Federation of Musicians, American Federation of Musicians, Canadian Federation of Musicians and many European Music Unions and Federations from Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Germany, UK, Switzerland and many more. The seminar was also attended by a few famous streaming music companies like Time Music, Hungama etc. One of the panels discussed and suggested that the key to success for a musician in niche music genres would be to directly and stay connected with their fans directly. Many successful International musicians have effectively adopted this the western world.
In the years to come, Indian Music and musicians need to really shape up, get organized, acquire knowledge and embrace the technology. The creation of innovative revenue models for an artist would be a challenge and also the key to success.
Therefore, to overcome this situation, the Musicians Federation of India (MFI) is relaunching the Global Community of India Music (GCIM). GCIM was launched in 2015 by Pt. Shivkumar Sharma, Begum Parveen Sultana, Pt Hariprasad Chaurasia, Louiz Banks, Pt. Vijay Ghate and many more artists at a grand function at Shanmukhananda Auditorium, Mumbai.
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MFI appeals to all artists to be the founder patron of the community and introduce at least 10 members to the community who are music lovers. Please spare 3 minutes, click HERE, fill in the details and press submit button.
