The audience isn't restricted to the self-important elite. Labels are thinking twice about extracting their pound of flesh
Skrat, a Chennai-based band with whom The Indian Music Diaries has conducted a video chat
Let's take a walk into the future. Imagine you've arrived at a point when Indian indie music isn't a tiny soap bubble anymore in front of Bollywood, which is more like a giant hot air balloon in comparison. Nightclubs aren't blaring songs like DJ Waale Babu. Instead, they are playing a techno banger by an artiste like Delhi-based producer BLOT. Venues aren't treating live bands like use-and-throw commodities. The audience isn't restricted to the self-important elite. Labels are thinking twice about extracting their pound of flesh. And indie artistes populate the most-heard lists on streaming services.
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It isn't wholly inconceivable, this future. But if and when it does happen, a large part of the credit would have to go to those chroniclers who have painstakingly looked for rough-cut diamonds in a musical coal mine at a time when you can count such platforms on your fingers. There is no history without documentation, after all. And if, say, someone 40 years down the line looks back for bands that created a ripple in the tiny pool that Indian indie is today, one place they could go to is The Indian Music Diaries (TIMD), a social media page doing a stellar job of bringing obscure artistes out of the shadows.
It's a totally DIY initiative. When the page first started in 2015, the admin depended on word-of-mouth information. But then bands, too, started reaching out in no time at all. These acts could be from cities like Delhi and Mumbai. But, they could also be from places like Ranchi and Patna. That shows how starved outfits are of coverage that helps them reach beyond a small coterie of local fans. And gradually, the page was successful in building a genuine sense of community about a scene that, even four years later, has only just learnt to walk after crawling for decades.
Now, TIMD has evolved into an entity that provides more than just information about upcoming bands. They provide news, too, such as that of the moral brigade filing an FIR against the organisers of a recent music festival. They also conduct ask-me-anything kind of interviews with indie veterans and people well-versed with copyright laws, so that the younger lot receives the right kind of education. And the eventual plan is to get some funding and move into the artist and event management space. We will have to wait and watch how that pans out. But meanwhile, here's a pat on the back for a page that's playing its part in ensuring that the soap bubble that indie music is only growing bigger and doesn't, one day, burst eventually.
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