Why have one music director when you can have six? OTT platforms are giving rise to music supervisors, who handpick songs, allowing indie talent to meet an audience it never imagined it could
Pune-based pop-rock band Fiddlecraft made three songs in The Family Man
Till last month, Pune-based pop-rock band Fiddlecraft had around 10,000 followers on their Spotify artist account. But then The Family Man released on Amazon Prime, and the band, which has three songs as part of the Manoj Bajpayee-fronted hit show’s OST, Toofan being the most popular, suddenly gained 16k followers. “We now have 26k thousand followers. What happens is if one song travels, the others also get traction,” says Sudeep Shetty, co-founder and manager of the band that’s made up of former IT professionals who quit mainstream jobs to pursue music.
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Why this happened is because Raj and DK, the director duo of Family Man, curated the OST for the show in a such a way that it features stellar indie’s talent, including Swarathama and Bengaluru-based rapper Brodha V. “I think they were following the Bangalore music scene and had heard of Vainko and liked it,” says Brodha V of a song that released in 2019, which the non-indie music listening viewers only heard on the show last month. “Music supervisors, and supervision, is a great help to indie musicians—when we get featured in mainstream shows, it gets us a larger audience.”
Azeem Dayani has been music supervisor for movies like Baar Baar Dekho, and featured Jasleen Royal and Prateek Kuhad on the song Kho gaye hum kahan
While the directors have played a dual role behind the scenes for The Family Man, most shows and films to release on OTT platforms now have exclusive music supervisors to curate the OST. Gone are the days when one music director dictated an entire album. You could say it all started with singer/songwriter Ankur Tewari, who was music supervisor for the 2019 Zoya Akhtar film Gully Boy. Tiwari says that it’s been happening in the West for a while, and it was high time India caught up. “It’s about having one more option. I think now, especially when the music industry is on a curve—music is being produced at home, many people own their music—something like this was needed. It was happening in small ways anyway. For example, back in 2011, director Bejoy Nambiar got a song by composer Mickey Mcleary to feature in his film, Shaitan. It’s more formal and legitimate now.”
Tewari thinks the trend has worked well to introduce indie talent to a new audience, one that doesn’t care about language. “The old barriers are now gone. We are transcending boundaries to look for music,” says Tewari, who is busy curating music for Amazon Prime show Made in Heaven’s second season starring Shobhita Dhulipala. In fact, it was Tewari who had introduced producer and musician Mukul Deora to Divine’s American manager, and that’s how the Mumbai rapper featured in Deora’s 2021 Netflix film, The White Tiger. “We had Divine, and we had a Punjabi MC song, which suited the ethos of the film. In America, this is the usual practice. And I am ecstatic that it’s happening in India. I think now, non-Bollywood artistes will get a chance to showcase their work; it’s opening up different spaces to them. The music industry is maturing.”
Ankur Tewari
Bombay’s export to LA, singer-songwriter Natania Lalwani will agree with Deora. The young artist has featured prominently on the OST for Amazon Prime’s Four More Shots Please!, curating and writing for it with Mikey Mcleary, who helmed the project. “We would watch the episodes and then write each song for a particular scene. This way, you truly become the character and are able to see what they’re going through,” says Lalwani, who was excited about adding different voices to the OST. “I remember finding Zoe Siddarth. When I heard her voice, I knew she would be perfect for a song I had written. We had her come in to demo it and she ended up singing a couple of songs for the season.” Another indie artist, rapper D’Evil, who has songs in the upcoming Farhan Akhtar-starrer Toofan, says, “It’s amazing to get this kind of supervision when an indie talent crosses over. We need this guidance.”
Mukul Deora, D’evil and Natania Lalwani
But it’s not just OTTs that are changing the game. Even mainstream production houses like Dharma are keen to give new talent a chance. Azeem Dayani, who is now a well-known music supervisor for Karan Johar’s production house, started in the film marketing team. “After work, I used to hang around and unwind by listening to music. Karan sir [Johar] was always around, and once he asked me to find some new music for Kapoor and Sons. That’s how I got to doing this,” says Dayani, who met indie songwriter Arko Pravo Mukherjee at that time, who pitched him Dariya, a song that became a hit in 2016’s Baar Baar Dekho. “We did a lot of new stuff—we got Amaal Mallik to rework Kar gayi chul then, more recently we also got Bpraak to sing Teri mitti for Kesari, which fetched him a National Award this year.” Dayani feels there hasn’t been a better time for indie musicians. “As music supervisors grow, there is more chance that indie talent will be featured in mainstream shows and movies. And that’s a win-win.”
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