I probably performed my first “professional” gig in 1995. It was a tour of the North East – Assam & Meghalaya. I had just joined New Delhi’s hottest band – Parikrama and I was lucky to be a part of “our” very first recording – a single titles “Till I’m No One Again”. I shall keep the story of the recording for another time and stay honest to the title of this blog for now.

In the day, a gig wasn’t something you do with an acoustic guitar on someones balcony with an audience of 12 people sitting 3 feet away from you as you try and find the space you’d like to be in while you perform.

A gig was defined as a show where you and the band performed on a stage with a drum platform, guitar, bass & keyboard amps were provided, as were holdback monitors, cables, microphones, DI Boxes’,  lights, PA system and a mixing console. No one ever performed without a sound engineer, and it just didn’t make sense to set all of this up for less than 200 people in the audience, although most of the shows were attended by an audience of anywhere from 500 to 10,000! So if you weren’t good enough to pull that kind of crowd, you just had to keep playing at college competitions or be one of the three opening acts for a band that could pull a thousand listeners.

Weeks of rehearsal were a norm regardless of wether you had a gig on the horizon and there was no scope of moonlighting for multiple bands apart from the one odd time that you chose to step in to help a band complete their line up in an emergency. Every one rehearsed till there was no need for notes, chord charts or lyric. We all believed then, as do I now, that on stage you perform at about 60-70-% of your ability at best. To give the audience a 100%, we would need to be able to get our skills up to 200%

With MTV coming in around 1991, everyone thought the time had come for music other than the film industry.. after all THE Music Television that made “Music Videos” into cult pop culture that the whole world had bought into was here in India, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, now in 2022, we all know how badly that went. And the main reason why it went badly was because just like now, then too, the music industry worked on “networking” and nepotism. Every one hired the other person they knew and their immediate side kicks regardless of their knowledge, experience, motivation, passion or proficiency in the field of popular music. Every defunct bands singer or guitar player, who never made the cut in the performing circuit went on to get an “MBA”, lined up and joined the music industry… from music channels to record labels. And how could they, now being the gatekeepers of the music distribution industry allow all those bands and artists who had the craft, talent and the audience to pass through? After all, these were the same bands that had shown these executives how to succeed in the Live circuit, now it was the executives who would show them how to manufacture successful recording artists. It was personal, but the international labels and channels paid for it.

30 years later, we all know, manufacturing artists, though possible in the short term, isn’t sustainable. That does not mean, things are any different today.

30 years later, the biggest music company in India who reserves bragging rights on owning the most viewed YouTube channel, continues to try this strategy. Yes, it seems it’s succeeding as of now… but history has shown that it won’t work.

It does seem that 1995 wasn’t that different than 2022 from an independent artists point of view.