That day in 1991 was to prove a harbinger of good things. Mahesh Tinaikar of Magnasound was watching MTV Asia. Viewers' letters were being read out "" and there was a surprise request. One viewer wondered if MTV could play the video of a desi group. Tinaikar swung into action. He picked up an old video cassette of Rock Machine languishing on his shelves and sent it pronto to MTV.
A new opportunity was presenting itself. Till date there had been no avenue to advertise Indian pop music on TV, or for that matter, on radio. That was the exclusive territory of film music. And the more esoterically inclined took refuge in semi-classical and classical music.
Magnasound jumped into the fray. They invited Ken Ghosh to do a video for Jasmine Bharucha's album "" Alone Now. At Rs 80,000 the video was cut for the song titled Alien Desire, with the specific objective of playing it on MTV. They couldn't touch ad film makers "" they were just too expensive. That's where I came in, says Ghosh.
Meanwhile MTV's Vincent Longobardo came to India. Magnasound played him Baba Sehgal's Dil Dharake. And Longobardo jumped at it. MTV would put in the money to promote the album with a video. Their sole objective "" to break the Indian market.
Ghosh did the video. Pooja Bedi added the glamour quotient. History was in the making. In 1992, Sehgal's album Thanda Thanda Paani sold 7,00,000 copies. After one month of its showing on MTV, the album was selling 90,000 every month. Doordarshan woke up to its popularity and played it on Superhit Muqabla that December "" sales that month skyrocketed to 1,11,000. The concept had worked. Baba Sehgal, Alisha Chinai and Remo Fernandes had gained entry to every Indian household with a TV.
The artist reaped rich dividends for
the exercise. Live performances were demanded of talented persons performing on screen. Daler Mehndi used to command Rs 35,000 for a show. After Bolo Tararara, that shot up to Rs 7 lakhs.
Half the battle was won when dedicated music channels appeared on TV. The next step was to cut a video to showcase the album, says Shashank Ghosh, erstwhile creative director and now consultant for Channel V. And music videos make for a roaring business now. Five years ago you could commission a video for Rs 50,000-70,000. Today that could be anywhere between Rs 15 lakh and Rs 20 lakh, sometimes more.
In a nutshell, the video is the advertisement. The record company prepares the product and commissions a video to help market it. The West inspired this music video boom. But those twenty-odd years that the music revolution took in the West was compressed into just five years in India, says Ghosh.
The next watershed was Alisha Chinai's Made in India. That album sold a good 20 lakh cassettes, and is now selling at a steady 10,000 every month, according to Atul Churamani, director, A&R and Marketing, Magnasound. That reinforced popular faith in the industry. No one had ever thought of pop music replacing or even getting into the same popularity bracket as film music, adds Churamani.
The industry gives a free rein to creativity. As Ghosh describes it: Music is not a linear piece of communication. It tends to move towards the abstract and the visuals seek to be faithful to the lyrics.
And the music in turn reflects this penchant for visual experimenting. Quite apart from the bhangra pop and Baba Sehgal's rap, there are whole new genres being created. Peter Gabriel and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan did Mast Mast adapting a synthesiser and a bass guitar to back the pure sufi qawwal. Shashank Ghosh has coined the term crossover for the kind of music Colonial Cousins and Lucky Ali have to offer. Colonial Cousins, for instance, bucked the tide in a big way. That video is roaring at number one in popularity ratings, and it is not even the best song in the album, he says.
Magnasound is clear about its agenda. Whatever you do must be entertaining "" something bright and happy with a little fantasy and some glamour thrown in, according to Churamani.
But he laments the fact that most singers, composers and writers are not dipping into India's heritage. Magnasound is promoting Rajasthani folk music with racy modern arrangements. Music videos to commemorate Onam were released by the company in conjunction with Asianet. Churamani also sees a great market for Hindustani classical music on videos, especially the instrumental variety, and bhajans.
Ken Ghosh wants to market ghazal maestro Jagjit Singh to the Channel V crowd, a generation that wouldn't be seen dead with anything that is even vaguely semi-classical. The way I see it, if Bruce Springsteen and Eric Clapton were to have an Indian pop avatar, that would be Jagjit Singh. So why not position him as such? So Unique will have a Western beat and a santoor playing in the background. At heart it is Indian, with a sugar-coating of the West, adds Ghosh.
This very lucrative industry has spawned a whole new galaxy of players. Ken Ghosh was the only person dedicatedly making videos for a long while. Now there are other names to reckon with like Mahesh Mathai (Lucky Ali and Ila Arun) and Namita Roy Ghosh (Indus Creed). The record label hones in on a concept, and the product finally emerges after much conflict and collaboration between the album producer, the video director, the artist, the arranger and sundry other players.
Ken Ghosh would rather have one outfit do all the needful. I would like to decide what the artist will do, work on the music, the lyrics, the presentation of the artist, the inlay card, plus decide how to market the artist. It will be a complete package.
Film songs are now cut in the music video style and often double up as both. The South has stolen a march in this respect "" Illayaraja and Rehman could see their songs as albums and built the videos into the movies.
Today desi music is definitely hip. Where Madonna sells 50,000 cassettes in India, Alisha Chinai sells 25 lakhs. Of course, Western music videos are also moving up. According to Bashir Sheikh of Crescendo, while international albums had about two and a half per cent of the market share in 1991, today it boasts double that.
There was a song playing in the early '80s that went something like Video killed the radio star. Fairly ominous words those, eh?
