Rocking online the Indian Ocean way

Earlier this week, Indian Ocean, arguably India’s leading band, did the unthinkable — they released a song from their latest album online and told fans to download it for free. No strings attached.

In fact, each month, Indian Ocean will release one new song from its latest album 16/ 330 Khajoor Road for free download on their site www.indianoceanmusic.com. It is not easy for artists to give away their work for free. But Indian Ocean had good reason to.

“ A lot of people are curious as to why we want to give away the music free,” they say. “ Firstly, this greatly reduces the distance between the band and its listeners.

A lot of people ( specially younger people) do not buy music any more but rip or download from the web, so we want to make their lives a little guilt- free.” That is just one part of the reason.

The other reason was record companies. Indian Ocean says: “ In addition, this ( giving away songs for free download) means no more negotiating contracts with record companies and fighting over copyright issues, no worries about bad distribution, albums not being available at different places and so on. Also, very frankly, no Indian artist survives on royalty. We make almost all our income playing live shows and composing music for films etc., so it is no great hardship for us to give up this amount. We also hope that this becomes a means for other artists in India to reach out to their listening public.” Indian Ocean’s downloadable song is Chand ( meaning moon), which the band wrote for an “ eponymous short film directed by Anurag Kashyap, which unfortunately never saw the light of day.” Indian Ocean bring forth an important point — how the Internet has bridged the gap between artists and their fans ( and seriously, Indian Ocean has many), and how the Web can easily be the next platform for marketing your talent while the real revenue ( or box- office figures) come from somewhere else.

The video game industry, for instance, has been doing this successfully for several years now. In fact, so successfully that, in 2008, the US video game market was bigger than the Hollywood market in absolute value. But video games have a good reason to give away free Web downloads — they translate immediately into DVD sales in the store because of word of mouth publicity.

Likewise, there is a good chance that 16/ 330 Khajoor Road becomes a hit on the concert circuit.

In any case, Indian Ocean has said, the album will be released in a double CD pack early next year, complete with all the seven songs as well recordings of the practice sessions. That will be some serious fun for Indian Ocean fans, but they may have to wait until March next year or be content with downloading one song every month.

Says the band: “ The songs on this album are classic Indian Ocean. You will recognise our sound in each number. However, almost all the songs were originally made for some film project or the other. In India, our experience has been that only about one in eight or so film projects actually get completed. But that's great for us, since we get to keep and play all these songs and put them into an album without negotiating with ten thousand lawyers.” Indian Ocean is possibly India’s only leading band to do so. But the world over, several bands have experimented — quite successfully — with the online model.

The most famous instance was when UK band Radiohead released their album ‘ In Rainbows’ online in October 2007, and asked fans to give whatever they felt like after listening to the songs. The experiment ensured 1.2 million downloads in 10 days.

Radiohead did not release the official revenue figures from this experiment, but it got them publicity like never before. Of course, the music was great too, which meant that the critics, too, went to town writing about the album.

Indian Ocean, too, need not fear much from the critics.

Chand , the first song from 16/ 330 Khajoor Road , is a superlative effort in composition and lyrics.

The orchestration is brilliant and the voices — despite Asheem Chakravarty not being around following his death last Christmas — search your soul. Just the kind of stuff that would make fans want to wait for the next download on August 25.