Musicians turn entrepreneurs to keep the party going

BENGALURU: On June 7, Bengaluru hosted its first social-distancing party experiment: Safe&Sound. Close to 30 people got together at The Hub, a co-living space on Infantry Road, and partied, within circles, for 45 minutes. The brainchild of city-based DJ duo Answer (Arjun Nair and Nishanth Naidu), Safe&Sound is a one-stop-shop party model for post-Covid socialising.
A week after that (June 13), the city saw rock band Perfect Strangers kicking off their first ticketed concert for this year. While it was streamed online, the concert was performed by the six-member band at Streamphony, a new venue kitted out with the best audio and video gear to enable quality live-streaming. A venture of Debjeet Basu (also a member of Perfect Strangers) and musician and music teacher RichardDudley, the concert had close to 170 people from across the world tuning in.
FIRST OF THEIR KIND
While one was a party and the other a concert, both were ideas of musicians looking for simple, doable solutions to restart an industry that coronavirus has put a halt to. They are among the first-of-their-kind projects in post-Covid India. According to Dudley, they wanted to do something that would support musicians, while adhering to mandated safety protocols.
“Post-lockdown, Streamphony is the first project in the country that enables bands to come together to play and live-stream their gigs. Our venue has a professional set-up with multiple cameras and a digital mixer to produce high-quality videos of the shows. That makes our shows very different from the unplugged Instagram and Facebook concerts that you see,” says Basu. Arjun Nair says Safe&Sound too happened out of the need to do something for the DJ fraternity. “We decided to come up with a model that would not only prioritise safety but would also instil confidence in people to come out and dance. And we put it all together in under seven days,” he says.
ENCOURAGING RESPONSE
Easing of restrictions in Bengaluru helped these musicians implement their ideas. And they are thrilled with the response from across the country and the world — Streamphony is booked for both music concerts and private events till mid-August, Basu and Dudley reveal. “While bands in the city are happy, we even got enquiries from bands in Chennai who are ready to drive down to perform after the lockdown ends there,” says Audrey, adding that viewers are readily paying the ticket price of Rs 300.
The Safe&Sound party was live-streamed on Facebook and had 14 venues in India as partners, including The Park Chennai, Antisocial in Mumbai, Soho in Delhi and Vh1 Supersonic. Within five hours of the event, the video had received 10,000 views on Instagram. Today, it has crossed 1.2 lakh views and has been shared some 12,000-14,000 times. “All this without any publicity,” says Nair. The duo is getting enquiries from event companies and venues about their party experiment. “We even have brands interested in sponsoring, and that's because everyone wants to socialise now,” Nair says.