Picture This!

Imagine you spent crores of rupees building a restaurant. You selected a good location, one which can attract a lot of crowd. You got all the licenses in place, had to pay under the belt for quite a few, just to get them in time. You designed the place so it could cater to as much of the masses as possible. You have a live performance area, and your place can accommodate more than 200 people so you go ahead and decide to host an event. Being a supporter of the independent music scene in India, you try and book good music acts from the circuit. Say about 68 people show up and more than 70% of them are under 25, the legal drinking age. There go your bar sales! Boom! You discover booking an independent music act from the scene is bad economics for your place. Next time, you decide to go for a Sufi Rock band instead.

A wider, much older crowd is where the bucks come in from!

There were hardly any Sufi rock bands till about a decade back but it all changed because of a few venues in Delhi. They realized they could attract a wider crowd, and a much older crowd too if they get these bands to play. If you are not acquainted with what Sufi Rock bands are, they are essentially Bollywood music cover bands. They hardly play any real Sufi music and have most of the times do not have original music of their own. The audience then finds it much easier to relate to the music, the masses having no temperament for any music other than Bollywood music, which is the truth! Everything boils down to pure economics you see. A typical mid-range Sufi Rock band will cost you about 40-50K for a gig and you can hope to make a sale of about 1.5 lakhs that day. Profits are a guarantee if you promote the event aggressively because the audience does respond to Sufi Rock bands or, to believe, they have been conditioned to do so. On the other hand, booking a band from the underground music scene and paying the same booking amount might not guarantee you even a break even in some cases. It’s not like there aren’t any venues making a profit by booking independent music acts, but the fact is that these venues have single-handed dedicated themselves to catering to the alternative culture, right from their inception. A lot of these venues have suffered and got shut down in the process while some of them have managed to sustain.

It Helps The Bands Pay Their Bills

Since Sufi Rock bands first started playing, there have been a lot of developments in the industry. While the first batch that cropped up ranged anywhere between 15K to 40K, you can now book Superstars in the Sufi Rock circuit for as high as 2 Lakhs+ per gig. Today, one of Delhi's first Sufi-rock band Nasha charges somewhere around 5-7 Lakhs and upwards per show. Some have these musicians now owe their entire livelihood to these gigs and have got into it full time. Others do it on a part-time basis to get their pocket money sorted. A lot of these sessions musicians in Sufi Rock bands are musicians from other independent music bands who’ve been having a hard time sustaining themselves through their art. Playing in such bands is easy money for them, and they earn anywhere between 10K to 30K per gig depending on the kind of band they play for. I agree that there is a lot that needs to be changed if independent bands are to see the light of day someday and have a chance to connect to a wider audience. Maybe we need more bands singing in a language people can relate to (both linguistically and musically). Maybe the venues can be more open to bands who want to showcase their original music. Maybe we as an audience can be more supportive too. Maybe.

Maybe we as an audience can be more supportive too. Maybe.