Over the next three months, Wadhwa plans to travel the length and breadth of India. The agenda then is to not ask them to come to Mumbai but to go out and find them. “I get demos from kids in Nagpur, Indore, Agra and some of them are creating mind-blowing songs, but they don’t have access and nobody’s taking them seriously,” he reveals. He wants to create success stories to ignite the larger music ecosystem. “Because it is a pop culture play, it has to be a holistic representation,” he says. The label CEO is in no hurry to lock down BGBNG’s roster, expanding the search country-wide, not limiting it to Mumbai and New Delhi. “We’re calling ourselves a label because there is no terminology for a hybrid model like ours, but what we actually are is a label meets management meets marketing agency,” explains Wadhwa. Photo: Big Bang MusicĪs a music label, BGBNG claims to be an enabler, moving away from the negative connotation attached with most contracts. Rapper Naezy is one of the representatives of the newly cemented Indian hip-hop wave in pop culture.
Playback singers rule the roost in Bollywood but does the Indian film industry give them their due? “A lot of the playback singers will have big, hit songs but nobody knows their names, faces, personalities, because they’re essentially singing for a Bollywood star who is acting out the song,” says Wadhwa, citing a larger pop culture play around film music, a tide waiting to turn. Musicians such as Sunidhi Chauhan, Neha Kakkar, Arijit Singh, Shreya Ghoshal, Nucleya, Diljit Dosanjh and Badshah have found themselves on Forbes’ Celebrity 100 list but the top 10 remains a place exclusive to actors and cricketers. Taylor Swift and Lionel Messi feature in the top 10 of Forbes’ list of highest-paid celebrities (2019) where the only entertainer from the Indian cohort is actor Akshay Kumar who ranks at number 33. India is the only country where musicians don’t feature in the top 10 of anything,” says KWAN’s co-founder and CEO Vijay Subramaniam. “If you look at anywhere in the world, the richest celebrities in the world and the richest influencers in the world, if you look at Forbes, Fortune, etc., you’ll find the top 10 being dominated by musicians and athletes. Drawing on Sony Music’s business and distribution network and KWAN’s A&R expertise and live event stronghold, the label finds itself in a unique position to realize its vision: creating pop culture superstars. The year old “new-age” pop music label is arguably the new kid on the block with an explosive mandate that aims to go beyond the traditional role of the music label, employing what co-founder and CEO Gaurav Wadhwa calls a “360 degree blockbuster approach.” BGBNG has an edge in the market with an interesting point of leverage. When entertainment management company KWAN and music label Sony Music announced a joint venture under the Mumbai label Big Bang Music (BGBNG) recently, it seemed like a rather ambitious endeavor.
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