The House Party Always Wins
On Indian indie music managers disrupting the market.
The genesis of this piece lies in Delhi’s best-known jazz club – The Piano Man.
The two of us attended a gig that we had been looking forward to for a while – a gig that we knew would be different from what we were used to. The Piano Man first opened in Safdarjung in 2015 with the aim of fostering art and music scenes in the capital. In the nine years since, the club has branched out to two more locations in Delhi-NCR. It has helped cultivate extremely talented live musicians across genres. If you’re an indie singer starting out, or a small rock band trying to make a mark, you have to notch up a Piano Man gig at some point. It’s no secret that the club takes after the New York speakeasies of the 1920s. It’s usually where Delhi’s elite go to enjoy ‘eclectic’ forms of music and blow smoke rings.
This is why the gig we attended together on May 19th 2024 was so disruptive. First, it was a hip-hop show. Until very recently, rap was never platformed at venues like The Piano Man, and this was an interesting exception. Second, in the vein of orchestral arrangements that artists like Kendrick Lamar or Black Thought often undertake, this rapper was not backed by a DJ but rather by a live band. And not just any band – a trumpet, a trombone, someone on the drums, a synthesizer, backup singers, a bass guitarist – fronted by one man wearing a bespoke brown suit who called himself Dhanji Kumar. The show exceeded expectations, it was fun, it was energetic, it was smooth, it was everything we had ever wanted from a live performance, and more. It was the first time this venue ever hosted a rap gig.
In fact, the credit for the first ever rap gig in the history of any Piano Man venue in Delhi also goes to Dhanji, who performed at the Gurgaon branch in 2023.
The audience wasn’t your usual Piano Man suspects. It was a group of young people – teens, twenty-somethings, college-going kids and recent graduates who were hooked on this cult-like figure of Desi Hip Hop’s greatest showman. Dhanji was in his element, and hot off the success of his solo debut album, RUAB. This crowd wasn’t there to further bougie speakeasy culture. This was a crowd ready to throw the gauntlet down for an artist who was doing something they had never seen before – doing hip hop like we hadn’t yet seen in India.
Dhanji released his first album independently less than a year ago. To add to his allure, his Spotify bio tells us nothing concrete about who he is, but rather is a quote from the celebrated author Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote Don Quixote, which contains the following words:
“….and the authors who compose them and the actors who perform them say they must be like this because that is just how the mob wants them, and no other way; the plays that have a design and follow the story as art demands appeal to a handful of discerning persons who understand them, while everyone else is incapable of comprehending their artistry…”
If like us, you hang around the nooks and corners of Desi hip hop Twitter, you would have stumbled across anonymous accounts posting “RVAB SEASON”. Till that moment, Dhanji — real name Jayraj Ganatra — had solved his “1000 fans” problem ten times over. His niche fanbase has been unwaveringly loyal to him, picking up his unique inflections and adlibs and plastering them wherever they could (“GENUAN”). His art, while groundbreaking, has managed to appeal to the mob in the Cervantes quote. But he has also pleased the “handful of discerning persons”. RVAB earned a 7.8 on Pitchfork — which, if you didn’t know already, is infamous for their usually stingy ratings. Critic Bhanuj Kappal describes the album:
“Propulsive basslines slouch and swagger in lockstep with tightly syncopated drums and bright horns spar with keening synths, all filtered through the dusty, sepia-toned lens of 1970s Indian parallel cinema. RUAB sounds like the background score for a Blaxploitation-meets-Hindi-film-noir movie, with Dhanji and his hometown of Ahmedabad as the main protagonists.”
When the crowd heard the word “GENUAN” after a small instrumental segue, and it seemed like the trombone player was ready for a jump-up, and one of the trumpet guys got his phone out, the venue erupted. They knew that a simultaneous scream of “colony se callertune tak, Dhanji classic” was coming. Dhanji’s runaway hit, Guru had no right to sound this slick with a live band, especially in comparison to the original song.
We were immediately cognizant that we were watching one of the best live performances Delhi had seen in a while. Personally, neither of us thought that Piano Man had ever sold out the way it did for Dhanji. Neither had we ever seen the sleek chic venue overpopulated by raging hormones the way it was that evening. The crowd knew every lyric. This was a mosh-pit — completely ill-fitting for a suave club like this one. The show broke every rule in the book, and that’s what made it so fun. If one could summarize Dhanji’s career to this point, it would have to be defined by rule-breaking experimentation. Miguel de Cervantes would be flabbergasted at Dhanji’s meteoric rise.
Dhanji pulls off a lot with what seems like very little. The Piano Man show was an ambitious gig. Even as recently as ten years ago, you would have needed a label or an agency affiliation to organize a show of this scale at a similar venue. He is truly independent – working closely with his manager Saqlen Hasan Khan, who had no formal experience with music management prior to this role. The duo had a blockbuster year: in addition to their Piano Man gig, they collaborated with the (English) Premier League’s India account and secured a spot on Lollapalooza India’s 2025 lineup. All of this is the work of a super-lean team not on anyone’s payroll but their own.
It’s All Happening
Towards the end of the movie Almost Famous (2000), the super-fan Sapphire critiques part-time groupies by saying, “They don’t even know what it is to be a fan. Y’know? To truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts”. Being a fan can be all-consuming, it can at times even seem like a job. And for some fans in the contemporary Delhi hip hop scene, different roles and identities blend into each other.
This past year we interviewed three managers who started out as super-fans and transitioned into innovators in the Delhi hip hop scene. They do not have formal training in the music business, yet they manage some of the scene’s most exciting acts. Two of the artists have made it onto Spotify’s RAP 91 playlist, and one has a song in an Anurag Kashyap movie. Speak to Mithran Samuel, who manages Kinari, and one of the first things he might say to you is, “I fucking love rap and I fucking love Kinari”. Speak to Saqlen, and he would likely say something -similar - minus the profanities - about the artist he manages – Dhanji. In conversation with Manvendra Krishna – manager of trap artists Boyblanck and DRV – about his strategy, he says “it’s not about the genre, it’s always about the artist, you have to love your artist”.
Saqlen, Mithran, and Manvendra have pushed boundaries and redefined conventional understandings of what is possible in alt-music spaces in the country. We started this piece talking about Dhanji’s gig at The Piano Man – what we witnessed was something novel and exciting that frankly changed our expectations of the live music scene in Delhi. As gig-goers (and fans!) it was an education. Kinari’s live shows have introduced rap music to a female-led audience – given hip-hop’s dismal record with gender, this is quite an amazing feat. Boyblanck and DRV are making their uniquely Indian life experiences sound stylish in the context of trap music.
A native of Bareilly, Saqlen often visited Delhi to meet friends who made music. He was ambitious and looking for opportunities. He hadn’t intended to be a manager, and in some ways, he fell into it because of the friends that he had and the crowd that he was hanging out with. He is a devotee of hip hop and has been ever since he was a teen – listening to the music, dissecting lyrics and interpreting meanings, and joining online forums and communities. He is passionate about hip hop culture and sees its potential in India. His evolution from small-town Bareilly student to manager of India’s fastest-rising rappers is meteoric.
His experience in business marketing – specifically, activation and retention – was his initial value-add to artist management. He is responsible for building a full-blown brand around Dhanji as one of the most eclectic, unique rappers India has seen in recent memory. “It’s about doing something no one has ever done before. I’m not doing it for the sake of it, I want to make an impact”, he says.
And, in the vein of Kendrick Lamar’s verse in Control, Saqlen wants to make sure that the core fans of other artists have never heard of them. He’s deeply competitive about music and is willing to out-innovate anyone in the race. This also means that he operates with a brutal level of honesty about where he thinks hip-hop is headed: “we’re the fastest-growing genre in India, but we’re not being bold enough with our creative or business risks”. He also believes that audiences need educating. On some level, this is an evocation of the famous Noel Gallagher snippet where he says that 99% of customers are idiots and they don’t know what they want. This is best exemplified in a quote from an interview Dhanji has with The Indian Music Diaries:
“I love the polarizing effect my music has on people. I would have hated it if I was just a boring artist who constantly makes good music, the type of music that everyone enjoys. I am really glad I’m not that and I strive everyday to not be like that. This does not mean that I’m trying to make obtuse and esoteric kinda music. I’m trying my hardest to make it palatable, but this is completely me, and that’s just Ruab.”
Saqlen’s focus on advancing hip hop culture is echoed by Mithran. When Mithran graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in Political Science, he didn’t set out to be a manager. He and Kinari first collaborated during Mithran’s residency at Khoj Foundation when they put together an iteration of their now infamous ‘Meetha World’ party. It was a place for Delhi’s queers to listen to good rap music, vibe, and be sexy. The success of that event led them to solidify their relationship as manager and artist. “When you like an artist you want to be their friend, and as you get closer, the next natural step is to want to manage them.”
Meetha World is a sexy rap party. It’s an important part of Delhi’s nightlife fabric, not in the least because it’s fun, but because as Mithran notes – it fills a gap in the city’s scene for cool, queer party scenes that are accessible. It is a rap party, with Kinari under her alias DJ Nasbandi spinning hardcore hip hop tunes. The first Meetha World was an exercise in managing a venture with a tight budget. The gig was pulled off in 10K and was part of Mithran’s residency at Khoj. It was set up to be an event and not a party (an important distinction). Using a low-key guerrilla approach, Mithran managed to pull off a rager with 400 RSVPs and nearly as many attendees. It was a product offering of the highest order that met every need of its target audience. The venue was a safe space and free and led to subsequent chargeable gigs (at nominal ticket prices), with a solid crowd showing up every time. A new artist’s first gig is rarely a success (especially without alcohol); Meetha World defied all those standards.
For Mithran, being an independent manager means having the freedom to curate gigs and live shows the way that he and Kinari want. It means redefining expectations and standards around what rap scenes and nightlife scenes in Delhi should look like. The independence is tied in with definitions of underground – being visible without being mainstream and having the flexibility to experiment and not be formulaic about their approach to rap. And that’s what all of Kinari’s live gigs have tried to exemplify: underground rap scenes that are sexy. Through his approach to marketing, Mithran has tried to think about rap culture in the city more broadly and figure out how to draw a more diverse gender audience to their gigs.
In March of last year, Kinari launched her album Kattar Kinnar and went on an India tour. The album launch in Delhi was called Mujrewaali Madhuri, and renowned Mujra dancer Khushi Sheikh opened for Kinari. The crowd at Nehru Place Social was lit. This gig and the subsequent tour were impeccably curated – from ensuring that the sound of the opening act aligned with Kinari and hyped the crowd up for the main act, the visuals, the iconic posters, and the theatre of it all. This is part of what Mithran is putting his energy into – putting on shows that are novel and contribute to the culture; and making sure that the audience has a good time and appreciates rap and the production behind it. Gigs like this redefine expectations of live music in the capital. And what they do is recognize and celebrate Kinari’s identity all the while centering rap as a genre.
For Manvendra, rap offers an authenticity that is hard to come across in other genres. For him, his connection to Boyblanck and DRV is personal. “They make music that speaks to me. It’s as though my views of the world are being shaped by their lyrics”. That relatability ensures that their collaborations are expansive – there is room to experiment and grow. The connection to the artist is essential. “The first time I met Raghav [Boyblanck’s real name], he said he is making music that he wants to listen to in his car”, says Manvendra.
While a student at Ashoka University, Manvendra gained key experience working at multiple labels, including UMG, Big Bang Music and Gully Gang, the agency founded by DIVINE. He worked at the intersection of brands and music, implementing live IPs and 360-degree campaigns between brands and artists. He’s used that experience to not only manage six of Boyblanck’s projects — 3 of them last year alone, but also guide DRV to some of his biggest successes yet. His latest album, Polaris has been making significant waves in the Spotify and Apple Music India charts. Most notably, a remix by Raftaar of his track “Party Mai Aa” has reached stratospheric heights of virality on Instagram.
While its origins lie in the drug houses of Atlanta, trap music has found a fairly relevant Indian social context. Artists like MC STAN, Loka, Darcy and DRV have led the charge, inserting themselves as game-changers the same way mumble rappers like Future once sought to do classic hip-hop – one of us has covered Indian trap last year here. Manvendra’s challenge is unique because both the artists he represents belong to a sub-genre that has only just begun to bloom in India. There is little precedent for him. “Diaspora Indians love trappers like Future, Young Thug and Metro Boomin. I have to figure out how to export Indian trap to those exact guys”, says Manvendra.
For each of these managers independence represents a certain kind of freedom. They are not opposed to labels and the financing that would bring. Rather they highlight in different ways the flexibilities, creativities, and personalization that their independence (to this point) has afforded them. The relationship between managers and their artists in each of these instances is extremely personal. Manvendra emphasizes how the process of working together on something as personal as music makes the artist and manager best friends. This friendship lends itself to a loyalty that is hard to find with labels. And while the relationship with the artist is paramount, each of the managers understand and think deeply about the genre(s) that their artists are experimenting with, and each of them enjoys the genre. They think about that tangled messy word – ‘culture’, and how their artists are contributing to it.
You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet
As we interviewed managers and wrote this article, we paused frequently to ask ourselves what the music management business was like in India like ten or fifteen years ago. “You kids have it too easy”, we’re told by Ritnika Nayan. Ritnika is a longtime executive, now-music entrepreneur who runs an agency called Music Gets Me High (MGMH). Her career spans nearly 20 years and plenty of accomplishments. Some of her credentials include: doing artist management for Sula Fest, working on some of India’s most loved music festivals like Ziro, Bandland and Lollapalooza, and seeing Nucleya through the earliest, commercially-roughest days of his solo career.
Today, Ritnika has taken a step back from actively managing artists, but through MGMH works on festival management and consultancy, artist mentoring, as well as distribution and publishing. She also runs a certificate course in Music Business Management at the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communication. She started the course five years ago, because she noticed that there was no formal education in India for prospective managers.
To a large extent, she’s right. Music management is far more streamlined and has become far more accessible in an age of streaming and social media. Most of the music that we listen to is on our phones, and much of the feedback is received in real time. India has also graduated from hosting a couple of music festivals that struggled to make money in the early days, to having global franchises like Lollapalooza make their foray into this market. Which makes the journey up until this point, and what happened between those two points all the more important. An entire generation of music managers across genres — a generation that Ritnika was an instrumental part of — saw the space evolve before their eyes.
Ritnika studied music business in the UK, with tutelage under Peter Jenner, the legendary manager of Pink Floyd. But her overseas experience didn’t strike immediately while trying to scale independent Indian music. “It was a big learning curve for me because nothing was organized and managers didn’t really exist”, she says. Her first success was with renowned Indian electronic act Jalebee Cartel, who have since disbanded. She was instrumental in pushing their sound onto European markets, and supported their first international tour, where they performed at the legendary Berlin techno club Tresor.
Scaling electronic-first, or really any kind of alternative musicians in India was a massive challenge, particularly in the pre-streaming age. Ritnika recalls how challenging it was to introduce India to any notion of dubstep even in the prime of the Americanization of the genre led by Skrillex. Jalebee Cartel and MIDIval Punditz were the first acts from India to make a breakthrough electronic-first artists.
Festivals were far harder to pull off as well. Ritnika recalls the first edition of the Eastwind Music Festival in 2008, which was the first of its kind to host over 60 different musical groups to primarily play their original compositions. It was a welcome alternative to the pub scene, where these groups mostly did covers of contemporary popular music. But it wasn’t all rosy – the promoter nearly went bankrupt as the main sponsor had pulled out. “Many of us volunteered to work on the festival without pay, just so that it could succeed”, says Ritnika. Eastwind did not progress beyond a 2nd edition. “The first edition of Lollapalooza India had 60,000 people – this wouldn’t have happened 15 years ago, that too for non-Bollywood”, says Ritnika, showing the sheer scope of evolution in the industry.
Ritnika is a strong believer in there being no better alternative than being an independent artist. As she says, “I started my own digital distribution company just to tell artists you don’t need a label”. There are exceptions, she reluctantly concedes, but for the most part, she believes that meaningful success can be achieved independently. Critical to this success is the need for artists to understand the business themselves and work with their manager towards building a strong brand. Her belief is that the fan-artist relationship is stronger without label support, especially with streaming and social media causing a decentralizatio effect on content. But part of the hustle has to involve the artist promoting and having faith in their work.
Ayush Arora, who manages Sickflip, Prabh Deep and the India side of things for the great Anoushka Shankar echoed a similar experience. Ayush began his career in music as a DJ while simultaneously working his first job at Audio Aashram, a New Delhi-based indie label that dabbled primarily in alternative ambient music. The label did many things fairly new to India at the time – an online radio (in the vein of today’s BBC Radio), an online magazine, and even their own fest. They also produced the first EP of one of India’s pioneering electronic acts in Dualist Inquiry.
To an extent, he indicated that success for electronic-first artists came when they didn’t actively imitate the West. In other words, they were enjoyed in bigger numbers when they actively incorporated more Indian elements in their music. On similar lines, Nucleya’s solo act has far eclipsed the popularity enjoyed by the collective he was a part of in Bandish Projekt. He was the first desi electronic act to headline the main stage of a major Indian festival in Weekender. It was no coincidence that the change in his sound that followed the transition to his solo career was significant.
We see this also when we look at the sophomore album of one of India’s best known solo acts in Lifafa. His album Jaago (2019) is littered with disco and house influences, evoking the epic creative streak of Bappi Lahiri and Usha Uthup on one end, and Giorgio Moroder on the other. In fact, one of the tracks from the album, “Ek Nagma” has an extremely relevant comment when it comes to those influences.
It is impossible to talk about independent music in India without mentioning Bollywood. Ayush and Ritnika both framed their careers’ income at a time that was not only pre-streaming, but when the music scene in India was dominated by film music. The Bollywood industry has always had its own set of features that distinguished itself from the indie market. In the former, music is driven by the interests of production houses, and it matters how hot you are at a given time. Most significantly, though, musicians in Bollywood do not have their own artist brands. Ayush put it pretty simply:
“The 90s had Sonu Nigam, the 2000s belonged to Atif Aslam, and the 2010s were dominated by Arijit Singh — who continues to be evergreen even today. But for most other artists, their popularity only stayed for as long as their movies were popular. The lack of an artist brand for preceding generations of music dimmed the light on their non-film catalog, which was hardly as successful.”
That was an inherent characteristic of Bollywood musicians for as long as it has existed, driven by the flux of structures created by labels (such as T-Series) and producers. In the independent scene, the musician has to be the ultimate sell. There is a certain recall factor to yesteryear musicians like Prince or ABBA that was also shaped by how they presented themselves. In fact, if you were active on Instagram this year, you probably saw plenty of reels of one highly-talented Bollywood musician breaking out of that structure and making waves with her live shows across India. You saw a reel of her singing the Ben 10 theme song in Hindi. Did you know Sunidhi Chauhan sang that?
Before Spotify and Instagram, creating an artist brand from scratch was hard enough. Add to that the fact that established artists and musicians were signed to European labels, and the concept of a music manager was very new in India. Let alone 1000, building your first 10 fans was a grinding process of trial and error. Ritnika started her own company in 2007, right after returning from the UK, because she was seemingly overqualified for any role Indian agencies had for her. One of the artists she backed early on was duo Shadow & Light. “There were 3-4 people who came to every gig, shared everything they did for this small band”, she says. Their most recent work is a collaboration with Salim Merchant.
Interestingly, even though they have been performing for more than 8 years, Shadow & Light did a full-fledged US tour for their album Sabar before even hitting peak popularity in India. It reflects the idea that early indie musicians in India tried to create an export-based success in countries that would receive their genres well before attempting to replicate such success at scale in India. This is partly due to NRIs, and partly because in the West, listeners tend to be more open to listening to new and upcoming artists. Bollywood music is not necessarily a system of organic discovery, but rather a culture fed to us through the medium of its movies. Cracking independent music in India first meant cracking how people discovered new music.
This necessarily involved live music. Ayush was adamant about the fact that the best way for musicians to win is to put themselves out there on the main stage. “It’s a form of dependency to assume that someone will surely book you”, he says. Musicians should not rely solely on what Ayush calls “holy grail” venues. He recalls how Sickflip suffered in his live attractions until he started his own IP, Pineapples. Today, IPs by reputed DJs or even independent artists are far more ubiquitous than ever.
Such a viewpoint understandably arises from the historical precedence of volatility of live scenes in India, even with the emergence of numerous IPs across India today. The 2024 edition of NH7 Weekender unexpectedly got canceled due to unprecedented police intervention. Festival lineups are decided largely on Spotify playlist relevance – you could be a trend today and unimportant tomorrow. For a while – a practice that often continues to this day, promoters even expected musicians to play for free, for so-called “exposure”. Ayush and Ritnika represent a generation of managers who have gone through those challenges for their artists.
Live Hardcore
Successful music careers are defined by having massive scale. Being a musician usually embodies the mantra: go big or go home. Falling in the middle has been tough for many, with few artists breaking through. But ’going big’ is often tied into the complicated notion of “selling out”. The returns to such risks are outsized for a few lucky ones.
For independent artists, the questions of scale can be existential. On one hand, the artists’ creative freedom is reflective of non-conformity with trends and the pressure to chase virality, on the other hand, this privilege is often capped by an invisible ceiling defined by funds and reach. You can’t expand your fanbase if you don’t have money, and you can’t earn money if you don’t have a fanbase.
We interviewed indie singer-songwriter Raghav Meattle, best known for his hits “City Life” and “Woh Saat Din”. Raghav also runs an agency called first.wav, which positions itself as an incubator for upcoming musicians. “Most independent managers have not seen scale”, he says. To him, scale is the most important driver in the music business. He attributes this partly to a lack of education around the music business and publishing on the part of the manager. The semblance of a thriving ecosystem that churns out success repeatedly is yet to be realized. Raghav echoes Ritnika when he says that the still largely-fragmented nature of the industry in India is due to the lack of professionalization of the music manager. Importantly, Raghav’s beliefs about the formalization of the industry are shaped by his experiences working for larger corporate firms.
All of the managers we spoke to understand these realities all too well. “Audiences don’t get that this indie shit is so difficult”, Mithran laments. On top of that, managers have to figure out the sweet spots that lie between authenticity and chasing money. This means that some moral quandaries are sometimes tested. “If you’re working with a brand whose copywriter wrote the lyrics and just wants Prabh Deep to sing it, I will refuse. The brand should just give keywords but not involve themselves with writing the lyrics. I’ve never tried to convince him just because they’re offering tons of money”, says Ayush. Saqlen is also all too familiar with skirting around this line – one of the most famous memes in the desi hip-hop scene has Dhanji hurling the funniest abuses at the popular rap talent show, MTV Hustle, who had invited him to be a participant.
Despite the connotations of ‘selling out’ that labels bring with them, deals are not necessarily off the table for independent managers - simply because of how hard it is to achieve scale. “I’ll take a deal for Kinari if the price is right. I don’t want her to just be another spot on a larger roster”, Mithran is clear about the conditions under which he would accept a deal. Manvendra told us that labels are like trampolines, and being attached to a label helps bring a larger audience to your music. Even the contrarian in Saqlen shares similar thoughts, despite Dhanji’s roaring success. And while ownership around one’s masters has become a big discussion today, it is never a straightforward solution. As Ayush put it to us bluntly, “What will you do owning a master as a young indie musician if you are unable to promote it effectively? Owning masters makes sense when you have a substantial fanbase.”
But a few things have structurally changed about music over time, partly due to how the internet has shaped its production and consumption. One is the possibility that mass production no longer needs to be the chief paradigm of making music. It is possible to forge success through the creation of substantial niches. It’s about quality and not quantity. An artist’s corner of fans may be small, but if they are extremely loyal, they become the artist’s brand ambassadors. To evoke Ritnika’s question of “what is success in music anyway”, its definition has become quite flexible today. That’s also propelled by the rise of artist brands. Most importantly, none of these things are the effective monopoly of large labels.
“The only way an artist gets to 20K streams a day is by building an artist brand”, says Raghav. First.wav has supported indie artists scale their careers through socials - most notably they have worked with Gini, Divyam Sodhi and Sammad Khan, who have achieved successful niches on Instagram. Raghav’s thesis is that it took artist brands a long time to pick up because the business model of the industry was earlier contingent on the songs rather than the artist. “The idea is to milk those 3-4 popular songs because the artist won’t necessarily stay with you for a long time”, he says. This is also the reason why labels may fundamentally have little incentive to build artist brands. Or why labels prefer singles to albums, as Manvendra says.
Prabh Deep is an example of an artist who evokes a certain aura with his name. His commitment to experimentation within the boundaries of hip-hop (and forging new borders as a result) is clear with each full-length release. Prabh Deep is one of one — he’s an artist who defines the genre, and throughout each of his projects has remained committed to the idea of a creative authenticity — something that feels entirely genuine to who he is and how he is evolving as an artist. When he released Trap Praa, an album fairly different to what he had produced before — he received critical acclaim for his novelty because as Ayush puts it, “he had built credibility for his artistry. His scalability was a natural extension of the same”.
In an age of social media marketing, managers find themselves tackling a common misconception: the conflation of scale with virality. Virality can be an infectious, intimidating, and often unhealthy chase. Algorithms favoring a certain structure to content has caused a shift in the way music videos or shots, or even how hooks are written. But “in 6 months, virality always reverts to the mean”, says Manvendra. He believes that catalog artists are likely to have a stronger recall. Artists chasing virality are likely to only have stretches of their 15 minutes of fame. It is also difficult, and – in the long term – counter-productive to devise a formula that creates an ideal hook. “The magic only comes from innovating a hook. We’re not looking for familiar hooks, but great hooks”, says Raghav of his agency.
These are also indications of the possibility that despite having their own robust indie wings, big labels are prone to falling behind the innovation curve. “A&Rs keep forgetting the rules of business because they’re so prone to ideas of short-term success”, says Saqlen. All managers agree to an extent that labels are helpful for capital-intensive, risky projects – such as massive album rollouts that also involve music videos. But label deals are useful as long as they solve a problem. They’re as likely to fall victim to drawing out a planned playbook or a formula towards success. “You can’t scheme and plot virality”, says Manvendra.
One of the most important factors that determines the strength of an artist brand is their live music performance. For indie artists, it can often boil down to a chicken-egg problem - more streams get you bigger gigs and vice versa. But there is also a larger structural issue that is linked to negotiation with bars and venues. “The job of a restaurant is to be a restaurant. If you as an artist don’t double their income that night, they won’t call you back”, Ritnika is brutally honest about this barrier.
However, this differs across genres – electronic gigs are cheaper, and people are more likely to spend on food and drinks at such gigs. Venues are tougher to crack when your musician does rap. Often in these cases, the venue exacts a cover charge, which is more often than not passed onto the consumer – an automatic turn off for most. The over-reliance on a select few venues for alternative music gigs, especially without an ecosystem directly connecting venues with sources of music, also makes negotiations with these spaces more challenging.
But a chicken-egg problem neither necessitates that the issue has no solution, nor that it has only one answer. “Gini is going on a 12-city tour today, but that can’t happen without the records working. Live music is demand-based”, says Raghav. However, for Kinari and Dhanji, whose roots are underground, live music was an early obsession, viewed as something that needed disrupting in a sea of lukewarm hip-hop gigs in Delhi and elsewhere. Their cults were enlarged by filling the need for a killer live experience like none that has happened before. Small-scale live music doesn’t just have to be the goal. It can well play the role of being a stepping stone. On the other end, “opening for a bigger artist on a bigger stage is not necessarily always a scalable move”, says Ayush. It matters that the opener and headliner complement each other. It also matters that they see eye-to-eye on more moral and political things. Hanumankind’s showcase for Narendra Modi’s US entourage after the success of Big Dawgs was such an example, especially after some explicitly political lines in his earlier tracks.
The perception of scale also changes across genres. “Peter Cat Recording Co are big, but they aren’t Anuv Jain. They don’t even have to be. They’ve simply doubled down on their niche”, Ayush points out. Their success has not come from bucking popular trends, but rather crafting their own. It’s evident in all the Instagram stories people upload of happy nostalgic moments in their lives with a track like “Floated By”. Or taking photos of themselves in black-and-white and likening it to a PCRC album cover. In August of last year, PCRC embarked on their first highly-anticipated world tour, while still being nowhere as popular as Anuv Jain. PCRC are also extremely well-known for being excellent live performers.
Realising one’s greatest ambitions as a musician is a function of scale. “Both DRV and Boyblanck want to compose for Bollywood for sure”, says Manvendra. Both Kinari and Dhanji have completed their first India tours as of 2024, which has also coincided with a semblance of mainstream representation for them. Hanumankind has released a remix of Big Dawgs with the one and only A$AP Rocky. This generation of artists and managers understands that artistry, commodification and scale represent a trilemma that can sometimes be difficult to manage. But being successful and being true to yourself as a musician requires that balancing act that recognises the importance of all three, both absolutely and in relation to each other.
Have you seen Ratatouille?
It’s only one of the greatest animated movies ever made. It’s about Remy, a rat who has no business being in a human kitchen for obvious reasons. But his love for food is so powerful that he’s willing to risk ingesting rat poison or even falling into a rat-trap to experiment with dishes. His lack of formal training in the ways of the haughty French chefs did not stop him from changing the game. His devotion to the culture, irrespective of where he came from, was unmatched.
We’re not saying that to be an indie manager is to be Remy. We are saying that the managers that we’ve spoken to are experimental and are redefining what it means to build a music career in today’s landscape. Innovation, taking chances, and a willingness to break the mold are key to the indie manager’s journey. These managers are proving that there’s no single formula for success. Much like Remy, they aren’t bound by tradition—they learn by doing, adapt quickly, and trust their instincts.
They are both a cause and an effect of the transformation of the Indian live music scene and are actively shaping the future of how music is performed, experienced and consumed. They are proving that there are spaces for alternative narratives beyond the mainstream—ones that prioritize artistic integrity, niche audiences, and a redefinition of success. They’re navigating in and out of the constraints of traditional industry structures in their own ways while valuing creative freedom the most. This has allowed them to take risks, experiment with live performances, and build a new kind of music industry where artists are unique brands in their own right.
In an era where virality is often mistaken for success or scale, They highlight the long game – sustained careers aren’t built overnight. They’re focused on creating strong fan communities, ensuring that live performances aren’t just gigs but also the seeds of a deeper connection between artists and audiences.
These managers operate with one important principle: you have to love the music. Circumstances can often be unforgiving as an independent musician, which makes your emotional stake in the artist’s success all the more important. If you don’t feel for the artistry in your skin and bones, you’re not going to give it your all. This almost-delusional belief system takes managers through all kinds of ups and downs, be it a sponsor pulling out of a festival, or a venue not cutting you your hard-earned paycheck on time.
Honestly, we could have invoked any movie to make this analogy and avoid likening the protagonists of our story to a talking mouse. We chose Ratatouille because throughout this piece, one quote from the movie resonated more than anything else. It has grown truer and truer of music production in the last decade, and how dynamic it has become:
Anyone can cook.
Acknowledgments
We are so grateful to all the managers who made time to speak with us as we co-wrote this piece: In order of interviews: Saqlen Khan, Mithran Samuel, Raghav Meattle, Ayush Arora, Ritnika Nayan, and Manvendra Krishna. We’d also like to thank Kartik Sundar for helping us out with arranging these interviews. As avid music fans, witnessing and understanding the impact that these individuals have had on the scenes that we enjoy today — has been an immense privilege.
Lastly, thank you to our proofreaders who read numerous drafts of this article at various stages in the production phase, in particular Sunaina Bose.
This was Hot Chips x
/ Vibe Check and was a collaboration (plus friendship) forged over multiple food outings, plenty of calls across two timezones, and lots of procrastination and hardwork. And it may be the first of more collaborative pieces to come :)
incredible!!