ibibo Yet Again Launches A Musical Initiative – Is Music The New Tool To Success?
We’ve all heard about music being the finest drug and that we should stick to it no matter what. The era of musical revolution begun right during The Great Depression, 1929 when employment was available in sections like folk and Gospel music. Lyrics of such songs included, for instance the story of an average American worker affected by the whole economic downturn. But, did you know that there was a special genre called ‘Recession Music’?
A stanza for instance –
There once was a time when everything was cheap,
But now prices nearly puts a man to sleep.
When we pay our grocery bill,
We just feel like making our will
- “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” by Blind Alfred Reed
Of course, it is one the most popular forms of Folk music in America during economic hard times, still. Whereas, currently at WATBlog we don’t think there’s any such need right now to start a unique trivia section called – ‘Did YOU Know?’
What we’re really looking at is how an online portal gets young talented musicians together and forms some serious content meant for business on the web 2.0. Recently in news, ibibo.com collaborated with Counter Culture Records to launch “The Rising Rock Stars of India” - an online platform that encourages fresh talent and emerging rock bands across India. This is not the first time ibibo is targeting the youth. Can we say that targeting the youth and introducing talent-based initiatives means only a certain kind of people are supposedly found online regularly?
WATBlog covered the launch of iHunk by ibibo in association with agency partner Elite. iHunk is an application for young men across India to showcase their talent, and create their audience and fan club in order to enter the business of modeling. To add, they also tied-up with Sony Music, one of the biggies in the musical industry, to start a singing talent search on mobile. But, Sony manages to create the buzz about music, while ibibo.com targets not just its standard internet audience but manages to leverage the mobile space as well. Registration on ibibo.com was an essential requirement for participation. So ibibo.com comes out with publicity, as the “new technology” messiah to music, and a lot of registrations on its website. So ibibo’s went ahead, tied up with Sony Music to promote Kailash Kher’s new album.
Similarly, MyBand seem to be gaining a lot of popularity with the sort of content they have encouraged on their site. After their launch, being a digital platform for Indian music bands to sell their content online. We had covered Myband before here.
Unsigned bands was always a hit when it came to promote a new online site or a video sharing channel. The reason being, these bands are confident enough to go on air and get their own record. While they have also performed at numerous local festivals and might have gained enough popularity to create a ready-made social buzz for the parent site. Hence the story lies within the above given brief about how this whole hoo-hah of talent search and youth audience works.
What I’m concerned about is that music nowadays is only created to sell a record deal and not for liberating people’s lives anymore. Can we call it a doomed planet, with ‘Sold Out’ being our emblem?
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An online portal does offer a venue for talented, underground musicians to get together and form some amazing music. But there’s value-added for fans too…especially as concerts begin to be streamed live via the Web…like the LifeLight Christian music festival (http://www.lifelight.org/). Now, people who are unable to travel can watch the music they love right from home. For more, visit http://endavomediablog.typepad.com/endavo_media_blog/2009/08/lifelight-music-festival-2009-teams-up-with-endavo-media-to-stream-live-concert-footage-online.html