Vijay Nair is the founder of India’s biggest indie music and comedy management company Only Much Louder (OML), which is worth over $10 million. His company is behind many successful music and comedy programmes — The Dewarists, MTV Tripping, AIB Roast and Stage42 (headlined in the past by the likes of Russell Peters).
Nair has brought a revolution in the live entertainment scene in India. Bacardi NH7 Weekender, organised by OML, is an annual multi-city music festival that has become one of the most popular and successful festivals. The first edition of the festival was organised in 2010. The festival, held between October and December, currently travels to five cities; Pune, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Shillong and sees an annual attendance of over 1,00,00,000 fans across the editions.
Nair has played an important role in making the independent music scene in India prominently visible.
Nair’s career started at the age of 15, when he worked closely with India’s youth-targeting ventures such as Procter & Gamble’s web portal Masti.com, and the only bustling indie music webzine in the country back then, Gigpad.com. While the nature of jobs changed, music was always at the centre of them all, which then led him to drop out of college at the age of 18 to start managing leading Indian indie bands, including Pentagram, Zero, Pin Drop Violence, and others. This move led to the beginning of OML — India’s first artist management firm for Indian indie bands — in 2002.
Today, OML Entertainment comprises live events in music, comedy and alternative culture, digital and TV content, artist management across a diverse spectrum of the arts — music, comedy, storytelling, and much more. Apart from this, OML also runs its own ticketing and technology platform, Insider.in, a curated lifestyle platform that gives access to a handpicked selection of events.
For Nair, booking headliners and acts is an art. He says there’s not much entrepreneurship happening in the creative industry and adds that at OML, there is definite interest and motive in discovering new bands and putting them out there. Excerpts from an interview:
PUNEET SAMTANI: Where and how did your journey begin?
VIJAY NAIR: About 16 years ago, I started with managing bands while I was working with some other companies that were organising concerts in Mumbai. My first major focus was on managing bands. I was working with them. A big part of the business was booking them for concerts. While doing so, I’d always see how to do these concerts better. I was obsessed with finding out what it was like to do a big event.
The love of concerts really started when I was booking bands. Before that, I hadn’t gone to many concerts. Since then, it has been focused around taking Indian bands all over the country to bringing international bands to India. One of the major reasons behind the scale of concerts we do is that I looked at huge music festivals abroad, especially Europe. It was very inspiring.
I have no background in music. Forget indie music, I was not much into music in general. I didn’t grow up listening to music as a big part of my life. I started listening to bands when I was 15 or 16. Before international bands, I started listening to Indian bands. That’s how I got into it more seriously. For me, my journey has been about building a business and the love of doing that as opposed to just the love of music itself because music came in after I started the company. I wasn’t a major music connoisseur before that. I was a fan first in terms of what I was doing and I just wanted to work and get something done.
PUNEET SAMTANI: Were there people around you looked up to as your role models?
VIJAY NAIR: Not at all, actually. I didn’t know anything about the industry. I didn’t know music, I didn’t know the music business, I didn’t know who to look up to. So, I didn’t have any role model when I started out. I just met some really good people like Vishal Dadlani. He was one of the first people I started working with. He’s been very influential in many of the things that I’ve done. He’s the first person you can call in if you have a bizarre idea: he’d fund it or help you get fund for it. Early on, some artists and musicians I worked with were very helpful. One person who definitely helped me a lot in my early days was Subir Malik, who used to manage Parikrama. He is an exceptional human being and I really looked up to him. He definitely influenced me at that point of time. It was good to have him as a partner and a friend. Before my music business, there was someone who was close to being my mentor. He was Anurag Srivastav, who is now also an investor at Only Much Louder (OML). He’s always been there to give advice. Even Ajay Nair, my elder brother, who’s now a business partner, was somebody who has been instrumental in the decisions I took and the directions I followed.
PUNEET SAMTANI: Was it your passion to promote independent rock music from India that made you drop out of college?
VIJAY NAIR: I didn’t really have the passion for rock music as such and I hadn’t listened to it till I started managing bands. When I started managing bands, people in those bands used to lend me music and I started listening to it more and more, but I wouldn’t say that the passion to promote music made me drop out of college. I just wanted to do something of my own and felt this was the thing to do. That’s the only reason I dropped out and started working on my project. So, it was a passion for doing my own thing and being independent.
When I dropped out of college, my plan was to do this for a year and then come back and finish my degree. I didn’t think this was my career choice. It just happened and I went along, but once it took off, there was no going back. It was very hard to go back to college and finish a degree. It just didn’t make any sense to do that. So, my decision to drop out of college wasn’t a planned move. It was only after 4 or 5 years that I realised that this can be a legitimate business, something I could really do. I didn’t really see it happening as soon as I dropped out. My family wasn’t against my choice; they let me be and let me do this because I was working and not wasting my time. That definitely helped to keep it going. When I started, it was just me. There were no collaborators till about 2007. I had a couple of people working with me on and off. But around 2006-2007, it started growing digitally. It was then that I started getting more people and building it from there, but until then, it was largely just me.
PUNEET SAMTANI: How did the idea of Bacardi NH7 Weekender germinate? How challenging was it and how did it finally take shape?
VIJAY NAIR: The idea of NH7 Weekender started much before the name, NH7, came to us. In 2006, I went to Glastonbury Festival in Europe. It showcased what a music festival is really like and it was very inspiring. I had never seen a festival of that scale and I was obsessed since then to do a festival like that in India. It brewed in my head for a couple of years. In 2008-9, I started making the effort to put it together. It was only in 2010 that we could organise the first edition of the NH7 Weekender.
By then, I had worked with bands across the country, across genres. So, the key was to put to use my network and the experience that I had gained over 8 or 9 years to mount a large music festival. Without having worked with those artists for 8-9 years and without having seen the festivals abroad, I don’t think it would have really happened. Two people who were instrumental in giving shape to NH7 Weekender were our co-founders, Stephen Budd and Martin Elbourne, best-known for booking the Glastonbury Festival. Stephen and Martin used to manage a bunch of bands in the UK. They helped put together the artistes for the first time.
There is a story behind the name, NH7. We had a website even before the festival happened and we were looking for a name for the website. I was travelling from Pune to Mumbai, driving down the highway and watching the milestones. It was then that the name, NH7, came to me. I knew it’s something that connected south with north of India in the earlier times when it was called something else. The name struck and since the domain name was available too, we were happy to use it.
PUNEET SAMTANI: How far have we come since the first edition of NH7 in terms of gear, line-up, sponsors, audience, bands and the choice of music?
VIJAY NAIR: I think we have come very far. At the same time, it’s pretty much the same in terms of what we had intended it to be. There is the same kind of vibe and the same genres of music. In terms of line-up, there is a lot more that is going on. In the recent times, the scale has become bigger. We never thought we’d have such huge acts, like AR Rahman and Steven Wilson, coming to the festival. In terms of sponsors, they have been the same since we began. And they will probably be the same for the next few years.
Bacardi has been a partner for NH7. They have the same role in bringing it alive as OML. It’s good to have one partner who is consistent in helping to build it up. In between, there were a lot of sponsors who came in and went out. Bacardi and Red Bull are the two partners who have remained with us for a long time. In terms of scale and the number of people coming, it has grown quite significantly bigger; it’s now more complex as well. The audience has increased 30-40 times since the first edition and that is quite significant.
We go year by year and see which headliner to get. Booking headliners and acts is an art. We need to see the bunch of big acts available on the same weekend that would be willing to travel to India. Once that happens, we programme the rest of the Indian line-up. We have a team which does that so I don’t get involved with it as much on the ground. Anuj Gupta and Debayan Deb are in the programming team. It’s their job to look at the new bands throughout the year so we keep getting new music. There are many bands that send us entries. We listen to everything and pick from them. Each stage has a different sound and we have to know who will be the main headliner for each stage.
PUNEET SAMTANI: How do you go about finding new bands and providing a platform to them? Do you have your own favourites?
VIJAY NAIR: About 50-60 percent of acts every year is actually playing for the first time. We pick a lot of new acts. For example, about 60 percent acts who played at NH7 Pune played for the first time ever. We constantly look at new bands. I don’t do it from the point of view of supporting newcomers. I think that’s very patronising. We want new bands to be discovered at the festival because that adds to its vibe. There is definite interest and motive in discovering new bands and putting them out there.
The bands that I have absolutely loved are The Staves, Manganiyar Seduction, Seun Kuti, Steven Wilson and Amit Trivedi. They all are a discovery in terms of what they can play. Honestly, there are lots of bands we pick because we are their fans as well.
PUNEET SAMTANI: How has the audience evolved over the years?
VIJAY NAIR: It’s a very different audience now. There are lots of different people who come every year since it has become much bigger than what we thought it would. A majority of the audience want to discover new bands and listen to good music. So it’s easy to deal with them. We never had a troublesome audience in any part of the festival. Of course, it has even expanded to multiple cities. We started in one city. But now while Pune and Shillong have become the mainstays, you have smaller editions happening in other cities. Altogether it will go to about 10 cities. Each city brings in different audience, but Shillong and Pune are at par in terms of the enthusiasm and the sheer number of people who attend.
Other cities where it is held include Bengaluru, Delhi and Kolkata. We have done the big editions of the festival in Hyderabad and small editions in many cities — Mysore, Jaipur, Nagpur and Pondicherry — last year to give people a taste of the festival and also for us to see what kind of audiences are there.
Vijay Nair. Photo courtesy: OML
PUNEET SAMTANI: How are the challenges different today in organising musical events since the time you first started? OML has also started organising events for stand-up comedians. Does your target audience
remain the same?
VIJAY NAIR: Honestly, the regulation hasn’t changed one bit in what we are doing. It’s been the same for the last 16 years I’ve been in the business. It’s the same licence. Some cities have become a bit easier. Delhi has become a bit easier, Hyderabad is amazingly good, Shillong is an easy city to operate in. Other places, like Pune and Bengaluru, remain the same so the same challenges remain the same too. We haven’t seen many major changes for the good, except that we’ve got used to it and so it’s easier to get things done.
The reason we started doing stand-up comedy was because it’s the same audience: the audience that comes to live music festival is also the one that listens to comedy. When we saw that they are similar, it was easy for us to expand into this. Comedy has grown quite significantly in India and for us it’s good to be at the forefront.
Our target audience is from 16-year-old who goes to college to 35-40-year-old who comes for live festivals. It’s an audience which is very young at heart. But a huge part of our audience is between 22-30 years: they are the key audience across stand-up comedy and music.
PUNEET SAMTANI: You and your team are exposing the youth and the audience of this country to things new and experimental. What is the process to get the funding for gigs? How do you generate revenue?
VIJAY NAIR: The funding is completely private. We have no government funding. That doesn’t exist in India at all. So, we have two sources of revenue — sponsors and sale of tickets. It’s between consumers and sponsors that all the funding takes place. When I started, I really didn’t need much money.
It’s only when NH7 Weekender happened that we went and raised funds. We have investors in the company now, but there was no outside money for the first 9-10 years. I used to borrow money from friends as and when I needed for projects.
PUNEET SAMTANI: What’s the one aspect of your job that you do not enjoy as much? Do you think it would have been easier had you been doing this in another country?
VIJAY NAIR: The government regulation and licensing is not something that we really enjoy. It’s always unpredictable and you don’t know how it’s going to go. It would definitely have been easier if we were in some other country. In India, it’s all going to be a big challenge. Organising the event is fun. Dealing with the government is not enjoyable.
PUNEET SAMTANI: For musicians in most part of the world, the main earning comes from performances as opposed to music sales. Are there enough performance venues and opportunities in this country today that can help young musicians make a comfortable living?
VIJAY NAIR: A musician doesn’t just mean independent artistes. If you are a DJ and are among the popular ones, then you’ll make money. Musicians are making way more money than they were making before and that scale is only going to go up. Most musicians are now full-time musicians. Musicians do much more than just playing in the band — scoring for the corporate, playing sessions and scoring for films. So, if you have a wholesome career, it’s not hard to make money. If you’re just playing in a live band or some such thing, you’ll just get by.
PUNEET SAMTANI: Are there enough venues in India fit to host such big-scale events?
VIJAY NAIR: There are hardly 10 good venues in the entire country. We do not even have 2-3 percent of what we need. It’s just a miniscule number of venues where we can perform. The venue business is a real estate business, a hospitality business. It’s an expensive affair. I know people who have invested and yet it’s been difficult to make it work in India.
PUNEET SAMTANI: What is the scene for indie music in India like?
VIJAY NAIR: Across the country, one thing that’s really common is that if you go to most people and ask them what music they like listening to, the answer is “everything”. That’s what people always say and they actually mean it because most people listen to multiple genres of music. It depends on your mood and the context. That’s good because you can’t just listen to one form of music. And certain regions have certain preferences. So, the Northeast likes bands more, but there is a huge following for electronic music as well. indie music —folk music or folk rock — is something that works everywhere. That’s a constant across the country. English music taste varies in India and it’s not that big. I would say we actually have a lot of fun with local language music more than anything else.
PUNEET SAMTANI: Is there a space for similar ideas like OML?
VIJAY NAIR: There is a huge potential for hundreds of companies like OML. We’re just in Mumbai and trying to do whatever we can, but every city can have its own OML. That’s something we need and that’s something we need to grow towards. It’s something that I’m hoping will happen in the next few years. There’s tremendous scope and potential for that. There’s not much entrepreneurship happening in the creative industry.
PUNEET SAMTANI: OML is setting up a brand new team to work with creators and brands. This network will work with creators not just in India, but around the world in 14 countries, designing and executing branded content solutions for its premium clients. This team is dedicated to creator-led branded content across multiple languages and formats. Tell us something about ‘The Coalition’? How do you see its progress in India?
VIJAY NAIR: We have an event called Coalition which really focuses toward that. The idea is to help more and more entrepreneurs get better at what they do. So, that’s where it really comes from. I see it changing every year. We see more people getting into it and in a period of time that will completely fix itself. The regulation by the government is a huge hurdle and a lot of people are not able to put together events because of that.
In Coalition, we work with comedians and YouTube creators, etc. We work a lot with brands. We help do brand placements or content marketing, using the talent that we have. We’ve been very successful in doing that in India. We want to see how we can do the same with influencers in other countries. We’ve set the format. We’ve set the way it should be done. We are working with a couple of clients and just trying to see if we can slowly expand it into other countries and start working with creators and influencers there. It’s an ambitious project, but we are keeping our fingers crossed. The Coalition is a project we set up purely to encourage and drill down this fact that there is something called the creative industry and the creative sector which never comes up when you talk of start-ups or anything else in this country. That is something that needs to be fixed and we are working towards it with Coalition. We did that in Delhi for the first three years. We went to Bengaluru later this year. The idea is to give creative entrepreneurs the tools that they need to set up businesses or companies.
Coalition is fundamentally a conference which brings the smartest people to share the knowledge that they have. It’s one place where you can go if you need to be inspired to start a business. There are people coming and training you and teaching you how to deal with different situations. There are workshops, panels and speeches to help people.
Vijay Nair. Photo courtesy: OML
PUNEET SAMTANI: Do you think crowd-funding has helped indie music festivals in India grow?
VIJAY NAIR: Crowd-funding hasn’t helped dramatically. There’s definitely potential, but there are a handful of projects and a handful of websites that can really help do that. It definitely is one of the ways to collect funds, but it’d be wrong to say that it has made significant change in India so far. It’s something that’s still fairly new and not every artist can do that successfully unless they have huge following. To start independent music, one has to just start playing and you start making money. That’s the way to do it. One doesn’t need an investor or a backer. That’s not just in India, but anywhere in the world. You just got to go get better put your stuff online, start building a following and grow from there.
PUNEET SAMTANI: India’s indie music scene has moved away from covers to originals. Online platforms —YouTube, Bandcamp and iTunes, etc — allow artistes to distribute their music at almost no cost. This has helped in the resurgence of indie music. What are some of the ways to bring a change? When it comes to distribution and turnover, do you think they are contributing to a grey area?
VIJAY NAIR: A platform like this hasn’t helped in terms of revenue. It doesn’t end up bringing you much money, but what it does is that it takes your music to a huge number of people and fans. And that results in money at some point of time in one way or another because more fans mean more live shows and it just grows. Therefore, it’s important to have those platforms. But, otherwise, if you are looking at it from the money point of view, it’s fairly meaningless. So, it’s good to have these platforms. It means that you’ll cut out the labels and everything else and can go to your fans. If your music is original and something good, people will listen to it and they’ll share it with their friends. They are not really contributing to any turnover, but it is free marketing. Even if your fans are pirating your music, for independent music, it’s a good thing because it just means more fans. More fans will always convert into more revenue at some point of time. Putting it on social media is amplifying the presence, but one cannot monetise it.
PUNEET SAMTANI: How organised is the Indian music industry today?
VIJAY NAIR: Indian music industry is fairly organised. It doesn’t have enough players. People know what they are doing. On the label, distribution or promotion sides, enough people are involved, but it does not have enough players as it’s not decentralised. Most of it is centered around big cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru. It needs to go across to other cities as well. Moreover, there are not enough companies and the scene is monopolised by a few.
PUNEET SAMTANI: What is the market share of indie music like?
VIJAY NAIR: The market share of indie music is really small. It’s 20 times more than what it was before. But it is still 1% or may be 10%, that’s about it.
PUNEET SAMTANI: Do you see taking your music festivals overseas?
VIJAY NAIR: At this point of time, I’m not thinking of taking the festivals overseas because most of the overseas markets have their own music festivals. There is no need for us to go and create something new over there at all. But may be at some point of time it will happen. We haven’t gone to 200 cities in this country. That’s what I’d like to cover first.
PUNEET SAMTANI: There has been a proliferation of music festivals across the country. However, not all of them are making profit. What are the key areas to consider when it comes to hosting a successful music festival?
VIJAY NAIR: There are about 40-50 festivals that have come up since NH7 Weekender. The festival model works in such a way that you are lucky if you break even in the third year. You always lose money in the first couple of years, then you break even and then you start making profit bit by bit. But it’s extremely, extremely hard to start making profits. The way to do it is to build it up. People sometimes try to rush and hurry and spend way too much money doing completely unnecessary stuff. There is an established model on how to do music festivals. People just need to stick to the plan as supposed to trying to be super ambitious with a lot of stuff.
PUNEET SAMTANI: What do you see yourself doing more and more from this point?
VIJAY NAIR: We have scaled up over the years. At first, we were just a talent management company. Then, we started producing concerts. Then, we started doing festivals. Then, we started a ticketing company. Then, we started managing comedians. Then, we started doing content. Now, we’re making shows for platforms and television networks. So, we’ve always kept doing new and new things. That will continue. We wait and see what’s coming up and what is on the cusp of things and then we really expand keeping that in mind. That’s the way we go. I don’t know what OML is going to do 2-3 years from now, but the idea is to really keep pushing it and being at the edge of things and seeing how that really works. Art is an instinct-driven thing. All the decisions are based on gut. There is no market research or data analysis required.
PUNEET SAMTANI: What would your advice be to a young Vijay Nair starting out today? Your list of do’s and don’ts?
VIJAY NAIR: If I have to advise my younger self, so to speak, I think I wouldn’t change anything much and stick to the way it actually happened. It took me a lot of time, but that period of time also gave me the experience to do things right. But, yes, one has to be a bit less cynical because when you work in this country and try to do things, it’s very easy to get cynical, but you have to keep pulling through it. And, in hindsight, I’d advise myself not to get into trouble as, in the past, we got into some. I would have done a lot of things much sooner in terms of spreading our business to multiple cities — as supposed to just being obsessed with Mumbai and Delhi. I think that’s one of the mistakes we made. We are trying to expand into other territories. That is something I would tell myself to do and, most importantly, travel more and travel often. I think all the good ideas that have ever come to me or all the good businesses that I’ve ever been involved in have actually come from travelling and meeting new people and going and seeing the world. I think that is the most important thing. And I wish I had done that more and more often.
PUNEET SAMTANI: Which are your favourite indie music bands?
VIJAY NAIR: There are loads. Zero, Pentagram and PDB are some of the bands I managed, but I was also a huge fan of them. I constantly listen to Indian Ocean, Papon, Raghu Dixit, Nucleya, Ankur Tiwari, Dualist Inquiry and Prateek Kuhad. These are the bands that have really influenced me.
