Bollywood News

Indipop had been given a quiet burial, here’s some news—the genre has suddenly surfaced again. Seven nonfilm albums were recently released in the span of 10 days, by artistes ranging from the happening Asha Bhosle and Sukhvinder to ghosts from the past like Baba Sehgal, Anaida and Mehnaz. Another five albums are in the pipeline, including Ustad Sultan Khan’s sur sangam with Shreya Ghosal and Sunidhi Chauhan, aptly titled Ustad And Divas.
The question is: Why? As everyone knows, Indipop, or most nonfilm albums for that matter, are losers in a country where film music holds tremendous sway. Why, then, the renewed rush?
Shamir Tandon, composer of Asha Bhosle’s new album, Asha And Friends, while admitting that pop music does not sell, claims that his new venture was born out of his “convictions’’. “I want to create a market for something other than film music,’’ says the bespectacled composer who did the music for Madhur Bhandarkar’s Corporate. “I want to change the status of singers, who go unnoticed while lip-syncing actors hog the limelight. In the West, pop singers have cult status, and it’s time India gave a similar standing to some of its leading talent.’’
Asha And Friends has people like Brett Lee, Urmila Matondkar and Sanjay Dutt accompanying the songstress (who mystifyingly remarks that Dutt’s “is the one voice after Kishore Kumar’s that has an absolutely distinct base quality to it’’). The diva is confident of her album selling very well, an optimism perhaps born out of the knowledge that an earlier album, Jaanam Samjha Karo, was a craze. “But two of her later albums didn’t set the market on fire,’’ says a music industry source.
But here’s a little secret of the pop industry: it doesn’t really matter whether you notch up sales or not since pop albums are more about business strategies than music. As Kulmeet Makkar, CEO of Saregama India Ltd explains, it makes good business sense for a company to back private albums because in 90 per cent of the cases the companies that own the album also manage the careers of the pop artistes. “The investment is made to create the artiste as a brand with possibilities of different revenue streams,’’ adds Makkar. Tandon corroborates this: “When I with EMI Virgin for nine years, we collected robust revenues on the shows we did with Shaan and Shubha Mudgal