Very true. There are so many indie bands like Alms for Shanti, Thermal and a Quarter, Avial, Fossils (just the four on the top of my mind, there are so many many more) that are pure brilliance with some amazing original music. I wouldn’t mind paying a decent price (18 bucks a CD, did someone say?) for good music like this. As far as the rest of the tripe that bombay, madras and bangalore put out as filmi music… well, I’d rather save my money for those cool DKNY shoes I saw down at East Village.

1) Amit Varshneya

2) Radioactive Ray. He is also DJ for a radion station in College Station/ Bryan.

Give them a try. I know both of them in person – coincidently from same place, Roorkee.

Here’s another interesting read on how much an artist actually makes on the sale of his/her CD:

“Profit margin is also huge concern for an artist at any level, but especially for one just busting into the business. Right now, the typical contract deal for a new artist goes something like this: the artist agrees to a deal where she doesn’t even begin to see a profit unless her CD sells at least 500,000 copies. Even then, she will likely earn only about $1 per CD. And if she doesn’t sell at least 100,000 CD’s often big companies will drop her anyway.

The musician who sells artist-to-fan direct, over the Internet, can earn $7-10 a CD, and can actually make living selling far fewer CD’s. Not to mention the fact that SHE maintains control of the distribution of her art.”

I don’t know how much of what I wrote concerns artists working in India, though I will surmise that musicians the world over see the majority of the profit from their work going into the pockets of others, download or no download.

These days I don’t download at all. All the music I listen to is from online radio or pandora.com. You can almost always find online any song you want to listen to. This way I don’t have to buy a 320 gb hdd. Is what I do less ethical than buying the cd?

But otherwise… raaga.com / musicindiaonline.com , although I don’t mind occassionally trekking down to Little India (ah, the pleasures of South East Asia) to survey the contemporary filmi scene.

But as a general point, I think morality is rather overblown when it comes to copyright infringement; personally, the debate between contra-legal downloading and legal buying is that of taste (do you REALLY want to wade through all those irritating IRC/ torrent tracker sites to get your moolah?) and convenience.

i agree with jatin. a lot of underdog djs put really good remixes up on filesharing sites and i doubt they ever get marketed on cds or other legal venues. punjabi mixes are very common, however, and often times you can find them in the store. i think that dl-ing is most convenient when you want remixes of rarer songs, like marathi pop or unusual hip-hop/rap mixes (not the typical d&b, techno, or ska). hell, it took me a year to finally find the dhagala lagli kara mix i wanted and it only happened after i gave up on the desi music stores in cerritos and edison and resorted to a filesharing program!

with respect to the financial hit that the music industry takes from illegal DL-ing, musicians are more affected than record companies since the money they make is directly proportional to how much they sell. distributors, however, seem to be resilient in that sense because they have many other sources to compensate for losses. i think that musicians/legal filesharing companies should make a deal with corporations or universities (like my college does) where the company gets a corporate subscription to, say, napster and employees and students can download for free while affiliated with them (or for a heavily subsidized fee). besides, it’s all about good business and i’m sure madonna would prefer the gouda from thousands of DLs by users from a large company versus the sporadic “moral” DLs from individuals who actually pay full price for napster. cuz we all know paying $15/month for napster is just plain extra when there are hardly that many songs-worth to DL in one month.

c’mon people, music is a form of communication. as a musician myself, i believe it should be shared and made accessible to all tiers of society. throughout history, music has been what unites humanity, and there have always been ways that music has been kept from the broke people and that’s just wrong. we are the world, we are the people and we were meant to live for so much more. you down wit D-L-ing, yeah you kno’ me… now i ain’t sayin’ i’m a golddigga’, but can’t you snap ya’ fingahz, to the beat y’all without having the law on your a$$?

If you use P2P on the other hand,…

Not advocating anything, just saying there’s other ways

I hear you JOAT, and I agree they don’t have to, but I wonder how many good artists fall by the wayside just because some exec thought about how marketable the whole package was. That’s what it has boiled down to for the most part, I think. At least when I look at songs on the charts, that’s the impression I get. There are exceptions of course. In the Indian context, playback singers don’t really do anything else unless they’re involved in the composition (as in Shankar of Shankar/Ehsaan/Loy or even Rehman), but everyone knows who’s doing the hard work behind the scenes.