Unearthing the independent music scene in India : An India-Australia collaboration

This paper reports on a collaboration between the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) (Brisbane, Australia), the KM Music Conservatory (Chennai, India), and industry partner, Earthsync (Chennai, India) since 2015. The project is informed by an existing experiential learning model and research project, the Indie100, which previously ran for seven years at QUT. Within the Indian context, the project centres around an intensive, publicly visible, music recording program held over four days. Each year, twelve independent artists/bands are selected through an application process and invited to participate in the project in Chennai. These artists work with professional producers from both Australia and India to record a compilation album. The album and artists are promoted by both QUT and KM music business students, and distributed on major streaming platforms to an international audience. Indie 100 India, brings together knowledge and experience from industry partners, professional producers, students, academics, teachers, higher education institutions and local musicians. Insights into what it means to be an independent musician in India, has been gleaned through interviews each year with project participants. Many of our participants shared a general optimism and a strong sense of dedication to the pursuit of music as a full time career, and acknowledged that the arts are becoming more widely accepted as career pathways in Indian society. It was also found that the majority of our participants learned about popular music performance and music business through engagement in their own informal communities of practice in the college years, culminating in performances at college rock competitions. Project participants stressed the importance of collaboration opportunities afforded by college festivals and projects such as the Indie100 due to the expense and scarcity of formal popular music education in India.Collaboration exposes local musicians to new practices, new audiences and new knowledge, and the high intensity environment of Indie100 gives students a real-world experience that will hopefully make them work-ready, entrepreneurial and resilient. These insights make a contribution to a very emergent field of research, and raise questions around the role that higher education institutions, and inter-cultural collaborations may play in the lives of local musicians