Meet Nivo, the self-trained musician who’s trending in the global music scene

Nivo

His music is enjoyed in over 92 countries but Indian American musician, Nivo, feels this is just the beginning. He wants to keep dropping music, and focus on the cities that he spends several months in every year like New York, London, Dubai, Oakland, and Goa. He wants to do live shows in these cities as soon as the global pandemic situations gets better.

"Eventually, I want to find an industry partner to help me push my music and manage me as an artiste. Whether it's with online marketing, securing collaborations, live shows or getting signed by a label, all this would definitely take my career to the next level," says Nivo.

Ask him about the kind of music that he wants to be known for, and he says Dark Pop. He feels it's like his custom genre and tagline that describes him as an artiste. It's futuristic, dark, but danceable. His goal is to create a new genre that goes beyond hip-hop. Nivo wants Dark Pop to be a new lane that he pioneers and he wishes to popularise it as a whole new sound in the music industry. "If I can ultimately be remembered for that, then I think I'll be able to call myself successful," he adds.

Nivo is predominantly into music production. He never trained formally in music and learnt everything from YouTube. He would watch YouTube videos by David Sides, where he learnt to play the keys and popular songs. He also watched several FL Studio videos about how to use the software and how to have good sound quality.

While in school, he learnt coding and then got a job. As software engineer, he worked on interesting problems and liked the creative aspects of software. As a musician, he was drawn towards it. Even now, as an independent artiste, his skills as a software engineer come in handy when he uses digital marketing and wants to develop music-related tools to get his music out there.

As per Spotify's annual artiste summary, Nivo has approximately 40,000 monthly listeners on the platform and it's growing with listeners in 92 different countries. By the end of the year, his goal is to achieve at least 1,00,000 monthly listeners and over one million plays.

Interestingly, Nivo has Indian roots. Though he has never lived in India, his parents hail from Gujarat. Perhaps that's the reason for his willingness to have musical presence in the country. He wants to work in Bollywood. He says there are a lot of Punjabi artistes who make fusion Punjabi hip-hop and he would like to work with them. Also, given a chance, he would love to associate with AR Rahman. He is also fond of musician Arjun Kanungo's work and would love to collaborate with him someday.