Nearly one-and-a-half years after the pandemic first crippled the industry, this is not the time anymore for stakeholders in the music business to count their woes. It’s time, instead, to look for solutions. It’s time to rally together and find ways of ensuring that musicians don’t feel the financial pinch of physical gigs being paused. Digital music platform OK Listen! recently did that, when they announced that artistes would get 100 per cent of the revenue from their songs being streamed for the rest of 2021. It’s an encouraging move. But there’s more that needs to be done since it is still an uphill battle, and the new order the industry finds itself in needs new mechanisms to ensure that artistes aren’t shortchanged.

One thing that studios can do, for instance, is reinvent their spaces in such a way that artistes can use them for live streams of gigs, feels singer-songwriter Ankur Tewari. “I’m really impressed with what Sherrin [Varghese] has done with his music studio, where he has put up a green screen that serves as an interesting backdrop for gigs,” Tewari says, with OK Listen! co-founder Vijay Basrur adding that when such concerts are held, the ticketing platforms for the events should disburse the money to the artistes as soon as possible so that the musicians’ cash flow doesn’t dry up. He says, “Some of these platforms also do merchandise-related stuff. So, they can tell artistes, ‘We will give you discounts if you create cool merchandise to sell along with the music.’”