Indie 100 India 2016

The music industry is undergoing the most radical changes it has faced in almost a century. New digital technologies have made the production, distribution, and promotion of recorded music accessible to anyone with a personal computer. People can now make high-quality digital copies of music and distribute them globally within minutes. Even bastions of the established industries, such as EMI and Columbia, are struggling to make sense of the new industry terrain. The whole employment picture has changed just as radically for people who wish to make a living from music. In Australia, many of the avenues that provided employment for musicians have either disappeared or dramatically shrunk. The advertising industry no longer provides the level of employment it used to prior to the Federal deregulation of the industry in 1992. In many places, new legislative pressures on inner-city and suburban venues have diminished the number of performance spaces that musicians can work in. Just as quickly, new sectors have opened to professional musicians: computer games, ringtones, sound-enabled toys and web advertising all present new opportunities to the enterprising musician. The opportunity to distribute music internationally without being signed to a major label is very attractive to many aspiring and established professionals. No doubt the music industry will face many more challenges as technologies continue to change, as global communication gets easier and faster, and as the challenges to copyright proliferate and change. These challenges cannot be successfully met on a single front. They require research and expertise from all sectors being affected, and this is why the independent music project (IMP) exists. This 2nd addition to the Indie 100 series identifies an emerging independent music scene in India. New partners, Earthsync are a hub of over 900 independent Indian artists and the directors have recognised that these artists have few opportunities to engage in education or pathways to commercial activity in the creative industries. The Indian independent music scene is seen by many to be the most promising emerging market in the region (Palling, 2014). The CEO of industry partner and local peak independent music body QMusic, Joel Edmondson, believes that the fostering of reciprocal relationships with the Indian music market can open up vital new economic and cultural exchanges between India and Australia.