Subir Malik plays the keyboard for rock band Parikrama. What’s little known is that he also manages 40 music bands from all over India.
Subir Malik is a familiar name in the contemporary Indian music fraternity. He plays the keyboard and synthesisers for Parikrama and is one of the founding members of the popular rock band. (The uninitiated will remember that this is the same band with which actor Saif Ali Khan collaborated for a string of shows — to showcase his own guitar-playing skills — some years ago.)
But Malik is not just a musician, he’s also the manager of music bands from all over the country. “Artiste management is often a thankless job,” Malik laments. Thankfully, Malik hasn’t allowed the thanklessness to daunt him and recounts hilarious stories of how he goes into the snazziest of corporate offices dressed in casual tees (“AC/DC T-shirts, actually,” he laughs) and sporting a ponytail and handlebar moustache to strike deals for the bands he manages.
So how did he get into managing rock bands? “I always wondered why people weren’t encouraged to form bands and why music bands weren’t able to translate their passion into a viable business. That’s when I realised that I could use my expertise to help music bands and talented people,” he says.
“I wanted to create a sustainable model for bands all over the country.”
Malik first began thinking about it back in the 1990s when he was a budding musician himself. At the time, Malik was carefully balancing his love for music with the demands of his family business in Old Delhi’s Kashmiri Gate area. “I think I applied my business acumen to my love for music even then,” he smiles.
His first step was simple: to include his contact details in Delhi’s Yellow Pages. “It upset me when I looked at the Yellow Pages directory to find that all musicians were slotted in the ‘orchestra’ or the ‘jagran’ category. I remember receiving innumerable calls for jagrans,” he laughs.
Which is why, during jamming sessions with other Delhi-based musicians and bands, Malik started thinking about ‘managing’ bands and individual artistes with the hope of “giving them shows, and ensuring that they actually ‘earned’ through their music”.
But getting business for music bands wasn’t easy. He began by experimenting with Silk Route, a now-defunct Delhi-based band which had Mohit Chauhan as its lead singer. “I loved the members of the band. They were hugely talented, very dynamic and I began helping them with live shows,” explains Malik.
Today, Malik single-handedly manages close to 40 bands from all over the country, from the South to the north-east, from Delhi to Kolkata and other cities.
Malik negotiates with corporate bigwigs to get the bands live acts, besides ensuring that they get enough shows a year to sustain themselves. What’s more, in an industry plagued by piracy, Malik continues to work towards getting album deals for the bands he manages. “There is hardly a market for non-film music, but I still have to keep trying,” he says. That’s how he got one of his bands, Delhi-based Bandish, a deal with Universal for an album that’ll release later this year.
While Malik’s business model works on the premise of good music, what he offers to the market is a concept he calls ‘floating bands’.
“When you go to Subway, you have the choice of vegetables, sauces and spreads. I thought, why don’t I get the same principle in music bands?” Tripti, a unique fusion band that Malik supports, can subtract or add musicians as per demand. “People don’t realise that some instruments can often jar with each other. Sarangi and violin, for instance, don’t always merge together well, so we subtract one of the instruments for a show and trim down to suit the requirements,” he explains. In the bargain, Malik says, he often ends up ‘educating’ the people who approach them for shows.
He’ll tell them, for example, that it’s soft jazz and not vocal music that is appropriate for a wine-and-cheese event. At a recent event for Louis Vuitton, for instance, Malik advised the organisers to opt for a string quartet. For another evening, which had Vogue inviting actor Frieda Pinto, he suggested Jazz Connection, one of his bands. For Volkswagen, he organised fusion music. “I make sure that there’s something for everyone,” says Malik, explaining that from rock-and-roll and Bollywood to Indi-pop, he has bands specialising in fusion, jazz, retro, Sufi, folk, blues, pop and even classical Indian music. While seasoned bands like Bandish command between
Rs 4-5 lakh per show, start-ups managed by Malik take home not less than Rs 50,000-1.5 lakh a show.
A large number of music bands now send him recordings of their work. Many hope that he will agree to manage them, help them secure album deals and give them work in the industry. For them, Malik’s initiatives are music to the ears.
