Starting off this month, with
Shillong, Only Much Louder’s NH7
weekender in its seventh edition, is coming back with a bang!
Since 2010 when the festival started , over 100 artists across diverse music genres have played at the Weekender each year.
Business Insider caught up with the buzzing CEO of Only Much Louder,
Vijay Nair to find out why weekender is India’s only platform for
independent music performances. ‘ When we started
OML, it was all about supporting and managing artists. I think the reason we got so huge has been just Word of mouth. We started with Pune and we have quickly been adding multiple cities since the first Weekender. We have organised 17 NH7 weekenders so far and we don’t intend on stopping anytime soon.’
Nair thinks that India has so much undiscovered talent that is waiting to be unearthed,’ Our artist lineups are a big mix, from someone like AR
Rahman whom people had never seen live to fresh new faces who are playing their first gig at the fest, we have a great variety.’
On the lineup in each city, he says,’What works in one city might not work everywhere. We certainly keep the audience in mind before even doing one-day fests. What we have seen that most Indians are open to experimentation; they just don’t like Rock, Metal, Indie or Pop, they are willing to listen to different artists and sample everything, even though they might have their favourites.’
This year, OML disappointed Delhi by skipping the city altogether and Nair was very practical about it,’ The problem is that Delhi kids don’t want to travel; to
Dwarka or to
Greater Noida where we found suitable venues. In Central and south Delhi, we face a lot of issues with Government policies and controlled venues, so we decided to skip it and focus on our two biggest NH7s- Shillong and Pune.’
While many die-hard Delhi fans might decide to travel north-east to hear their favorite artists live, we decided to give you a glimpse into the colourful musical Mecca that is the Weekender.
Slide and cruise along.
Images credits: NH7 Weekender
