festival while still being in a city , Pune fits the bill .
Nikhil : Pune , much like Bangalore is one of those centres where there ’ s a very large college community . The college community tend to be the ones that go forward and explore music festivals more . It was a good fit from that point of view . The proximity to Bombay was also a big point to tick mark . There ’ s a certain ease of doing business in Pune as well , which also sort of influenced our decision to move there . For the consumers , the music fans who come to Pune , the overall expense of going to a music festival is significantly lower than the markets if you had to travel to those markets . It seemed to tick the box for many many reasons , both for the festival organisers and the fans as well . Vh1 as a channel partner and as the brand that leads Vh1 Supersonic also has data that consumption of the music that we promote at the festival is pretty high in Pune as well . A win-win for everyone .
Do you have plans of bringing the festival down south like Bangalore or Chennai or any other place in the south ?
Nikhil : That is an intention , yes . We want to spread our tentacles across India . We are just waiting for the right opportunity .
Gaurav : We did start this year with Vh1 Supersonic Main Stage in Bangalore . We did another show with CamelPhat in Bangalore . We normally do smaller versions of Vh1 Supersonic and those will continue . But the entire festival moving to another city or doing a festival of this scale in another city , I think will totally depend on the opportunity in the long run .
Nikhil : There are four different versions of the Vh1 Supersonic .
The first one is of course , the main festival , the second one is called Supersonic Arena tour where we bring down one artist . In the past we ’ ve done that with Major Lazer , the Chainsmokers . There ’ s also the Supersonic Arcade , Supersonic Takeover which is an outdoor / indoor event , but the capacity tends to be 1500 to 3000 people . There ’ s the Supersonic All Nights that we do as well . The Main Stage is not really a part of Vh1 Supersonic . It ’ s separate . It ’ s in the same Live division that Gaurav heads .
Could you take us through the process of selecting the line-up ? Are there certain checkpoints that you go through ? How do you select the artists that you ’ d like to see performing ?
Nikhil : Curating a festival involves three points in my opinion .
Number one , you need to deliver to fans what they love and what they ’ ll want to come out to listen to and what they ’ ll enjoy . Number two , you need to try and make the festival future-proof , which means that you ’ ll need to identify trends that are coming up and programme them into the festival so that the transition into future trends and future genres is more or less seamless . It ’ s what we did in 2015 with techno and it is now the biggest genre of music across the world arguably across the world . It ’ s also what we did with hip-hop when we brought Macklemore into the scene in 2018 . It ’ s what we ’ ve done with CKay and Afrobeat this year . So that ’ s part of making the festival future-proof . I think Afro-beat is going to be a significant genre and a player in the music industry and the scene in India going forward . The third point is that you have gotta try and wow people with acts that they would love but they have never heard about .
So , these three elements go into programming a festival . It ’ s not just a year-on-year process , sometimes you will follow an artist for several years before you decide that the time is right to bring them into the festival . An example is the person who headlined the Vh1 Supersonic the last time around was an artist called Illenium . I had been tracking him for five years and watching his profile grow across the years and Illenium was offered to us as a support artist for Marshmello the previous year and we said no to it because I felt that the time wasn ’ t right to bring Illenium into India as yet . I knew that of we waited just a little more time , he would actually emerge as one of the headliners and that ’ s exactly what happened . It ’ s a long process , not “ hey , who ’ s hot this week , lets book them .”
There ’ s consensus involved , of course . It ’ s not just one person ’ s decision . There ’ s a team of people , boards have a meeting as well , everybody has an opinion and a point of view . Sometimes the name gets shown up that other people may not have heard of . We then get into the internet and we do some research on what this artist has been doing and what the trends have been , who the artist has performed with , what kind of a fan base they have in india , how that fan base has evolved , how have they communicated with their fan base over time , do we see fans responding to the artist if we announce that the artist line up . So , all of these discussions happens over the time before we finally decide that this is the artist that we are going to select .
Gaurav : As part of the research , we also talk to our loyal fan base with small focus groups . So , besides all the other work that goes in from social media listening to google trends to music platform trends to what ’ s new , what fits in the Vh1 Supersonic
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