30 days, 30 musicians, 1 platform

In a first in South India, 30 musicians have come together to go live on Facebook for 30 consecutive days. The event, conceived by Silver Tree Talent Management and their digital partners Oodagaa, started on June 21 with singer Sathya Prakash as part of the celebration for World Music Day. 

Venkatesh Balaji V, who heads the digital marketing company Oodagaa, says this is their second association with Facebook after the Tamil Nadu Badminton Super League. “The original idea was less ambitious. We only thought of getting seven artists on board to take turns playing live for four weeks. But when Silver Tree pitched it to their talents, so many of them signed up that we found we could change it to 30 artistes for 30 days. Now, we might end up doing one or two live streams from the offices of Facebook itself. Such an event has never happened in South India before.”

Uthra, senior artist manager at Silver Tree, adds, “We manage talents like Sean Roldan, Saindhavi, Rahul Nambiar, etc, and when we first pitched this idea to them they were so excited.  Instagram has this vertical video issue, while not everyone will be subscribed to YouTube channels. There’s also the question of having the option to interact with their audience. So, Facebook is overall the best platform given these constraints, and when Oodagaa pitched it we liked it too. Sean absolutely loved the session because not only did he get song requests but also technical questions. It was as much a knowledge sharing session as it was a musical one. Srinivas sir, on the other hand, got a lot of ghazal requests which normally doesn’t happen with a Tamil audience.”

(The month-long exclusive Facebook Live series titled Evening Grooves happens every evening at 6.30pm.)