MUMBAI: “A song becomes a huge hit, makes millions, but when will that money come to the artist? When will we get clean royalties,” quizzed music composer, song writer and singer, Tony Kakkar at the recently held FICCI Frames 2019. His questions grabbed eyeballs, but the artist’s query had a point.

Tony made this important question during the interesting panel, Let’s Dance to the New beat: Will India face the music! He further spoke, “If you are a big performer, who does stage shows, you definitely earn through them. But, there are times when an artist doesn’t want to perform. For example, I am a creator and I want to perform for two or three years, after which, I want to spend time with my family, give time to my mom dad.”

One Digital Entertainment COO and co-founder Gurpreet Singh supported Kakkar in his query, but also highlighted the importance of artists being aware of the eco-system today. Singh said, “While, we keep talking about royalties, I can easily say, half of the artists are not even registered with societies, who are supposed to get royalties because there is no one guiding them about how these things are to be done. This I believe is the gap area.”

 “In these times for artists, educating themselves about the entire eco-system becomes very useful. Earlier, artists could say, ‘I am a singer don’t understand all this’. But, today, having the knowledge of how things work, how revenues and royalties work, studying the entire data, predicting what is being liked as well as not liked by the consumer etc will become a critical aspect. They are not just pure artists, everyone is individually an entrepreneur, who is running their own brand and eco-system,” he further stressed on the importance of artists being aware of the entire eco-system of the music industry.

Further suggesting on what could be done to lessen the gap, Gurpreet Singh told, “There is a need for specialised agencies, independent companies to come forward, where a few people, who are probably based in Mumbai or who are fortunate enough to be connected with this set of people (who know about royalties and music eco-system’s functioning) and gain all knowledge about how things work.”

“They need to work with artists not only from Mumbai but across the entire eco-system, so that you can build brands, careers out of various artists and artists won’t have just a one song hit career,” he concluded.

Well, Tony’s query did open dialogue on some valuable advice by One Digital Entertainment COO and co-founder Gurpreet Singh. But, the question arises on the transparency of division of the profit share and if artists really get the monetary gains, they deserve?