Striking a Chord
Three young musicians on how they’re using social media to take their first step towards success
In this age of Reels and Tiktoks, and the phenomenon of going viral overnight, there’s been a steep rise in musicians launching their careers on social media. The benefits are plenty: The creator has their own space online, with a tailormade audience; their work gets noticed and lands them production work and compositions, brand endorsements and collaborations, and online performances transition to in-person concerts.
Another bonus: Being independent of corporate music labels that often don’t allow artistes to do their own thing.
Meet Mayur Jumani, Rishab Rikhiram Sharma and Aksh Baghla, musicians and creators eager to share their experiences.
The last disciple Rishab Rikhiram Sharma The musician who focusses on mental health
Born into a family of musical instrument makers called the Rikhirams, Rishab Rikhiram Sharma, 23, is the fourth-generation of instrument makers and the only one in his family to have performed onstage.
Rishab was 10 when he picked up the sitar, his father his first teacher. He then started classes with Pandit Ravi Shankar at the age of 12.
“Guruji was 90 and told me I would be his last disciple, the only one from my generation he was teaching, and hence, I had to carry the legacy forward,” says Rishab, who rose to fame during his Sitar for Mental Health live music sessions from his bedroom at the end of 2020.
“That was the first time I was vulnerable in front of my followers,” he says.”i started doing rooms on Clubhouse and Instagram Lives to battle my own anxiety. My therapist also recommended it.”
Soon, he found his DMS flooded with messages about the calming effect his music was having on people; he also got requests for tributes to loved ones his followers had lost.
“This tightened the community, and we went from 10-15 people tuning in, to 600K, which gave me the opportunity to do a tour in India,” says Rishab. “The fact that classical music is good for your mental health is a 5,000-year-old tradition. I’m just putting it in more relevant terms for Gen-z and millennials.”
Man with a plan Aksh Baghla The musician who just released his first single
Aksh Baghla, 27, decided to showcase his musical talent by doing covers on social media so that when he worked on originals, he would already be popular enough to be able to bypass corporate music labels. Though his family in Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, wanted him to join their business, as someone who had picked up the guitar and piano in high school in Chandigarh, was in a band, and grew up listening to cover artistes on Youtube while also keeping an eye on the great number of views these videos got, Aksh managed to convince his folks to give him a year to give singing a shot.
Soon, he was uploading videos of himself performing covers, but didn’t really manage to get a lot of views. So, he gave up the idea and joined his family business. When a video of his did go viral in 2017, with nine million views, it got a surprising number of hateful comments accusing him of lip syncing. To prove a point, he posted another video of himself in which he mimicked 30 singers. This did the trick.
“To those who say I’m not really a musician, I’ll say: Check out my original composition, which released last week. On Instagram!” he says proudly.
After all, who needs labels when you’ve already built a 505K-strong audience on a platform of your choice?
Short, snappy & catchy Mayur Jumani The king of mash-ups
Mayur Jumani, 30, a composer whose original music has already made it to Bollywood, had been gigging while pursuing a corporate job, but had never seen it as a career. Till 2016, when his acceptance letter from the Berklee College of Music arrived.
Most social media users know Mayur as the man who created extremely entertaining content during the bleak initial months of the pandemic. “I took an Arnab Goswami dialogue and mixed it with a beat. I thought it would make my then less than 2K followers smile. The next day, it was everywhere.”
This was supposed to be a lockdown project. “But the response I got was so overwhelming that I had to continue. The pandemic pushed me to experiment. In my right mind, I would not have done this. I always considered myself to be doing more serious music,” laughs Mayur.
It took about five videos to go viral before he started getting requests for music production gigs in 2020. “Social media helped me get more involved in the composition space. I had brands coming to me to make 30-second pieces for them,” adds Mayur, whose first big gig was a number for the IPL.
Mayur has now taken up content creation, and the music production and composition work that’s come his way via that, full time.
“Even ‘bigger names’ are sitting in their dressing rooms and thinking about the 30-second part from their song that can be used in a ‘viral’ video” MAYUR JUMANI, musician