BACKDOORS MAN
Right now, anyone doing anything big in music in India is doing it just for the love of it
What does it take to run a music festival? To find out, we talked to Nikhil Barua, founder of Bengaluru performing arts venue The Humming Tree, which will stage a day-long concert, Backdoors, this month. The event, headlined by hip-hop star Anderson .Paak, will be held in Mumbai (February 14) and Bengaluru (February 17)
Q. How do you recover the costs for an event like this? Anyone who’s trying to do anything big in India right now is pretty much doing it for the love of the music. There are only one or two festivals here that manage to recover costs, because we just don’t have the numbers, in terms of audience size and spending power. Apart from sponsorships, the ideal situation would be to build a brand as a festival that’s strong enough [so] that people buy tickets regardless of the line-up— which is what Weekender, Magnetic Fields and Ziro have done. Our goal is to sell 3,0004,000 tickets because we’re doing this with Amnesty. If we hit those critical numbers, we turn a profit and all of that goes to Amnesty. Q. How tough is it to put together a music festival?
Not that tough, to be honest. You start talking to artistes about a year before and everything ideally should start coming together about six months in advance. There’s a clear set of licences and permissions needed. We have a fairly good set of festival-size venues in India and really good production and sound teams. The bigger challenge is getting your programming and marketing right.
Q. Why did you choose to hold Backdoors in February when there are already a number of other festivals during the month?
There was an option to do it in December when Anderson was going to be around Asia, but we felt that was going to be too close a timeline. He is playing Australia right now, so we said we could bring him right after that. For the next edition, we are definitely not doing it in February because there is too much happening around the same time. This time we had to because it revolved around his dates.