KOCHI: It has already been hailed as the most trusted and comprehensive database on Malayalam music and movies. Undoubtedly, the website www.malayalasangeetham.info (MSI) can surprise you with the information it has on Malayalam film music/movies.
A collaborative venture of a handful of people spread across the world, it is the brain child of Ajay Menon, who is based in Denver, Colorado. Today it gets about five million hits every month from nearly 3 lakh unique users. “We want to make it the most comprehensive music and movie database ever created for any language in the world. I envision a day when music information is at the fingertips of anybody who wants it and all matters pertaining to Malayalam music information is synonymous with MSI,” Ajay says in a mail from Denver.
While 55 percent of the usage is from India, MSI has users from more than 150 countries around the world. 14 percent of the users are from the UAE, 12 percent from the USA, and 2-5 percent from the rest of the gulf countries such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain. The rest belong to UK and Australia.
This ‘not-for-profit-collaborative effort’ contains information on all the songs created for Malayalam movies from 1936 till date. It has a sister project, the Malayalam Movie Database or Mmdb, which has comprehensive information on all Malayalam movies made from 1928 onwards. Though conceptualised in late 2001, MMdb was first launched in late 2003 and MSI in April 2006.
MSI has Rajagopal, based in Bahrain, as the main advisor and the second-in-command. “The work of the contributors and administrators on a day-to-day basis ensures that on any given day the data integrity of MSI and MMdb is better than in the previous day,” Ajay says. It has two more advisors, Ravi Menon (Thiruvananthapuram), music writer and columnist and B Vijayakumar (Kochi), a music researcher and writer. Priyesh is the main artistic designer of the site.
The website gives the full list of contributors, with a brief profile of each and the number is definitely on the rise. “We were confident that music lovers can provide 95 percent of critical information required for building a database like this. The other 5 percent comes from aficionados and researchers. Vetting the data was a crucial and critical task, which is still ongoing,” Ajay said. He makes it clear that whatever you get on MSI and Mmdb is completely legal. “Instead of providing downloads or creating illegal content, we give information and teasers of the songs. This helps the artists and producers,” he said.
There is a plethora of features that let you search for a specific song in MSI. One can search for a song by decade, year, raga, singer and so on. Clicking on any of the links on the page gives you all the information regarding all the songs in the database for a specific criteria. Changing trends are reflected in MSI which has information about over 18,000 songs, including songs from unreleased and dubbed movies.
Since there is quite a lot of information about each song, there is a page dedicated to each. A typical song page will have artist pictures, lyrics, audio and video clips, a cross reference to the Youtube video if available, Karaoke track if available, lyrics in both Unicode as well as English characters and links to the artists’ profiles.
The concept is similar in MMdb. The categorisation is based on musicians, lyricists and movie directors. A typical movie page will have an incredible amount of information regarding all the movies ever created in Malayalam, rare ‘pattupusthakams’, movie posters, song-related information as well as actor profiles.
MSI Media is an independent non-profit record label under MSI, which came out with its first album ‘Hridayamuralika’ in 2009. It had lyrics by Sreedevi Pillai, another contributor of MSI.
“I have always loved music. MSI is essentially a way for me to connect to our culture. Over the years, I have found that this is precisely the reason why other non resident Malayalis come to MSI,” Ajay says. “MSI was and is my hobby. But for the past several years it has been taking up more than a handful of hours every day, which is hard on my wife Anitha and daughter Annika. Without their support in helping me balance everything MSI wouldn’t be a reality.”
athira@expressbuzz.com