This weekend is when the city is going to be teeming with musical talent. And no, for once it has nothing to do with the Margazhi season. City-based music label EarthSync records is all set for their three day international music conference and festival called IndieEarth XChange 2012. In their journey of promoting independent music artists from the region, EarthSync started the IndieEarth initiative last year, "We wanted musicians to collaborate over the Internet and use IndieEarth as a platform, and that really helped," says Sonya Mazumdar, CEO of EarthSync.
Harried by the process of organising an international music conference, Sonya is proud of the fact that they are hosting it in the city, "The reason that we're doing it in Chennai and not Bombay is because we believe that there are exceptionally world-class musicians in this region, who lack the infrastructure to take their music to the world," she rues. And the conference - through a series of panel discussions, lectures, film screenings and concerts - aims at doing just that, "If we can bring people together so that they can establish the infrastructure for a musician to perform, sell and produce then we'd have done our bit, really," she adds.
Discussions will include topics such as venues for live music performances, the emergence of music festivals in India, collaboration potential over social media and traditional music in international markets.
Though as the title suggests, most musicians, managers, DJs, independent filmmakers, and whoever else is coming will be 'indie' or independent, a large number of them will be from overseas. "Networking is going to be one of the best things we can achieve here," she says.
Though it was meant to be a niche conference with only 40 delegates initially, the numbers have surged to over a 100 and Sonya is on crowd-control mode, "It's been really overwhelming and that's possibly got a lot to do with the kind of people who are coming," she says, reeling off a list of popular names from the music industry.