ASSAM: Often have the homesick souls stranded far from their native haunts yearned for the familiar tunes of home. Well, thanks to the innovation and efforts of Mrinmoy Kumar (26), Biswajit Baruah (26) and Krishanu Kashyap (25), three friends from northern Assam’s Tezpur city, those spread far and wide and yet connected by the Assamese culture can sooth their souls with the songs of home.
The trio, deciding to archive their culture and open it to the world through technology, created a digital library of over 30,000 songs in less than four years, thanks to a mobile app “Baahi” (flute) they developed before monetising it for the local and global audience.
As they say necessity is the mother of invention, the need to develop the app was felt in the absence of an online platform to listen to exclusively Assamese songs.
Mrinmoy craved for the familiarity of native music while pursuing his degree in Odisha. It was then that he came upon the idea of developing the app.
“While I was doing my B Tech in Odisha, I would often feel like listening to Assamese songs. There was no platform to stream Assamese music, new or old. I thought I could make an effort to develop an app as exclusive platform for Assamese music. I shared the idea with my school friend Krishanu and he passed it onto his college friend Biswajit. That’s how the three of us came together,” Mrinmoy tells us.
He says after tireless efforts for about four months, they developed the app for mobile phones with IOS and android features. It was officially launched in April 2021. The trio pumped in the funds. They extensively used social media to take their app to artistes and the people of Assam.
Success, in terms of the app’s popularity and revenue for the company, did not come overnight. Initially, the trio faced the problem of content. They approached record labels (music distributors) but they did not have much faith in the trio “Anybody can download our app and listen to the songs.
It is absolutely free. But our platform becomes subscription-based when somebody wants to download our content and listen to ad-free songs. We have a paid subscriber base of around 10,000. The combined download via IOS and android so far is 3.5 lakh,” Biswajit says.
“We have over 30,000 songs on our platform. The artistes include Sonu Nigam, Kumar Sanu, Zubeen Garg, Angaraag Mahanta (Papon) and many others of yesteryears and present generation. Initially, we had only Assamese songs. Then, we kept adding the songs of Bodo, Mishing, Karbi, Tiwa tribal communities,” he adds.
Adding the lesser-known and less-talked-about songs and music of rest of the Northeast to Baahi is their next goal. “We now want to explore the Northeast. There are many indigenous tribal communities with rich cultures but not many people know their languages or music. We want to stream their songs on our platform,” Mrinmoy says.