God’s Own Bounty

Blame it on the rise of Hindutva if you will, but here is one development that has had music companies singing to the tune of their jingling cashboxes. Forget Indipop, Chhaiya Chhaiya, dance remixes and evergreen Hindi film numbers, it’s time to close your eyes and surrender your soul to the melody of bhakti.

In the combined market of 2.5 crore music cassettes and CDs worth Rs 400 crore, the category of devotional music already enjoys more than a 33 per cent share. No wonder Chander Rai, executive director of Music Today-one of the early birds in the segment-calls the trend the most exciting thing happening in the Indian music world.

Ask a salesperson at Spencer’s Musicworld, the classy RPG-HMV showroom in Delhi, and he’ll tell you that devotional music sales is matching those of film numbers and Indipop. There are the Shriram Sutras, Bhaktimala series, Gita series, Gayatri, Ganesha, sacred chants of Shiva and Krishnadhwani. Even the names of the singers are getting bigger. Bhimsen Joshi, Pandit Jasraj, Hari Prasad Chaurasia, Kishori Amonkar, Jagjit Singh and even selected Gita shlokas scored by Vanraj Bhatia.

"Devotional music is now top draw with the big boys entering a market which, until recently, was shared by small-time players," explains Rai. He believes the trend will stay, mainly because bigger players are penetrating a relatively virgin market with top-end products. "The interest is unlikely to wane in a traditional country like India," he adds.

Consider the case of Times Music which decided to focus on devotional music sometime last year. The company moved in since the big boys were yet to catch up with the small fry in the game. There was also a need for the brand to find a niche and not end up being a ‘me-too’. Plus, most of these albums focused on the singer who often interpreted the traditional, age-old content.

Explains Pramod Shanker, head, artistes & repertoire, Times Music: "I felt the need to shift the focus to the content. Artistes were doing devotional music in classical tradition, in morning and evening ragas. But we felt that if one wants to listen to classical renderings, they would turn to classical albums. A creative input of this kind can dilute the content. This analysis worked with our very first album, Gayatri."

Rendered by Rattan Mohan Sharma, Gayatri, say trade observers, was an instant hit because the mantra, embedded in Hindu consciousness, needed little introduction. Another point in its favour was that the mantra was explained in Hindi (in the cassette) and in English (in the CD) followed by a congregational chanting and an aarti (liturgy). There was little stress on music-the focus was on vedic chanting which made it highly popular abroad among foreigners and nris. Today, Gayatri has sold five lakh cassettes and Shanker is producing an average of 50,000 every month. Times Music followed this up by Sacred Chants of Shiva, also an instant success with over two lakh copies sold till date.

Even the biggest of them all is no laggard. Last year, when the RPG group, which owns HMV and has the largest repertoire of music published over nearly a century, decided to focus strongly on the devotional music segment, it hit upon a simple formula. Get more and more celebrated singers to sing devotional songs and acquire smaller companies, especially in the South, which have significant shares in mini metros. A year later, the move has helped the group hike its marketshare by 15 per cent. Projections for annual growth lie anywhere between 15 and 20 per cent over the next five years.

Remarks noted author and RPG spokesperson Moni Shankar Mukherjee: "These acquisitions were significant as they give us a headstart in such markets. Bhakti music is a bottomless market. It’s not restricted to the streets of Hardwar or the gateway to Vaishno Devi. Why us, even the bhakti series from the low-profile Ramakrishna Mission has a major market."

The devotional music market has always been there, more as a case of steady demand ignored by supply-in this case the big names. Earlier, the entire market comprised a few players like Narendra Chanchal with his Maata series and the ever-popular Beshak Mandir Masjid Toro from Raj Kapoor’s Bobby. Of course, there were bhajans in the classical/semi-classical genre. Then came the late Gulshan Kumar and his cheap and prolific T-Series cassettes-it churned out 20 religious albums a month to feed the temple belts in the North and transport operators. Kumar’s strategy was simple. He produced for niche markets using locally famous singers, keeping both production costs and volumes per album low. Still, the total number of cassettes sold was huge. A trend that continues. Every day, Super Cassettes production centre in Mumbai churns out 3 lakh cassettes, running at full capacity.

The cost edge holds the key to success. Says Nayan Chandan, HMV-RPG product manager: "The margin in devotional music is low but the high volume takes care of profits. This is aided by the tremendous print and television publicity blitz." Explains Mukherjee: "A devotional album would cost us Rs 3-5 lakh to produce whereas an Indipop album takes Rs 30-40 lakh." And since these cassettes have a long shelf life, the operating costs are virtually nil in the long run. "Our new album, Ganesh, is just a month old and has already sold one lakh copies. We’ll now have an Upanishad rendered by Pandit Jasraj in April. Compare this with Indipop albums which last for less than two months. The only two to ever do any reasonable business have been Alisha’s Made in India and Baba Sehgal’s Thanda Thanda Paani," he adds.

At the other end are companies like Music Today whose repertoire boasts of a veritable who’s who of Indian music taking part in well-planned series throughout the year. Rai talks of how they took two classical musicians, Pandit Chaurasia and Pandit Jasraj, inside the sanctum sanctorum of Mahadev Kandarya temples for the Khajuraho series (which blends the modernism of keyboards and other accompaniments, flown in from Mumbai, with the tradition of Sanskrit shlokas recited in a classy ambience).

But has such music broken the audience barrier yet or is it still restricted to the 35-65 age group? Both, claim experts, because of a triple effect. First, bhakti music cassettes are cheaper than those of film songs and Indipop. Second, there’s a subtle presence of religion in two-thirds of films from Bollywood and south India (either an aarti or a bhajan-remember Raghupati Raghav sung by hippies in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai?) Third, religion is a major hit on the Net with as many as 75 portals run by Indians (some of them even enable the surfer to offer pujas) Says Mukherjee: "The audience is universal. I recently went to an Arya Samaj ‘paath’ where at least 100 young boys and girls recited it from memory for over an hour."

Observers say unlike in the other music markets, bhakti songs are selected on the basis of personal experience and gut feeling. To keep the market alive, the companies need to do a constant, thematic production.

Perhaps the only strain of tension in this booming market is the unbridled growth of duplicators who corner a vast chunk of the rural market where awareness and brand knowledge are poor but which still accounts for 40 per cent of the total cassette sales. The duplicators are prompt-they come out with their ware within a few days of the big boys. But, says Rai, "there’s a growing sense and interest among listeners to pick up branded cassettes and the days are numbered for these operators. They will either phase out or be acquired by the bigger houses". The latter will, probably, be a better way to kill competition in these sentimental times.