BackVijay Nair | The weekend project
The organizer of the Bacardi NH7 Weekender on start-up highs, the perks of a rock 'n' roll lifestyle, and taking over Indian indie
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Even before professional networking site LinkedIn.com turned “Bring In Your Parents (To Work) Day" into an actual, global event by declaring it so on 7 November, Only Much Louder (OML) celebrated its 10th anniversary with a Parents’ Day party in August last year.
Vijay Nair, CEO, OML, was 18 when he founded the live music and entertainment conglomerate as an artiste management and booking agency in 2002. It was the same year he convinced his parents to let him drop out of Mumbai’s Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics, shortly after completing the first year of his bachelor of commerce degree.
At the company’s school-like open-day celebrations, sceptical moms and dads of the 80-odd employees—almost all 20-something and on their first jobs—mingled with other folks trying to make sense of an industry that doesn’t exactly make way for one of India’s coveted professions. Party favours poked fun at the parents’ collective, if somewhat comical, predicament: Everyone left with a family photograph with the OML kids holding up a cardboard cutout of a boardroom suit under a bold red banner that read “Our kid has a REAL JOB! Really!"
Each business was run separately with its own company name and logo until January, when Nair consolidated all his teams under two new divisions. OML Live, responsible for nearly 80% of the company’s revenue, has since absorbed the artiste management and booking arm The Syndicate and the live music and festival production wing Motherswear, while OML Content consists of the video production arm, Babble Fish Productions, and the company’s digital team.
We meet immediately after the Diwali weekend at Lower Parel’s Café Zoe, a convenient pick for Nair, whose 5,800sq. ft industrial chic office is just a building away in the same mill compound. Dressed in a plain grey T-shirt, blue jeans and sneakers that are the same shade of red as his order of watermelon juice, he smiles through the interview even though there are important things to knock off his to-do list.
It’s smack in the middle of festival season for OML—two weeks after the Pune leg of the Bacardi NH7 Weekender and just two weeks away from the back-to-back Bangalore and Delhi editions. Flipping through the café’s menu, Nair, 29, assures me that the Parents’ Day event last year wasn’t a mass-scale prank to embarrass his team.
“What your parents think about you and their acceptance of what you do at work is still integral to kids here (in India), it’s just the way we’ve been brought up. A lot of the young people working with me have taken big decisions. They’ve dropped out of college or given up their MBA dreams and they find it hard to explain at home exactly what they do at work," says Nair. “I just wanted to bring all their parents together and show them that it’s not like a sweatshop here."
Until 2011, the company did not have more than 20 people on its payroll, leave alone an HR department to host such an event. Apartments in the suburbs, including Nair’s parents’ home, served as workplaces.
“I actually had a long speech prepared to tell my parents why it made sense for me to quit college. But it was a short conversation. My dad said that if that’s what makes you happy, then do it but go back to college after a year," he says. “It’s been a very long year."
What started as a short stint at Gigpad.com, an online forum for independent musicians, led Nair to manage his first band, the Pune-based Acquired Funk Syndrome (AFS), in 2002. Before the year was over, Nair had also begun to represent indie rock pioneers Pentagram and Pin Drop Violence. But his A-ha! moment didn’t take place until he accompanied Pentagram to the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, UK, in 2006.
“I was in queue to buy a drink when this extremely drunk girl climbed on top of a huge trailer and started singing Why Does It Always Rain On Me? by Travis. In about two-and-a-half minutes, there were 5,000 people singing that song along," says Nair. “It was a magical festival moment, one that people talk about seeing when their lives flash before their eyes. I knew then that I just had to bring the same vibe to India."
That same year, Nair partnered with Girish “Bobby" Talwar, bassist of rock band Zero and Samira Kanwar, the founder of independent video production company Babble Fish Productions. “For the next couple of years, we just went from one project to another and did whatever made sense," explains Nair. “We founded a record label (Counter Culture Records) because our bands didn’t have a label to sign on to, we started the production house (Babble Fish) because we couldn’t find other companies to produce our music videos, and finally we did festivals (the Big Chill Festival in Goa) because our bands didn’t have enough festivals to play at."
Much of the credit for shaking the company out of its “organic growth" goes to Nair’s elder brother, Ajay. In 2010, the 32-year-old Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, graduate quit his position as chief operating officer at Spring Healthcare, a subsidiary of private equity firm Sabre Capital Worldwide Inc., to help put together the first NH7 Weekender in Pune.
“To be honest, even though Ajay helped with free consultancy on company accounts over the years, I still didn’t know what private equity meant," says Nair. “I couldn’t even comprehend the fact that other people would give me money to do things. If it wasn’t for Ajay, who knows, even NH7 Weekender may have been a one-off event."
Quick on the heels of the second edition of the Bacardi NH7 Weekender, in April 2012, The Chernin Group, founded by Peter Chernin, the former chief operation officer of NewsCorp International, acquired a 49.9% stake in OML. The undisclosed investment has since catapulted the company to a dizzying rate of expansion.
New live event properties like A Summer’s Day, headlined by Norah Jones in March, an extra city, Kolkata, added to the Bacardi NH7 Weekender circuit this year, and NH7 InTown, an event listings mobile and Web app for Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Pune—there are just a few of the latest additions to the company’s growing portfolio.
Another business division that’s helped Nair come full circle is NH7 In Campus, a brand-activation project that’s centred on college festivals. Youth-centric brands like mobile service provider MTS face a peculiar challenge while doling out disconnected sponsorships to different college festivals, explains Nair. But NH7 In Campus helps brands take the integrated, mass-scale campaigns to college festivals across the country by taking over liaising with the different festival organizers on campus for them.
“NH7 In Campus is special because for the first five-six years of my business, all I did was book bands for college events. It will definitely be one of the larger revenue drivers for us in the future, but it’s also important to us because this is where we are converting people to alternative music and culture," explains Nair.
At the same time, OML has also managed to leverage its expertise in live event management and its indie market insight to become the go-to team for brand activations and guerrilla marketing. It’s become impossible to imagine the NH7 Weekender without Bacardi’s community drinks, served in large ice buckets. Apart from working closely with the Bacardi brands, they are currently producing concerts for the Red Bull Tour Bus, helping Puma produce LP records featuring the freshest independent artistes for its Puma Loves Vinyl campaign and even booking b-boying crews, graffiti artists and hip-hop acts for Adidas Originals’ latest street culture project, Collision.
In September, OML also announced The Weirdass Pajama, a three-day outdoor festival for stand-up comedy, slotted for January 2014, in association with Vir Das’ comedy consultancy Weirdass Comedy.
“The plan is to be present across all alternative entertainment now," says Nair of the company’s recent venture outside the independent music scene. “After all, there are only so many music festivals to produce. I’d like to go after spaces where not enough people are investing yet. From where I am standing, theatre is hugely under-tapped in India and there’s a lot of talent and tremendous potential there."
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