The latest one, titled That Cow, involves zoom-in/zoom-out/split screen footage of a mysterious cow. He is standing in someone’s driveway, peering intensely into their house, standing absolutely still. Check it out here. Cowabungalow.

Flip Clip #5 – That Cow from SKINNY/ALLEY on Vimeo.

The band’s experimental alterego PINKNOISE has been remixing Skinny Alley material at recent live performances.

Since we already gave our impressions of the conference earlier, we’ll just outline some minutes here.

1. Piracy prevails and will continue to do so mainly because most of the music consumers in India have tasted blood through free downloads. New ways of monetizing digital content need to be chalked out. O RLY? Yeah, and stop calling it a “piracy problem”.
2. The whole royalty paying business is still very convoluted. Songwriters and composers are not sure about what rights their producers are assigning to them. There is absolutely no clarity in licensing. This practice needs to be removed and a law needs to be passed at the earliest for songwriters to receive their royalty fees.
3. The live scene in India is still in a nascent stage. The live business is extremely reliant on sponsors and even though the artists get paid a lot more now there are very few acts who lead a comfortable life. Most promoters have clogged the live scene by getting dated, has-been stadium acts into the country which needs to change very soon. Return on investment in the live business is still a far fetched dream for most. News on the NH7 Weekender coming soon!
4. The fourth panel of the day was about regional music of the south. The vibrant film music scene of the south took center stage. What was funny is that most of the music bodies and music companies of the south are headed by Punjabis. Physical CD sales are still quite popular. People identify actors with popular songs and not so much the singers. Hitcore culture still exists. An industry in itself regional music in India needs to crossover to the national level.
5. The digital domain is the future. All major labels are witnessing a dip in their physical sales. The mobile centric business model of this sector is generating a lot of money. As Lloyd Mathias of Tata Teleservices Ltd pointed out, “A band like Swarathma has the potential to sell up to ten million caller tunes in India.” Keywords here being “potential” and “up to”.

More from Nokia Music Connects.

The band performed the song recently at an acoustic session for Seattle radio session 107.7′s show The End. The acoustic version is a stripped down cover of Springsteen’s ballad, and takes away much of the bombast (and the sax solo) of the track. Ezra Koenig’s moody delivery, while reflecting none of Springsteen’s heartache, is pleasantly mellow and changes the tone of the song from earnest longing to life-goes-on.

Check out the cover below.

This is how we like it though.

Florence + The Machine and Kid Harpoon performed a similar acoustic cover of the song in 2008.

Check out our interview with Vampire Weekend.

Here are our impressions

1. Starting any new project post lunch is always a bad idea. Heck, we at Indiecision face a 54-69% drop in productivity after we eat our Thai noodles (and watch an episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks) at 1.30pm. If the organisers had intended that attendees got a good night’s rest after the pre-party the night before, the result was that post the excellent buffet at the Taj Lands End hotel, even some of the panelists speaking looked as though they could use a 30-120 minute power nap.
2. As with last year, most opening remarks featured unnecessary rhetoric and the wholesale use of dated buzzwords. The lack of more lively panelists (read Farhad Wadia) meant that most of the discussions ended in all the panelists agreeing with each other as if they were relieved they could finally get off stage and take a 30-120 minute power nap.
3. There were some panelists however who did manage to make specific sense in a way that was not only informational, but also interesting. The dean of music publishing Achille Forler once again layed the smackdown on how little people in the Indian music/entertainment industry know about music publishing taking on Yashraj films who he said “Would call me on Monday” to hear him out about their own music being used internationally, but never called.
4. Given that this was a Nokia event, there was plenty of pimping of the Nokia Ovi music store. But we’re definitely not yet convinced of the product, and DRM in 2010 is just #fail
5. The panel on international music in India saw panelists agree that the sector is “growing” and that people can search for plenty of international music on the Nokia Ovi store, till one representative from PRS UK asked the tough question – how are users going to search for international music, when they don’t know what to search for? The panel was stumped as the coverage of international music in television and radio is negligible. One panelist suggested it could grow via “social media”. Do check out this excellent indie pop trio from Spain called Boat Beam, on NH7.
6. Why is there always one person at all these conferences who believes that not enough is being done for classical music? D-I-Y. Start your own classical music blog. Coming soon on NH7.
7. The panel on live music was the highlight of the conference mainly due to someone who wasn’t on the panel. Dhruv Jagasia, manager of Indian Ocean and Midival Punditz, brought out how those artists are surviving in the Indian music scene purely by being performing musicians. He mentioned how Indian Ocean’s involvement in the soundtrack for the film Peepli Live had improved the band’s visibility therefore getting them potentially more offers, and thereby sparking a much needed Bollywood vs indie debate that, let’s just say, had to be taken offline.
8. Day 1 was closed by a rocking music performance.

Notes from Day 2 of the conference will be up tomorrow.

Oh, and did we mention we launched NH7 there?

Pics: Kunal Kakodkar

a) Bollywood is stifling all other genres of music in India.
b) A vast majority of artistes have a less-than-functional knowledge of copyright.
c) Firang delegates are invariably wowed by the general enthusiasm of the desi music industry. They tell half-truths about how the bands they represent are just itching to tour India, and they claim to be on the lookout for killer Indian acts to take to ‘the West’.

In line with the second half of c), some sort of showcase is traditionally part of the festivities. Presumably, this comprises a selection of acts intended to demonstrate the high quality of Indian talent to these international delegates.

Flash forward to a lanky dude in a corduroy blazer and matching scarf moaning, ‘This next song is about how to propose a woman.” I haven’t seen so much cringing since the Great Cringe Summit of 2003. Billed as ‘the first Hindi hard rock band’, Rios had the distinct disadvantage of playing to an entirely sober crowd by virtue of being first up. They didn’t do themselves any favors though. They were dressed for a Sindhi wedding reception. The guitarist (sporting a white blazer from the Jeetendra Collection) abused the Floyd Rose tremolo on his Ibanez with dive bombs straight from 1983. The vocalist was woefully off key, and spent the entire set making feeble attempts to hold a tune. To his credit though, I do believe he spent as much time singing sharp as he did flat – on average, I guess he was pretty okay. Apparently, they’re signed to EMI and have just recorded their second album which is slated for imminent release. I hope the auto-tune was set to maximum.

Unsurprisingly, most of the delegates chose to spend their evening outside the conference hall and by the bar/buffet after this debacle. The high point of the night was Sriram, this year’s Indian Idol, who was stellar in comparison as he belted out filmy numbers with the help of a backing track.

Based solely off this night, an otherwise clueless international booking/talent agent might come to the logical conclusion that non-Bollywood music in India deserves to be stifled because it is largely atrocious. Probably not the exact outcome that the organizers were hoping for when they programmed this ‘showcase’.