Parikrama and Creative Commons

Parikrama…

Originally uploaded by taruntej

Parikrama is a blues, rock ‘n’ roll band based in India. They have some of the very popular numbers in the Indian rock (Indirock) scenario including “But it rained”, “Rhythm and Blues”, “Load up” et cetera. Their brand of rock ‘n’ roll has been Indianised to a great extent with a regular accompaniment of instruments like tabla, sitar and harmonium.

The band was recently invited to the Download festival at Donnigton Park, UK by the incontrovertible messiahs of modern-day rock - Iron Maiden. The team manager of the touring Maiden, Rod Smallwood was impressed by the professionalism and intensity displayed by the Indian protagonists.

” We were completely blown away by the intensity and passion of the India crowd and also by the quality of PARIKRAMA. I just didn’t realise there were metal/rock bands of this quality in India. I was so impressed by their playing and attitude and professionalism and all of the Iron Maiden band and crew watched and listened to their entire set backstage. So I asked the Download promoters Live Nation to add them to the bill opening our Maiden day, the Sunday, on the main stage and we further extended the invitation for them to play at Clive’s show at Brixton. I certainly look forward to seeing them play again and l hope Maiden fans will give them some great support.”

After the blitzkrieg at Donnington Park, they received a flurry of invitations to stage their shows at a number of venues in and around London.

It is a curious how a successful band, which is yet to release a full-scale commercial music album in the market, when it could have had the producers at its own accord, chose to keep the music free for it’s fans.

“Pirate our music!” bellowed Nitin Malik, the lead vocalist of the band into the crowd at Azad Maidan, New Delhi last year. “We want to be heard by as many people as possible“, he said, when not many musicians would have dared to display such scant regard for copyrights in the era of grandiloquence and Intellectual Property Rights. Perhaps, it was this curious disregard for copyrights that spiralled the band into popularity which might not have been achievable if the music wasn’t freely distributed. Their website currently offers their prominent collection of music as free download.

It is my belief that as the front runners of the rock music scenario in India, they can also be an inspiration to the younger and budding artists of the country by leading the way into another noble project of Creative Commons. Creative Commons licenses offer a variety of way of licensing work such as text and music, with which the authors are enabled to grant some or all of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms.

It is only plausible to assume that the young and upcoming artists would not be able to achieve the same amount of success as established musicians in their initial years. By licensing their work under Creative Commons, they are opening themselves up to a new way of distributing music. Their work becomes freely distributable under the terms of a generic Creative Commons license - they retain certain rights, such as attribution and can decide upon whether their work can be used commercially or not, while the rights to share and distribute are released into the public domain.

Through the free distribution network, a large number of audience gets access to their work without any legal impediments. For free-culture enthusiasts who are artists or vice versa (and specially in India) CC licenses would make a lot of sense since most of the distributed music is pirated and artists tend to earn their living by staging concerts, shows and by other promotional acts. Moreover, music and performances distributed by fans openly and without any restraints would reach a wider audience than music distributed underground.

This is one of the many ways through which free culture can promote art, creativity and aids talent to bloom into the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings to trigger a tidal wave of fans and aficionados, who probably might not have had access to the music had it been copyrighted! Had Parikrama known about this before, they wouldn’t have had to ask its fans to pirate their music, instead it would have been CC-licensed!

Since their formation in 1991, the band has staged hundreds of shows throughout India at rock concerts and events at educational institutions like NITs and IITs. Their behemothic fan club is ever-increasing and they are often looked upon as the “face of the Indian rock“.