A hotter than usual April at Neon
Playlists, planning the next DAMC and potentially going to SXSW Sydney
We mean it literally when we say it’s been hotter than usual this month. Bangalore has never been this hot before, everyone is installing ACs or getting coolers, and we are also in the midst of a massive water shortage in the city.
Some version of this has been happening in different cities over the past few years, and I hope we are slowly but surely realising that we are inching closer and closer to a climate crisis that no one can change the course of except us. While we are individually very careful with the kind of carbon footprint we have, we take this very seriously at Neon as well and do our bit to not make an already scary crisis any worse. Minimising trash, reusing materials and carpooling or using public transport to commute are staples at Neon HQ everyday and for our events.
Finding ways to minimise the environmental damage we make will always be front and centre of our values. We enjoy taking short walks in the few remaining green pockets in our beautiful home city, and welcoming birds into our balconies, and would like to enjoy views like this for a long time:
Potentially going to SXSW Sydney?!
Late in March we sent in a casual application for a talk at SXSW Sydney 2024 and found out sometime last week that our application was SHORTLISTED among 1000+ applications from 35 countries! We now have the chance to rally our community to vote for this session to be presented at the conference later this year, and we really need your help to vote and spread the word about this. Public voting is open for two more days until April 25th, and here's how you can vote for Neon's talk at SXSW Sydney:
Login / Register on the SXSW Sydney Session Select Voting platform.
Search for neon's session in the search box. The title for our session is "Breaking down the Indian Music Market with a hyper-local approach”
Once you have voted, do let us know or post a story on IG and tag us (@neonculture.in) so we can amplify this call!
We would absolutely love to present this topic at SXSW Sydney later this year, and make some real progress on our goal of bridging the gap between Indian music and the world. Looking forward to your vote for our session!
Playlists shouldn’t be gate-kept
We think it’s becoming far too complicated or expensive to get new singles into “curated” playlists, and music being something that brings joy shouldn’t be so complicated. So we started a new playlist this month, and it’s called Bangalore Indie. This is for anyone who is an indie artist based out of Bangalore and has recently released new singles. Send your music to us via a simple form and we will feature it here - there’s no gatekeeping or curation going into this - only discovery!
We already have some banging music on there from our local artists, and are so proud of the quality of music coming out of our city. We update this playlist once every two weeks and the next update is due this week on the 25th (Thursday). Just send us your music - that’s really all you need to do!
We love music discovery, and have three playlists for you to delve into or feature your music on. Do you follow us on Spotify yet? If not - don’t wait any longer!
Other things we have been upto…
Earlier this month, we sent out the full report and executive summary for our flagship annual conference, DAMC. We are in the pre-production planning phase for DAMC 2025, and are having some very meaningful conversations with potential partners and collaborators already. Stay tuned for more updates on this space!
We also wrapped up the Bangalore Music city survey for 2023-24, and will be announcing the opening of the survey for 2024-25 very soon as well.
We are also overhauling the Neon website, which should be ready in May. So much has happened since we touched it last about 8 months ago when we started Neon, that we haven’t had a minute to update anything on there.
Last but not least, it’s a bittersweet April for us as we say goodbye to the first ever Neon coordinators at the end of this month - Shaantanu and Hidayath. They have been instrumental in supporting so much of our work since the start of this year, and we will really miss working with them. We wish them the very best for their upcoming projects, and also look forward to welcoming two new members to the Neon team very soon.