We are a pair of detail oriented fiends
...and we are back after decompressing from our most ambitious undertaking yet!
Hello and welcome back to Neon’s monthly update!
It’s been more than a month this time. You last heard from us at the end of January, the week before DAMC - our flagship conference and showcase event, and our most ambitious undertaking to date. What a contrast in how we were feeling then (palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy) vs now (snap back to reality, oh there goes gravity), and the only way to describe it is through song lyrics.
We are proud and excited to share the executive summary and full report for the Deccan Alternative Music Conference and DeccanAlt Showcase.
We also compiled the responses from the Bangalore Music City Survey in a report, which we had the opportunity to present at the 2024 Measure of Music Conference in late February. You can read more about this engagement and get your hands on a copy of the report in this blog post.
One of the early readers of this document (Manojna Yelluri of Artistik License) said that it gave her “valuable insight into an ecosystem that unfortunately has not been documented properly before.” This gives us all the more reason to keep this survey going annually and bring it to more cities with partners who understand the need and applications for research at this level.
We would love to hear some thoughts and reflections once you have gone through them, and a share with your networks or on social media wouldn’t hurt either - tag us (@neonculture.in) if you do!
We have toyed with the idea of putting all of our reflections about the conference, as well as talk about the daily realities of building a company from scratch on a podcast someday.
Since a podcast is a distant fever dream at the moment, we have summarised our reflections from organising DAMC into 5 points:
🫂 Community is everything
Over the course of the two days, we brought together 300+ fans, artists, music business professionals and students for the shared purpose of furthering the music community in Bangalore and beyond. We witnessed firsthand beautiful exchanges between artists meeting each other for the first time, curators finding new work to showcase, and professionals realising why they do what they do and falling in love with their jobs all over again through these human moments. It reinforced our primary belief - the community is bigger than any individual, and there is magic in bringing it together!
📝 Don’t underestimate the power of documentation
We spent endless hours putting down every little detail on a document, and obsessively creating templates for all communications. At the time, it just felt like the right thing to do but looking back, we now have a whole set of comms and operations templates for future editions of DAMC, and can easily pull from these for other projects as well. It’s also a remarkable tool to set expectations across the board, especially in our line of work where there are no set contracts or payments to hold people to!
🤝 Collaboration is key. Trust the team.
Vishruti and Prarthana first discussed this conference late in 2022, and every decision made since has been with each other - wherever one of them couldn't see the way forward the other stepped in. There are also a few key people mentioned on the report, namely our core team who took our vision and brought it to reality, and our dedicated crew (some of who travelled into Bangalore on their own time and money!) who were on-ground and ensured everything ran smoothly. In the last few weeks leading up to it and on the two days of the event, we knew we had a strong team and trusted every person on it to make calls that benefitted the overall experience. Collaborating with these people, incorporating their ideas into the conference and getting to know each of them at different levels was the magic sauce that levelled up the DAMC experience.
🙌🏼 DEI is not a box to check - it’s a representation of the world we live in.
It is very possible to have an inclusive, diverse, cross sectional event - as long as you are intentionally building in representation of how the real world looks into every level of it, and willing to question your biases along the way.
For DAMC, we put a little more thought and care into planning our sessions, shortlisting artists, and inviting speakers and crew. We wanted to ensure that we were not only catering to or representing the most visible group of people and adding in one or two underrepresented groups as an after thought, or falling into the trap of “solving for diversity.” We worked in a few hours of regional language programming, more than half our crew and speakers did not identify as male, and all but one of our spaces was wheelchair accessible.
We are certainly not perfect as there is so much more to do with every future edition and cater to more groups of people, but we are starting somewhere and will build on it every year.
💭 A long term vision is the only thing worth having - trust the process!
Conferences, especially new ones, are so damn difficult to sell! It sometimes felt like we were screaming into a void and no one was really listening, at other times we had a lot of engagement from what we were posting online, people were affirming every programming detail with enthusiasm and it felt like we were on the right path. We broke a lot of rules with how this conference was set up, as well as learned a ton on how to communicate that. But none of this changed our long term vision to build a community-led event for learning and knowledge exchange, and that's what kept us sane through these long few months.
The showcase performances by the incredible shortlisted artists were the perfect evening events to wind up the learning heavy days with - we got to let loose, unwind and enjoy so many genres of music at two stunning venues across the city! Here are some moments from those gigs captured by the talented Sakshi Nishu.
At the end of it, we came out thoroughly inspired, lacking sleep (and for Vishruti, lacking her voice as well) and ready to reflect on what we had just pulled off on a shoestring budget and a whole lot of nerve.
We each took our own time to decompress - spending time with family, friends and in nature, picking up hobbies and routines that were put on hold while we planned the conference, and came back with a renewed fire in our bellies to build on the great work we did with this conference.
What else is up at Neon HQ?
Attention indie artists and fans! We love music discovery, and now have additional playlists (apart from We Are Vibing With) for you to delve into or feature your music on. Do you follow us on Spotify yet? If not - don’t wait any longer!
Bangalore Indie - if you are an indie artist based out of Bangalore and have recently released new singles, send them to us and we will feature it here! Here is a link to the form (that’s really all you need to do, this is not an April fool’s joke)
Neon Artist Spotlight - showcasing some of the music released by the amazing artists work with at neon.