Indian Ocean giving away its latest album for free

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Indian Ocean, the contemporary fusion music band from Delhi, India is giving away their latest album 16/330 Khajoor Road for free on their website. The songs of the album will be made available to download one by one. The current available song is “Chand”.

The band claims that they are doing this in order to reach out to their listening public.  They have also identified that their primary audience, the Indian youth, mostly downloads pirated music. So there is no point in signing contracts with the record companies and fighting over copyright issues.

Here is the full excerpt from their website:

A lot of people are curious as to why we want to give away the music free. Firstly, this greatly reduces the distance between the band and its listeners. A lot of people (specially younger people!) do not buy music any more but rip or download from the web, so we want to make their lives a little guilt-free! In addition, this means no more negotiating contracts with record companies and fighting over copyright issues, no worries about bad distribution, albums not being available at different places and so on. Also, very frankly, no Indian artist survives on royalty. We make almost all our income playing live shows and composing music for films etc., so it is no great hardship for us to give up this amount. We also hope that this becomes a means for other artists in India to reach out to their listening public.

The first song to be given away is titled ‘Chand’, which means ‘moon’ in Hindi. We made this song for an eponymous short film directed by Anurag Kashyap, which unfortunately never saw the light of day. It’s a beautiful, touching twelve minute film about a young boy called Chand, who resides in a remand home in Mumbai, but lives in a world of his own. Sanjeev Sharma has written the lyrics for this song.

Download their songs for free here.

[via Indian Ocean Official Site’]