(I read this great article on www.grammy.com about Kirtan – they interviewed GuruGanesha for the article. Very cool! Check it out! – Karan)
Yoga’s music movement is gaining popularity while broadening horizons and sales
This article taken from GRAMMY.com
Alan di Perna
While many sectors of the music industry are learning to live with decreased sales and diminished expectations, one niche music market that’s remarkably robust is the growing yoga/chant genre. The expanding popularity of this genre is directly tied to the explosion of hatha yoga over the past decade, with yoga studios springing up in a number of cities across the United States and Europe.
“It’s part of a whole cultural movement that includes yoga, meditation, devotional chanting, and ayurveda [traditional Indian medicine],” says Bette Timm, head of alternative music retail promotion company Bette Timm Marketing.
As a product of the yoga and spirituality boom, leading chant artists such as Krishna Das and Deva Premal are enjoying album and concert sales rivaling artists in more mainstream genres.
Deva Premal
“Deva Premal has sold, between her four albums, over 750,000 units, which is not something to sneeze at in anybody’s world,” says Parmita Pushman, owner of White Swan Records, the label that released Premal’s second album in 2001. “The highest-selling Deva Premal album is her first one [on White Swan], The Essence, which at this point has sold about 300,000 units. And I imagine Krishna Das is up in the same numbers. With all the problems in the music industry, and with so many segments of the industry going down, this is one market that has been immune to that.”
The music performed by these artists is largely based on kirtan, an ancient Indian form of rhythmic call-and-response devotional chanting that creates an ecstatically meditative mood. While the paradigm is ancient and South Asian, some of the genre’s top performers express the mantras while drawing upon other musical styles. Das sticks close to the Indian tradition and also incorporates the harmonium, African percussion and electronic influences, while Premal employs ambient New Age style synths in her music. Jai Uttal, a GRAMMY-nominated kirtan artist, explores Brazilian rhythms on his latest album, Thunder Love, and MC Yogi has created a sensation by setting mantras to hip-hop grooves on his debut album, Elephant Power.
With the genre infusing a variety of musical textures, the audience has reflected both baby boomers and a younger demographic. “I go to a concert by Krishna Das or Deva Premal and half the audience is the older spiritual crowd,” says Terry McBride of NuTone Music, a label specializing in the yoga/chant genre. “But the other half are people who have heard this music in a yoga studio and they’re all 25 to 40 and about 80 percent female.”
Yoga studios are an important component to the genre. “When my partner and I started White Swan in 1991, yoga studios weren’t really playing music,” says Pushman. “Yoga teachers have become the radio stations for this music. They’re the DJs. And that provides a vital way to reach listeners, which is one thing that more mainstream labels lack these days.”
Yoga/chant CDs are also sold at other non-traditional outlets such as New Age stores and gift shops at meditation or spiritual centers. “The problem is that a lot of the sales don’t go through [Nielsen] SoundScan,” says Pushman. “So they get short shrift on the music industry’s radar.” And while digital sales are up across genres worldwide, CDs are still a major focus for the yoga/chant genre. “People aren’t buying the music for one song they love, but rather for an experience that fits their life, such as a yoga class or meditation,” says Pushman. “So they tend to buy whole albums and they tend to actually like buying CDs.”
Compared with pop music, “kirtan music clearly has a longer shelf life,” adds GuruGanesha Singh, founder of the Spirit Voyage label and manager of Spirit Voyage’s flagship artist Snatam Kaur. “As an artist like Snatam Kaur gets embraced by more and more people around the world, they’re going back and buying the whole discography. It’s not likely to go in and out of style.”
Live performance also plays a key role in CD sales. “I really see a huge difference between the artists who are touring and the ones who aren’t,” says Timm. “It’s really hard to sell CDs if an artist is not touring. Whereas those who are out touring consistently and have been doing it for a while are doing great.”
“We’re seeing consistent increases in attendance at concerts, especially over the last eight to 10 years,” says Singh. “We’ve been averaging audiences of maybe 300 to 400 in the U.S., 400 to 600 in Canada and 600 to 1,000 or more in Europe.”
The involvement of Nutone Music’s Terry McBride is a development that may help catapult the genre to a new level. As CEO of Nettwerk Music Group, architect of Lilith Fair and an instrumental force in launching the careers of artists such as Sarah McLachlan and Barenaked Ladies, McBride began attending yoga classes a few years back and became an avid yoga practitioner. He revived Nettwerk’s defunct world music imprint NuTone in 2008 as a new outlet for yoga/chant music, signing artists such as Bhagavan Das, Donna De Lory, Wade Imre Morissette, David Newman, Uttal, and Wah!
“What I see missing and what I’m going to work on over the next couple of years is a more mainstream touring circuit for this music,” says McBride. “We’re going to market this music in ways that it hasn’t been marketed yet.”
Perhaps his most adventurous plan is to create a Lilith Fair-style festival based around mantra music, yoga and wellness. “The initial thought for this would be sort of a half-day festival, like from noon till 10 at night,” he says. “It would combine spiritual music — someone like Krishna Das or Deva [Premal] — with a more mainstream musical artist like Michael Franti. And that would be combined with sessions led by some of the more well-known yoga teachers. The whole thing would be something that resonates with what today’s society is looking for, because there will be a lot of people coming to these events searching for something. And I’d love for them to find it.”
For all the artists involved, kirtan is a spiritual practice first, and a profession second. Newcomers should realize that it is by no means a fast track to stardom.
“Unfortunately some people do try to get on the bandwagon,” says Timm, “but it’s not really what’s in their hearts so it doesn’t have the right essence. But I think the music itself tends to weed those people out.”
So while the market for this genre will continue to grow in the future, it will most likely do so on its own terms. “You can’t force a flower to bloom any faster than it’s going to bloom,” says Singh. “It feels to me that this genre will grow at a slow and steady pace, like a good spiritual practice. We’re in it for the long term.”
(Alan di Perna has been writing about music for more than 20 years and is currently west coast editor of Guitar World magazine.)
In continuation of my interview with Snatam about her upcoming release, Liberation’s Door, she talked to me about an incredible experience she had in the studio while recording the vocals for the track Charan Sat Sat. In listening to Snatam speak, I realized the depth of devotion and meditation that she experiences with her music, and I am just beginning to understand why so many people are so deeply touched by her music – because it comes from such a pure place within her that is transmitted to you as you listen.
Posted by Karan 
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Karan
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