Blogswara - First Time in Blogosphere

Blogs are still evolving in India and everyday we see so many changes and improvements in the way the blogs are used. But what it has done now is something that has never been tried before in any part of the blogosphere. Many music enthusiasts among the bloggers started to use the audio blogs to post their new music compositions thereby exhibiting their talents to the world. Some even sing some popular songs in their own voice and post it as an audio blog. Such like-minded people started to gather in some of the most popular audio blogs sharing their new ideas in music and discuss about music there. They give honest feedback on each other’s works. Now what is great about this group at this moment is that they have decided to compose a music album and release it in the blog. It is something first of its kind ever tried in blogosphere. It is a collaborative effort of many bloggers. Take a look at the name of the composers, singers and lyricists of the songs in this album here. Jo is co-coordinator of this great effort. The album is going to be released shortly. Now follows my mail interview with Jo about this project.

When and how did such an idea sparked in your mind?

I've got a good chance to know a lot of nice people through the blogging world. And some of them have amazing musical talents. They've been in touch with me and I worked on some songs with them. Original and re-mastered songs. And I have posted those songs in my blog. Seeing this, blogger Senthil asked me "why don't you co-ordinate all of these musical talents and do something together?". Also blogger Ganesh was mentioning the same in one of the comments in his blog. That's how all of this started.

How this group got formed?

I sent emails to these blogging buddies asking if they would be interested to be a part of this venture. All of them replied positively and thus we started the work.

Generally what can we expect from this “Blogswara” album? How many songs will be there? What is the probable release date? What is the genre of music to which the songs in this album belongs?

We will have a variety of songs in Blogswara since there are people of different musical interests working for this album. However, you cannot expect a rock, metal or new-age song in this album. But we are not saying it won’t happen in our next album. :-)
We have songs in 3 different languages. Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi. And I think that is a very rare case in the current Indian music scene. There will be 10 songs in the album. We haven't finalized the release date yet, but most probably it will be in the first week of February.

Are you having a central theme based on which the songs are composed and written?

There is no central theme for our album, because we do not want to disappoint our listeners who may have different tastes. There are songs of nostalgia, love and spirituality.

Are you going to post it just as an audioblog? The reason I am asking this because, it will be useful if you make this available for downloading.

Listeners will have two choices. They can either listen to the songs online or can download the MP3 version. Each song will have an audioblog format and a link to the downloadable MP3 format.

Have you thought of any strategy to let the whole Indiblogosphere to know about this project? I mean it should not be restricted f you and those who work for this project.

We haven’t started working on that yet, but have some good plans. After we finalize the release date, we will start the work on this part. We will let the whole indiblogosphere know about this project through the famous Indiblogging groups. And the biggest publicity will be blogger-to-blogger. I plan to request my blogger buddies to let their readers know about this and from them to the others.

Also we plan to get some celebrity singer to receive the first copy of our album. And we plan to give some offline publicity through International and Indian MSM. Let’s see how it turns out.

Are the songs in this album a collaborative effort? Do composers compose the songs individually or is there any transfer of ideas for each song, so that two composers will take credit for a song?

Composers do the songs individually after communicating with the lyricists to get the right feel of the song. But in the orchestration part, you will see two people working on the same song.

What do you think about the future of blogs, audio blogs in specific? What more you expect to happen in blogosphere because of such interactive features? Becoz, even one year before no one would have thought of audio bloggers making a music album together?

I should thank the inventors of this wonderful medium, because this is how I could meet a lot of nice and talented people. In the early days, I believe blogging was all about personal notes or some journalistic view points about what goes around. Even in the international scene, people see blogging as a medium for freespeech, as a rival of the MSM. No one thought beyond that. Then the photo blogging and audio blogging came and these have given an option to enjoy the creative works of individuals.

Now with Blogswara, we are going to prove that anything is possible in the blogging world. Usually an album work requires the composer, lyricist and singer work together and record together and publish together. Here, we have multiple composers, orchestration people, lyricists, singers, post-production people and all of them residing at the different parts of the world. Mostly in UK, USA and India. And all of us are amateurs who haven’t been introduced in the main stream music industry. So blogging has been an opportunity for showcasing these amazing talents who would have gone un-noticed otherwise.

I think the future of blogging is going to be in the audio and video blogging. You can already see a lot of online radio channels run by individuals through audioblogging and podcasting . And you may even see online TV channels (run by individuals) in the near future. And a massive free-speech movement in the regular blogging area.
Everything is possible in this world of Internet and blogging, if you have the right spirit and time to put your efforts.

What is going to be next project of your team? Any other new ideas?

Right now, we are busy doing this work together. And I can assure that there will be plenty of such associations in the future. We will do more of this. So a version 2 of Blogswara can be expected in the future. :-)

What “Music” in general means to you?

They say music is the food for soul, and I agree to that completely. Music is a powerful medium that gives me the energy in my day-to-day life and a big stress reliever. Music, in any form or genre is good and divine. It is up to the listener to decide what is good and what is bad. That is why we have different forms of music.

Here is Thanking Jo for the interview and Saluting the efforts of his Team.