We recently had the opportunity to speak with Nikhil Chinapa about his joining BitClout with a large Clubhouse audience of over 200 fans. Nikhil has spent a lifetime dedicated to spreading music throughout India, first on MTV (1999-Present), then through co-founding Submerge, one of the most influential EDM companies throughout India, as well as co-founding Sunburn, Asia’s largest music festival, and now through his festival Supersonic, which he has used as a vehicle to bring the biggest names in EDM throughout the world to perform to massive crowds in Mahalakshmi, India. The number of artists inspired to become DJs and Producers through the work Nikhil has put into the last twenty years is unknown, but certainly would be a jaw-dropping figure.
Nikhil, like AudioNode, is a vocal critic of Spotify, based on a Twitter post from 2018. Our relationship with the streaming goliath is a complicated one. Yes, we feel Spotify follower data represents critical data for gauging the success of a musician in the digital age. Thus in order to reach people outside the decentralized economy, it is and will be a critical data source to help people understand how to relate creator coins or NFT sales to industry data. If we fail to relate an artist’s value in the crypto-space to the real world, mass adoption will never happen.
But we mustn’t keep a short-sighted view on what the creator coin economy means to musicians and their fans, even while we are well aware of the inequities associated with the financial payouts of these massive streaming services. We must start in the reality of the present before we can push for a better future.
Welcome Nikhil, thank you for the inspiration to write this piece and your inspiration to millions of young artists across India. And welcome everyone to a better future for artists everywhere.
