Mathures Paul

Today, 10 or maybe 1,000 parties were organised, many of them featuring songs like Maiyya mainu and Kala chashma on different playlists. The tracks got skipped on Spotify. No, you paid the music streaming service your dues but that’s not a guarantee you will be allowed access to all the tracks, all the time. The company says it’s about licensing issues with Zee Music but why should customers who wanted to have the best time of their lives have to pay for it? And it’s not just about Spotify. Tomorrow, some other streaming service may do the same. Day after, an artiste can pull his or her catalogue. In fact, Jay-Z did just that in 2017. You pay a monthly/yearly fee but the music is not yours. One of my few sensible ideas (another being getting a moka pot instead of having to rely on a café) came more than a decade ago – pack all my music into a digital storage and find a safe place for the 5,000-odd vinyl records and 2,000-odd CDs. It doesn’t make sense by way of real-estate space b...

March 28 is a special day for anyone who appreciates Western classical music. The app Apple Music Classical will make its debut and for subscribers of Apple Music, it’s free to access. This is Apple keeping its promise to offer a classical music app after acquiring the music service Primephonic in 2021. You already know this part but the bigger question is why do we need a separate app for classical music? Aren’t Apple Music or Spotify presenting that successfully? It’s a complicated question that has as an answer… metadata. You are looking for Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 on a music streaming service. What you will get is a list of recordings based on the “title track”. It’s unlike the time when we bought the same on vinyl or CD. The list that’s thrown at you on a streaming service will have all kinds of takes on the symphony, even energetic rock performances. The problem is that the metadata considered by streaming services doesn’t take into account the conductor, orchestra and...

Campa Cola’s return to the public eye is a rare occurrence in the fizzy industry. Rarely does a cola brand get a second shot at being fizzy-licious but Reliance Consumer Products, the fast-moving consumer goods arm and subsidiary of Reliance Retail Ventures, is offering just that. Most of us may have forgotten what the Campa Cola brand stood for but maybe not Salman Khan. Salman was only 15 or 16, oozing the same solo swag he tries to channel now at age 57. Ad film-maker Kailash Surendranath, founder of Kailash Picture Company, was approached by Chaitra Advertising in 1982 to make a campaign for Campa Cola, an ad film that captures the vibe of the youth. Kailash decided to cast some of the most sought after young faces in the campaign which was shot on a yacht and underwater in Andaman. The film-maker chose actress Ayesha Shroff (Jackie Shroff’s wife), model Aarti Gupta Surendranath, models Shiraz Merchant, Sunil Nischol and Vanessa Vaz for the campaign. And Aarti brought in a yo...