art wants to be free

I am writing this right now because ten years down the line, either I would be successful in what I'm trying to do or have given up and am leading a 9-5 vegetable life. In both cases I would have lost the feeling I have right now. So this is the best time to communicate it.

Art and business do not seem to enjoy each others' company. At least thats what people in their mid forties would tell you. They will either say that art is for the rich and famous or tell you that art is not for sale. I beg to differ here, its like saying that art is a catholic and business is an asshole (read: makes no sense). Infact I beg to rubbish both the two notions. I believe that art can be free but artists can still make a handsome living. For me, art wants to be free. It wants to reach people. It wants to entertain and enthrall the masses. The distribution can cost but not the art. Thats the prime philosophy of TempoStand, which, if I may be allowed to digress, is wrongly being promoted as the first statup of DA-IICT. It isn't. Ankit Agarwal and Pavitar Singh both have been involved in their respective startups earlier and I may be missing a few I do not know of.

Coming back to the point. Our music is free for people who want to listen and enjoy. We will charge for distributing CDs and we will charge for people who want to remix the songs and market them. If you subscribe to our feeds (either via a subscriber or by email) , you would see that all our songs are available as podcasts, so it is free for everyone. However we believe that people would buy audio CDs of our albums too. People who want to support their favorite bands and us would buy their merchandise. There are several ways of earning money on the web, most of them apply to TempoStand too.

So its an idea that we believe in, more important than the idea is the fact that we believe in something. Unlike most hypocritical entrepreneurs I will not say that we are confident of where we will ten years from now, but starting and failing is much better than standing safe and observing. We are anxious and touchy, but we are loving every moment of it. Learning things the hard way is fun and it stays.


My father, a chief engineer with the State Electricity Board having an experience of 33 years, says "have fun with ideas, this is the only time of your life when you will have some of your own".