Publishing Entrepreneur Ajay Prabhakar of ‘The Score Magazine’:India’s Only Pan-Genre Music Magazine

The Score Magazine is a pan-genre magazine focusing on just music. “It irked us to see little vision or effort by several music media organizations in India to promote original music and to create an audience for it. We want to change all this. We want good music to reach millions. We want to create a market for original music in our country. We want to be the reason why musicians want to persist with what they do. We have lofty goals, and we are going to need your help. Join us. We will create a revolution” says their about us page. We set out to find out more about this revolution!“We are proud of being the only Music magazine in India on stands today” says the founder Ajay Prabhakar. There are other magazines focusing on a particular genre or there are international magazines with Indian editions but they are the only Indian magazine with a comprehensive pan-genre focus. We caught up with Ajay to find out more about this startup.

Ajay on the motivation behind the business idea:

The motivation behind The Score Magazine was simple.

a. We have music media brands, which were pan-genre. But they are all from foreign countries.

b. Which means they have no vision for the local music. MTV cannot do to Indian music what they did for international music.

c. Which is why, if you see, in the initial days of MTV, there were plenty of artists who were born, like Lucky Ali, or Sonu Nigam or Shaan, or Anaida etc. But ever since a policy shift by the music media companies to shift to reality shows, the commercial music industry (not the film related one) has virtually collapsed.

d. People long for such music. And they are people who are making such music. We want to be the way people discover Indian music again.

e. There are other music media companies in India, but they are relegated to a single genre. Which we believe goes against the essence of music, i.e. genre no bar, language no bar.

f. In short, we want to be the first Indian music media which is pan-genre and home brewed. This is the idea we started with, this is the idea that continues to drive us.

But Score does not stop at printing the offline magazines; they also have a online community and online offerings. Ajay elaborates:

We have a website, an enormous Facebook presence and an offline magazine. We hope to create more media streams like radios, and technology like socially driven charts. Again our aim is to excel at all these mediums only to reach every section of the Indian populous.

You can look at all our issues from issuu.com/score. On an average, we range 20,000 - 1,00,000 views for each online magazine, which is one of the highest for an online magazine for any content.

Since your launch how has your growth been? 

From being obscure, in the last 2 years, we have grown and etched ourselves a compelling presence within the music industry. We are spoken highly about, and that gives me a great sense of pride.  

Some of the strategies you have used as a publishing entrepreneur?

 I am from a technological background, so all my strategies are sort of lateral and combinatory. Not many publishers from India are tech savvy.To make my point, we recently developed a hack that allows us to directly throw out rich media when people share us on Facebook. I'll make my point:

Try sharing the following link in Facebook, and see what happens:

• http://www.highonscore.com/the-score-magazine-february-2012
• http://www.highonscore.com/the-corrs-the-good-part-of-nepotism

Funding?

We are not funded. I am bootstrapping my way through. But our ambitions have grown immensely. We hope to bag funding this year or realize all our visions. We are a team of only 5 people, and it’s stunning how much we get done!

To keep yourselves informed of their revolution visit their website here! As a media platform ourselves, we are very excited to see niche media startups creating a new market for themselves in India, we will keep you posted on this!