MBELDOG BLOG

For the live recording of a song to be done in participation with online listeners on two popular microblogs, singer Adnan Sami garnered a whopping 475,000 participants.

The huge number of participants for Adnan’s tribute to his father that he recorded January 21 at the Yash Raj Studios, has encouraged the composer-singer to attempt a whole album with live participants pitching in with their suggestions. The proposed album will have tracks dedicated to Adnan’s fans who would be contributing actively to every composition.

“When I recorded Main tere paas hoon for my father last Friday, I thought I would give my fans and listeners a chance to share a very precious recording moment with me.”

“We expected around 65,000 participants. We got 475,000 very active, very vocal and excitable people coming online with their ideas and suggestions,” said Adnan, who is of Pakistani descent but born and brought up in Britain, and has been living in Mumbai for quite some time. Many people who listened in made suggestions and corrections in the music.

“I was taken aback by their inner understanding of a song composition. I was on my laptop. I’d do a line and then a number of people with some very interesting usernames would pipe in. There were people who actually made suggestions that improved the quality of my number. I incorporated these suggestions,” said the 37-year-old singer.

The entire process of recording live at Yash Raj with massive online participation will be shown on television.

“It was history. No song in any part of the world has been recorded in this way,” said Adnan who intends to carry the online recording session even further. The only drawback is that the fans tend to get too close for comfort. “Some of them have embarrassing usernames like ‘hard-on’ and ‘dickhead’. It sounds really weird to call them out online by such names. We’ve to find a way out of this. Also some of them get very upset when their suggestions are not incorporated.

“That apart, the whole process of bringing to life a song with the active participation of thousands of people makes my songs creative and the intellectual property of the listeners,” said the singer.