“At Awaaaz, we’re revolutionizing the way Indian music is produced, shared and consumed. Through a synergy of technology, vision and artistic know-how, we are adapting the best and brightest innovations from today’s global social media landscape to the Indian music realm. This is Indian Music 2.0, and it spans four major domains - collaborative arts, community, content and commerce - themes you’ll

see much more of in the coming pages.”

Regards,Team Awaaaz

Introducing Awaaaz

Awaaaz being an internet enterprise, our website obviously forms the foundation for everything we do. The site ties together individual infrastructural modules such as our collaborative music platform, marketplace, or tag cloud user interface. It also provides users all the bread and butter features that one has come to expect of a social utility or video community - profiles, blogs, friends, groups, videos, newsfeeds, playlists... the whole gamut.

However, our site functions as a gateway to Awaaaz rather than an end itself. Instead, it is our unique and thoughtful integration of community and services, content and commerce, and real-world and virtual resources that defines the Awaaaz vision, brand and experience.

So, yes, we’re web-based, but we’re much more than just a website.

We are not just a website !

The concept of collaborative arts lies at the core of our growing suite of products and services. Each product brings together artists and amateurs from around the world, separated by time, space and culture, and enables them to create, learn and share music together seamlessly. By first commoditizing this concept, we seek to fine tune our methodology, demonstrate it’s potential, cultivate a market and grow awareness. With sufficient momentum, we look forward to opening up our validated platform to all the possibilities of public collaboration.

Awaaaz Custom-Soundtrack © retro fits user submitted recordings with custom-made accompaniment soundtracks by tapping scores of professional artists from around the world. Our product is delivered back to the customer as either a karaoke track for use in practice and performance, or as a portfolio-quality mastered recording. While classical music is our main forte, we are currently expanding to serve Bollywood and fusion genres.

Our products & services

Our Credentials Package builds upon our customsoundtrack product by coupling portfolio-quality recordings with an accreditation process and professional CD production operation. The finished product is a finely packaged testament to the customer’s artistic achievements, and can be submitted toward college admission, or as part of any educational or artistic application.

Further leveraging our global artist base, we are preparing to offer music composition and transcription options, as well as power an “ask an expert” service for Indian music.

Mirroring the spirit and hospitality of South Asian culture, we want every user joining Awaaaz to enter a welcoming, engaging and vibrant community, not an intimidating social network, just to search for people they might know or watch videos in isolation. Thus, a strong emphasis on centralized activities like music contests, interactive webcasts and movie screenings are a cornerstone of our community

We inspire community

building approach. These site-wide events have the potential to draw in a breadth of users and engage them in a real-time shared context. Meanwhile, our network structure has been carefully designed to nurture smaller, intimate communities which provide users a local home, but also inspire rivalry and camaraderie during site-wide competitive events.

Alongside supplying opportunities for inclusion, we also empower users to contribute and participate. Our site’s social features allow any aspiring artist to establish a rich virtual presence, while our heavy incorporation of a tag cloud user interface makes it exceptionally effortless and entertaining for users to register dynamic ratings, comments and feedback on any content they consume.

Our major quest when it comes to content, is to organize it in a culturally meaningful and relevant manner. This means taking Indo specific parameters such as ragas, talas, artists, languages, sub-genres, composers, time periods and more into consideration while devising innovative classification schemes and implementation strategies. In parallel, our radical audio-based search is the long awaited answer to the odious challenges of transliteration based text search and the perennially imperfect mapping of Indian phonetics to the Roman script.

The content itself, we pull together from every source we can access or partner with. Our strong ties to the Indian music and Bollywood industry afford us a wealth of readily generated, high-impact exclusive content, while we are also spearheading the digitization of a large volume of vintage recordings and bringing them online for the first time ever.

What’s different about our content?

Think Wall Street, Newbury street. This is the financial and commerce epicenter of Awaaaz. Our platform empowers third party vendors ranging from major content and advertisement partners, to small time independent artists and service providers to circumvent traditional roadblocks to directly reach customers and manage sales operations with ease. Paired with our social media functionalities, Awaaaz Street closes the loop in terms of providing a truly viable and competitive independent platform for Indian content producers and consumers everywhere.

Awaaaz Street

In parallel with our primary undertakings, we love to take on cool and exciting pet projects as well. We won’t go into much depth here, so do contact us for details if any of these pique your interest.

Debuting cool software• - whether it’s music and media related or not, if they’ll let us try it out, we’ll demo it for our users

A&R Club• - we’re in talks with leading international labels to have them discover, audition and sign Indie artists from Awaaaz who manage to get voted into a competitive “A&R” (Artists and Repertoire) Club by our users

Indian music genome• - modeling Indian music in terms of its fundamental primitives throws open doors to innovations with far-reaching implications for music discovery processes, and the propagation and accessibility of Indian music within an international audience.

What else is cool ?

At this time, we’re quite content preaching to the choir. For us, this means getting Indian artists, students of South Asian arts, and enterprising Bollywood lovers of all ages hooked onto Awaaaz. We are currently pursuing this progression in a geographic community-by-community manner. In parallel we have an aggressive and well-oiled outreach operation to win over the support and involvement of Indian arts and entertainment’s biggest personalities. As we grow and become better established, we hope to expand beyond these traditional demographics to an international audience - serving as a transformational player/conduit in the wider ascendancy of India and Bollywood on the global stage.

Our target users

Behind the Awaaaz concept is a team of Harvard University recent alumni intensely engaged in the current social media revolution of the internet. Our team’s solid technology base, passion for Indian music and culture, and strong ties to the music industry position us to bring forth the very best, as we pioneer Indian Music 2.0.

Who is behind Awaaaz?

Awaaaz’s products and services are currently being rolled out, with Awaaaz Customsoundtrack© already available to customers. A placeholder site for this purpose is currently at Awaaaz.com. Meanwhile, the beta launch of our full social media platform is scheduled for June 2009.

What is the plan?

Whether you are an artist, music fan, prospective advertiser, content producer, software developer, musical institution, or community organizer, Awaaaz will be an exemplar partner for you. We will work hard to build a personalized and fruitful collaboration, and ensure that you are happy every step of the way. Allow us to:

build you a • fan baseprovide you a • seed user group for product testingmonetize• your contentdesign a social media ad campaign• propagate your brand• mobilize your constituency in the virtual space• or simply • connect you with people and opportunities

As part of any of the above, we’ll construct a customized community and virtual presence built specifically around your brand, and give you premium access to all the functionalities and facilities of our cutting-edge platform.

You and Awaaaz

Above and beyond such tangibles, working with a nascent, ambitious enterprise like Awaaaz promises serendipitous benefits. If we make it big, you’ll not only have a front-row seat to it all, but will be solidly positioned to partake of the windfall. You’ve witnessed the social media revolution of the internet and the meteoric rise of Facebook, YouTube and more. Likewise, the steady tide of South Asian influence in mainstream global culture is palpable. Now is your chance to grab a piece of the action on both fronts. We hope you’ll choose to do that in partnership with Awaaaz.