![]() ![]() ![]() Vox and Tucker spoke as a morning cool hung in the hills and sunlight edged across a scrubbed, white kitchen. We have countless resources to help get our music out to the world. “The fact that most artists will never sign a major label deal is actually a good thing. “The exposure I built independently on YouTube was more than the record label ever did for me, and I couldn’t believe I’d been so willing to hand it over for a long-shot gamble on mainstream stardom,” Naomi wrote in the article. She detailed the ordeal in Digital Music News in a 2015 piece headlined: “How Signing a Major Record Deal Nearly Destroyed My Music Career.” Terra Naomi was a YouTube star more than a decade ago when she signed with Universal Island Records, lost her artistic independence and was criticized by her online fans for selling out. “There’s a shelf life for anybody on YouTube and the question is what do you do when you’re at the top,” said Tucker. They recently promoted the EP with shows in Boston and Johannesburg and Durban, South Africa. The songs and videos are meant to attract potential producers, managers, concert promoters and record labels with original dance pop that fuses Indian and Western beats. Her new EP release, “Kuthu Fire,” which includes six songs co-written with Tucker, is a gambit to resonate beyond the boundaries of YouTube and into a music world greatly changed by iTunes and Spotify. But for musicians, me personally, you just can’t keep doing covers or mash-ups. Fashion bloggers have done great things with YouTube because they can go out and have their open lines and sign deals with big corporate companies. You have to keep pushing boundaries,” said Vox, whose first YouTube hit in 2011 was a rendition of the Indian classical song “Nee Nenaindal.” “It’s all about the balance. YouTube delivered her to the world but musicians who become stars on the channel don’t often make it in the old-school world of record deals, radio play and a chance for wider artistic and digital success. Sitting the other day in her Silver Lake apartment with her co-writer-producer-boyfriend, Shankar Tucker, who also directs her videos, Vox, in jeans, slippers and a lace shirt, was a woman at a turning point. “There’s a shelf life for anybody on YouTube and the question is what do you do when you’re at the top. “I didn’t even have time to think between 1 million and 2 million subscribers.” She has found cyber fame by drawing on the Carnatic traditional music she learned as a child in Chennai, India, and the hip-hop and electronic grooves she listened to on a school bus when her family moved to the suburbs of Washington, D.C.Īt 27, Vox, whose real name is Vidya Iyer, is surprised by how quickly she found success: “It just grew,” she said. Rahman, and a new EP of original music, Vox has tapped into an international vein with nearly 300 million YouTube views and over 3.5 million subscribers on her Vidya Vox channel.Ī Twitter-age, multi-culti diva, Vox is an instinctive marketer and a tell-tale face in a globalized music landscape of streaming, pollinations and crossovers. With hybrids that mix the likes of Taylor Swift with Indian composer A.R. Vox is at once an ancient heart and a modern confection, slipping between love, abandon and defiance in videos that move in swift rhythms and lyrics that weave English, Malayalam and Tamil. “I thought if Coachella happened in Rajasthan or Burning Man happened in Rajasthan how would we all look?” “I love mixing Indian and Western,” said Vox, who for the video teamed up with Arjun, a Sri Lankan-born British singer with a large YouTube audience. Vox was as focused on her dance steps as she was her fashion, changing from cut-off shorts to Indian bubble pants and twirling amid women in folkloric dress, as if a bit of Bollywood had bloomed in the scrub-brush and sage. The dancers included a Vietnamese, two women from Delhi, two guys from California, and a hip-hop-jazz man from New York. Vox met her choreographer, Kavita Rao, an Indian American who lives in West Hollywood, on an earlier shoot. The YouTube star was shooting a new video and had packed an array of talents and nationalities to spend two days kicking up dust in Joshua Tree and Palmdale. ![]() Vidya Vox, a mash-up singer of Western electronic dance music and Indian ragas, loaded her crew into cars and ventured into the desert with sun visors from a 99-cent store. ![]()
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