Today, Arjun Sagar Gupta, Founder, The Piano Man, Gurgaon

1. How did The Piano Man endure through the lockdown?

The lockdown was a rather frustrating and scary experience from the business perspective, but fruitful on the personal front. I don’t often take breaks from work, just a few in a decade. So,  it allowed me time for personal development. I’ve spent an average of two hours a day pursuing something that I’ve wanted to do for two decades, practicing trumpet, and it’s been incredibly fulfilling.

For TPM, we tried to answer our most pertinent question, how to keep the bridge between musicians and active patrons, and The Piano Man Home Sessions were born. We’re 88 sessions in, with another 10 already booked. We have 450,000 views on these sessions with no marketing, and I hope whoever saw them took home something beautiful about the artists.

We’ve also just finished developing and have launched our own ticketing, membership and support portal. We are inviting our patrons to subscribe to us with a monthly fee that we want to use to deliver high quality daily broadcasts of concerts and eventually develop our independent music label. This will be completely subscriber driven

2) How long do you think before things get back to normal?

We’re hoping to start hitting pre-Covid revenues from April ’21. It depends entirely on how the vaccine distribution is carried out in Delhi / NCR

3) What is your strategy to survive going forward?

Cut cost, request support from landlords, run a tight ship and infuse capital as required. The last bit is tricky since it’s getting harder to raise capital at a fair interest rate, but we gotta do what we gotta do!