running our booth at Masala Mixtape ‘22

3 min

Hallojis! Earlier this month, we attended NYC’s first-ever South Asian music festival as a booth + bronze sponsor. It was nothing short of an INCREDIBLE experience filled with good music, good people, and good vibes.

In this blog post, I’ll cover some of my thoughts and takeaways on the following topics. Whether you’re a fellow business owner or simply a supporter of RRA, there’s definitely something in here for you. Let’s go!

1. "Behind the Scenes” of running a booth

2. Running the booth itself + lessons learned

3. Our experience at the festival

4. Impact on the South Asian music community and beyond

1. “Behind the Scenes” of running a booth

• Remember, brand awareness is the goal.

  • There’s a well-known concept in business called the marketing funnel. TLDR; it’s the idea that guiding a customer towards a purchase follows a similar format: awareness > interest > consideration > purchase > loyalty.

• T-shirts and signage are a few ways to achieve this.

  • T-Shirts— purchased a bulk order of 50 shirts to give away in exchange for festival goers’ engaging with our brand.

  • Photo Boards— to advertise our latest project and guide folks towards engagement (more on this in a sec).

  • Vertical Banner— to display more broadly who we are, what we’re about, and our portfolio.

2. Running the booth itself + lessons learned

• Engage, invite them into your world.

  • For our booth activity, we had festival goers play a guessing game, “mixed or not?”, in which we’d present them with two different versions of the same 10-second clip of a song (a demo vs the master). Their goal was to guess which was the master.

  • We set up 6 different options to choose from— Hip Hop, RnB, Acoustic, Rock, etc. All were projects we’ve worked on.

  • In doing this, we SHOWED (not “telled”) people what we do. This was ran via a series of Google Forms with YouTube embeds.

• Grow your email list. Build real relationships.

  • The only “follower list” that stays with you regardless of which social media platforms rise and fall is your email list. In order to play the game and win a t-shirt, we requested that interested folks provide us their email addresses.

  • Lesson learned: have this be 100% electronic. You don’t want to deal with trying to read people’s handwriting (lol).

• Be thorough in your planning.

  • It was raining prior to the event, so we transported everything in a hardshell / waterproof suitcase.

  • Random but useful materials in our planning:

    • Table linens

    • A roll of tape to hold things down in case it got windy

    • 3.5 mm to lightning adapter for the headphones

    • Clorox wipes to clean the headphones between people

3. Our experience at the festival

• Bring a partner (or two).

  • Especially for complex setups, having an extra pair of hands is SUPER helpful. Thank you Suhana!

  • We wanted to enjoy the festival too! Having help allowed us to each tap out on occasion and catch some performances.

• Enjoy the vibes.

  • The musical sets were AMAZING. The community who attended was AMAZING. I met so many talented and incredible people that night, both performers and festival goers alike. I discovered new artists, added new music to my playlists + more.

@itsraviray NYC’s first south asian music festival! ravi ray audio x masala mixtape #mixingengineer #audioengineer #southasiantiktok #desitiktok ♬ original sound - ravi ray

4. Impact on the South Asian music community + beyond

This event was not the first-ever South Asian music festival. Other events like this already exist in other parts of the world, BUT, what made this one so special was that it showed that the South Asian-American music scene is starting to finally give itself an identity.

Never mind the headliners who flew out from London, India, etc. The most interesting artists (in my opinion) were the ones further down the list. It’s the ones who were born and brought up here in the US that will define what it truly means to be a South Asian-American musician. And what’s so exciting about that to me is how infant it is— how what that means is yet to be defined.

A lot of the players have already identified themselves. Not just artists, but organizations behind the scenes like Outer Voice Records and RRA. I think this is the beginning of a renaissance in the South Asian music space, and I can’t wait to help grow it.

Until the next one, stay well and shine bright.

~Ravi