MUMBAI: Bajaao.com, the online retailer for musical instruments, will concentrate on adding more live music event properties to its roster under its new sub-division, Bajaoo Entertainment. The news was confirmed by Bajaoo Entertainment’s business head, Himanshu Vaswani, who was previously Bajaao.com’s Senior Manager. The initiative has been taken in an attempt to streamline all of Bajaao’s services. Since Bajaao has been programming live music venues for a while, and also has its own live music property – BIG69, Vaswani said that it was imperative that the brand had an identity of its own.

“Bajaao Entertainment is the entertainment division of Bajaao.com, which actually started in 2009 with music programming for former metal music venue, B69 before venturing into online retail for musical instruments. In 2012, we started getting more into events and live properties. At that time there was just one registered company called Bajaao Consulting & Entertainment Private Limited. But, now, since we will also be developing more live music IPs, we decided to create this new identity called Bajaao Entertainment,” said Vaswani.

For that purpose, Bajaao Entertainment has partnered with various live music venues across the country, including those like Hard Rock Cafe, Boveda and Smaaash, among others.

“Our first partnership is with Hard Rock Cafe, across its various centres in India for a live property called ‘Insanium’. With that Hard Rock Cafe will foray into electronic music,” said Vaswani. He also added that ‘Insanium’ will be held on one Saturday every month, where various electronic artists will play a set at various Hard Rock Cafe centres across the country on the same day. The first edition of ‘Insanium’ is scheduled to take place on Saturday 18 July, and will feature artists such as Anish Sood, Big City Harmonics, Blent and many more in cities like Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi.

Bajaao Entertainment has also partnered with sports and entertainment venue, Smaaash in Mumbai to promote its IPs including ‘Urban Assault’, which started in April and the new ‘Smaaash’d’, which starts on Sunday, 19 July. “With Smaaash, we already have a property called ‘Urban Assault’ for our metal aficionados. We, at Bajaao Entertainment, are genre agnostic; we would love to do something that pertains to everyone’s music taste. For the same reason, we have started ‘Smaaash’d’, to showcase the independent music scene in Mumbai,” added Vaswani. The first edition of ‘Smaaash’d’ includes indie artists such as Red Seems Right, Blek, Spud in the Box and others.

To conduct more music showcases around the country, Bajaao Entertainment has also partnered with Pan India Food Solutions Private Limited (Blue Foods), which owns restaurant brands such as Spaghetti Kitchen, Copper Chimney, Gelato Italiano, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Bombay Blue and Noodle Bar among others. “This partnership is one of our largest yet; we are working very hard with every one of Pan India’s brands on exposing its audiences to more varied music around the country,” said Vaswani. The first event from this partnership is called ‘Unplugged Evenings’ at Spaghetti Kitchen in Kolkata with musician Richard Parker, with plans to expand to Gurgaon and cities other than Mumbai.

Bajaao Entertainment also has plans to programme music for venues across the country. This will start from next month and will include programming music for live music venues once a month. These will include venues like The Humming Tree in Bangalore, Social in Delhi and High Spirits in Pune.