Culture Community Tilt Is Scaling Up

The last time we spoke to Mumbai-based event agency/culture community Tilt was in 2019 when their open jam nights across the city were taking off. Since then, the company has grown through the pandemic, and we recently caught up with them to find out all that they’ve been up to. In this interview with Rolling Stone India, co-founder Kaelyn D’Souza talks to us about how Tilt has grown, the work they are doing with artists, future plans and more. Read below:

What have the last three years been like at Tilt?

We raised close to ₹50000 for artist welfare during the pandemic, created an offering called Culture Pods to help corporate employees grow, get closer together, be more empathetic and thrive using art, worked with artists with the merch for their album releases, integrated dancers and dance concepts into our event lineup, conducted Jams with dancers to showcase the inherent linkage between live music and dance and we’re even trying to find a format where the two can sustainably co-exist in the venue and other live circuits.

We even have integrated Melo and Choira to ensure that via the jams serious musicians can now track and record and digitally distribute their music at free or discounted rates. To spread sonic literacy, we’ve tied up with Sound Monk to ensure each jam has instruments available at the venue rather than the original Bring Your Own Instruments. Through our extremely successful indie jams, we’ve been putting out that there’s always a space for originality and musicians to be themselves.

As Tilt is a social entrepreneurship venture, we’ve begun tying up with some of Mumbai’s best music schools like Whistling Woods and Sound Monk Music School to ensure that students get access to real-life gigging experiences via showcases at the jam. Currently, we’re in conversation with labels to push Indie Music at the grassroots level. We’ve even provided more than 50 paid gigging opportunities for our community.

How has the community grown since you began?

We started off with just a handful of people but today we’re a fam of 3100 plus. In addition, today our fam doesn’t just include musicians and music lovers but also game changers; ad sync deal people, record label personnel, festival programmers, entrepreneurs, artistic and travel influencers, corporates and other creatives such as designers, writers, dancers, etc. We’ve also been fortunate to have many people resonate with the cause and volunteer their time and resources which has enabled us to grow more than we can imagine. While we always knew that our community would be sacred, today we can proudly say that our fam is the lifeblood of Tilt and we’ll be doing everything in our power to create more opportunities for everyone to succeed.

What can you tell me about Tilt 4.0?

In a nutshell, Tilt 4.0 is our attempt at making the industry holistically self-sustainable, optimized, exciting and fun. Pursuing an artistic career is risky. There’s no guide, no manual and no help. This makes artists operate from a place of fear which hampers their mental health, interpersonal relationships and above all – their craft. Through our unique offerings such as drop-shipping merch, financial investment and accounting assistance along with training, shoots, branding, marketing and gigging help, we aim to lower this risk with Tilt 4.0.

What are the plans going forward?

Tilt is equal parts social and an entrepreneurial venture. With that in mind, we aim step-by-step to become the voice that embodies the soul of artists across the country starting with the musicians of Mumbai. We aim to do this through debates, talks, conversations, training, unique events and our offerings. Further, our goals lie in creating social platforms where creative, logical and people of all sorts and kinds can come together to connect, find a place that they can call home, discover new things, challenge their beliefs and grow. As we grow, we aim to bring all arts closer and tie them together like the beautiful bouquet of flowers that they are. And while we’re small today which makes it difficult to act on the entirety of this vision, we’re committed to working towards these targets with a passion, fire and step-by-step pathway like no other.