Artist Agency RE:Play’s Nitin Kandhari on Touring, Music Business and Being a Fan First

Nitin Kandhari was recently on tour with hip-hop star MC Stan, hot on the heels of the rapper winning reality show Bigg Boss and making his way across the country. While the tour was not without controversy – an activist group disrupted his Indore show – Kandhari says it offered eye-opening insights for him as a co-founder artist agency RE:Play.

Kandhari says it was a fun and hectic tour, especially in terms of catering to a wholly different crowd. “80 percent of the audience are cult fans, and they will not probably show up for any other artists. They’ll go mad about just getting a photo with him and that’s about love and affection,” he says. The agency head directly addresses how some groups had a problem with Stan’s music being replete with explicit language, saying that the rapper in fact supports Hindi language through his music.

RE:Play – which was launched in September last year as an expansion of artist management company Represent – found a way to reach a wholly different audience with Stan. Kandhari, for his part, has worked in the music management and artist agency space for over a decade now and co-founded RE:Play with Aayushman Sinha in order to streamline live shows for artists. Kandhari explains the difference between being an artist manager – one who looks into brand deals, social media and more image-related concerns – and an artist agency. “The agent’s job is to make sure that the artist is getting the best live shows possible in the country and abroad,” he says.

Presently, their roster includes singer-songwriters such as Akanksha Bhandari, Anuv Jain and Hanita Bhambri, electronic artists like Lost Stories and Nina Shah, rocker Raman Negi and pop artist Zaeden. There’s no doubt that it’s been a dynamic decade in the music industry so far, with Kandhari himself going from working in EDM circles to now expanding into hip-hop, pop and indie. The constant, according to him, is that the agent is always the biggest fan of the artist so that they can “understand the music or the type of shows they should play.”

Artist agency companies and management has become less of a gamble, according to Kandhari and it’s more of a “calculated risk.” While they’re focused on providing specific live experiences for each of their artists, RE:Play also relies on local promoters and has a close-knit technical team to ensure they dissect and improve upon every aspect with each gig. “My goal with this business is to make artist agenting a business that stands among all the other highly coveted jobs that people want to pursue,” Kandhari says. He adds with a laugh, “At the same time, I want to make sure all my clients are happy and rich.”