Jesse Jaspal Singh recounts his experience of The International Young Music Entrepreneur of the Year ceremony

I have been to London several times before but this time when my plane touched down on Heathrow on June 20th I felt different. I had arrived as a winner of the IYMEY (The International Young Music Entrepreneur of The Year) award from India. This award, in its inaugural year, has been set up by the British Council across ten countries namely Argentina, Nigeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Estonia, Kenya, Poland, Venezuela and India. It recognises talent in each of these countries among individuals who have contributed towards development of music by challenging conventional norms and breaking boundaries.

Over the next ten days the ten of us were taken to meet key music industry people across Manchester and London. It was a whirlwind of a trip. We met some of the best brains behind the UK music scene including club owners, venue managers, artist managers, record labels, arts councils, promotion companies and the like.

The British Council organised our visit to the 02 Wireless Festival at Hyde Park and we got to watch the likes of Gnarls Barkley, DJ Shadow, Damian Marley, Pharell and Flaming Lips. But the highlight of the evening was Massive Attack - I couldn’t believe that I was watching them live, I felt like a teenager, I sang all the songs word to word till I lost my voice.

We had one weekend off to explore London I also decided to take the nine others out for a club night of one of the artists I manage - Bobby Friction. So off we went to 333 that Saturday night. My colleagues were exposed to the Brit Asian sound full-on for the first time and got to check out Bobby Friction, Hard Kaur and Dee from Shiva Soundsystem.

It was an awesome experience interacting and spending time with the others and learning about what they do in their respective countries. Each one of us did something different for e.g. Momo from Morocco ran the biggest music festival in North Africa, Mareck from Poland was the biggest promoter of Hip Hop in Poland, Heidy from Estonia was Editor in Chief of the biggest FM Radio station and also a DJ, Eric from Kenya was a singer/songwriter. I was someone who promoted leftfield music in India and hence my profile was completely different than the others, I was more of a talent spotter and than a business manager of the artist and a music marketing consultant on a project to project basis. All of them were very surprised that my work did not involve Bollywood as that’s what seemed to be the association that most of the western world has with India and that’s the mindset I had gone there to break.

Being winners from our own countries was not enough as each of us had to present to a jury for them to decide on an overall winner.

The jury comprised of

Doug D’Arcy
Doug D'Arcy entered the music business in 1968, as a booking agent and manager at the Ellis-Wright Agency, which later became Chrysalis. He worked at Chrysalis Records as the Managing Director, becoming President in 1986. After its sale to EMI, Doug started Dedicated Records, a joint venture with BMG, featuring Spacemen 3, Spiritualized, Cranes and in the US, Beth Orton.

Doug currently owns a music consultant, management and investment company, Songlines. He was a founding board member of the Association of Independent Music.

Chris Greenwood
Chris Greenwood is Music & Marketing Director of the Cantaloupe Group. Cantaloupe Group was founded in 1995 with the creation of the Cantaloupe bar & restaurant in Shoreditch, London. When opened, Cantaloupe was sole pioneer in this part of the city, winning the coveted Time Out Bar of The Year 1997 and setting a trend that has seen a multitude of new venues springing up over the last seven years. Soon after they began development of Cargo, (launched November 2000): a different concept to Cantaloupe yet still welcoming with a vibrant urban style. The 500 capacity Cargo venue offers a ground breaking combination of cutting edge live music and DJs, a street food restaurant and two bars underneath three reclaimed Victorian railway arches. It has become renowned across the Capital for the quality of its music, as well as its food and drink (runner-up in the Time Out Bar Awards 2001).

Gary McClarnan
Gary is a serial entrepreneur who started out studying Engineering technology and design in the early 1980s, then moved on to photography. He contributed to the definitive Hacienda book, 'The Hacienda Must Be Built', and then joined the team at Mixmag, taking it from DJ fanzine to leading club culture glossy. Alongside this, he turned a failing rock venue in Stoke, Shelley's, into a leading dance venue and took DJ Sasha from bedroom DJ to national icon. In 1992 he went to University to study business and finance. In 1995, Gary started an artist management and event production company in Manchester and discovered DJ Mr Scruff, who is still a client, and has helped him reach international fame, selling over 500,000 records. He's produced events for Adidas, Manchester City Council, Arts Council of England, the BBC, Jone's Laing Lascelle, PRS, Penguin and others and synchronised my clients' music to Adidas, Virgin Atlantic, Mastercard, Volvo, Lincoln, Pathe Films, Universal Films, BBC, C4 Films, Bacardi, Accors Hotels, BT and more. In 1997 Gary joined the Music Mangers forum board, later becoming 'Head of New Strategies' (1999), and contributed to the development of Mpeg4 and Mpeg7.

Leah Zakks
Acting Director, Music, British Council
The announcement of the final prize came at the reception at London Calling hosted by the UKTI (UK Trade and Investment) Each of the judges read out a citation on each of the finalists and then came the shocker: owing to the high calibre of inaugural candidates, Leah Zakss, Acting Director of Music at the British Council, made a surprise announcement at the ceremony: Due to the difficulty of the judges’ decision they chose to also recognise two other ‘specially commended’ finalists: Jesse Singh from India and Yoris Sebastian from Indonesia. So instead of one winner, there were three. The main prize went to Momo from Morocco whereas Yoris and I got £3000 each to be spent on a music project that builds the relationship between our country and the UK. I couldn’t believe it.

We were all happy for each other, the ten of us had become family by the end of it and we all celebrated that night at the pub across the road Coal Hole. As Emmem Ema from Nigeria put it perfectly “I could never have imagined that I could fall in love with nine people at the same time.”