MUMBAI: By now, Smridhi Sharma has learnt to carry earplugs to concerts.Booming speakers have made the 23-year-old marketing professional want to protect her eardrums.Three Saturdays ago, though, volume wasn’t the problem.She winced as sections of the audience heckled an indie singer who was opening for a bigger act.“The noise drowned him out.” No wonder Sharma treasures a gig she attended in a fairy-lit fifth-floor room in Navi Mumbai months ago.There, a few dozen strangers sat on the floor and swayed to an indie band whose name, ‘A Day Old Sushi’, they had never heard.“The conversations between the sets were as memorable as the music,” says Sharma, who ended up talking about life and friendship with a stranger she now chats with daily.Connections, friendships and even love are among the happy side-effects of invite-only house concerts that are increasingly offering an alternative night out.Even as live-music venues contend with rising rents and audiences tire of high-octane shows, intimate gigs are finding new currency with their promise of paid gigs and attentive audiences for young artists and noise-cancelling avenues of engagement for listeners.At Rs 1,200 to Rs 2,000 a ticket, collectives such as Tiny Room Concert (TRC), Sofar Sounds and supper clubs such as Around The Table (ATT) turn homes into venues where 20 to 60 strangers gather for food, music and conversation.Reminiscent of traditional baithaks, “the format isn’t new, but it feels newly relevant”, say ATT founders Ishita and Rukaiya.“People are craving a way to make friends and find their community,” agrees Chyna Brackeen, vice president of Experiences at Sofar Sounds, which began in Bengaluru in 2015 with the idea of bringing music into intimate spaces for meaningful engagement.In the last decade, Sofar Sounds has grown from four or five Indian cities to roughly 15.“Sofar began because musicians were tired of being shoehorned into noisy venues meant to entertain a crowd that wasn’t really listening,” says Ankit Dayal of Sofar Bombay, which has staged nearly 90 shows, drawing from over 500 artists across India over the last decade.“Best friends and even life partners have met at Sofar shows,” says Dayal even as TRC founder Aditya Patil tells us about four unintentional couplings that have happened so far.Started last year by three former event planners who “realised club culture was dying”, TRC has hosted events in villas in Karjat and flats in Navi Mumbai.“Clubs were full of people getting drunk and dancing, and there was no respect for the artists or the DJs,” says Aditya Patil, one of the three Gen Z cofounders of TRC.The appeal lies in what these gatherings remove too.“There’s no pressure to dress up,” says TRC cofounder Pratham.“The events are also great for introverts and safer for women, as we offer the option to stay back,” adds Pratham who has seen lawyers, techies and others break the ice at the venue.TRC had invited the band A Day Old Sushi, named because “sushi tastes better the day after”, to play after watching them win a competition in Terna Engineering College.Though initially concerned about the drum kit drawing complaints, band members say “the acoustics were “just perfect”.“We played Punjabi songs that had the crowd dancing until it turned into a house party”, recalls vocalist Ayush Sawant. “Even the DJ was vibing with us.”That search for connection drives ATT, host of six living-room concerts since Ishita and Rukaiya started the supper club in May 2024.Guests eat first; once music begins, service stops.“You’re sharing silence,” the founders say, “listening together, noticing the same moments in a song.”ATT has settled on 20 to 35 people as the sweet spot.That way, “it becomes less of a performance and more of a shared experience,” says Ishita.What guests are paying for, she adds, isn’t the music alone. It’s being welcomed into someone’s home and watching an artist perform a few feet away, “things you simply can’t replicate in a traditional venue.”Besides a chance to “be vulnerable and transparent” and preview unreleased material, artists even bag gigs.Singer Avantika Ganguly, who has performed at ATT events alongside bassist Sayar Mitra, has since been booked for birthdays by listeners.The economics is “a win-win for us,” says Ganguly, who has felt the pinch of time caps and high rents in studios.Challenges though remain: acoustics, neighbours, floor seating among others.Mumbai’s shortage of spaces does not help.Dayal admits to being “a little jealous” of sister chapters in Hyderabad, Goa and Kochi, which stage shows in heritage properties.Profits, too, are hard to come by but some have started measuring success in other ways.The morning after a recent Navi Mumbai apartment concert, Pratham of TRC texted a male attendee who had come in with a woman colleague: “Hope you enjoyed the night?” The reply came back: “Yes… thank you. I finally got the courage to confess my feelings to her after I got home.”
