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Official Gig Poster

Live Banned’s Social Experiment

Saturday’s CounterCulture gig saw Live Banned take the stage for what to be a prank. Almost three weeks prior to the show, the event was created online, spawning awareness of an act that was to play with Live Banned on the same day. This ‘lively bunch of youths’ from Pondicherry, hailing from Lyon, were called Panchamrutha Acoustic, and were to play a set on the same day. This acoustic band did not have a Facebook page, and little was known about them. A week prior to the show, a page was made, with as minimal information provided as possible, but which still, incredibly, got  80 likes very quickly.

Live Banned and the Panchamrutha Acoustic

At the show, it was finally revealed that Panchamrutha Acoustic were in fact a hoax, a dummy band created to prove an artistic point via social experimentation. Live Banned found that there was an extra amount of interest being generated for this so called ‘underground French act’, and that this was an unfair amount of interest compared to the waves that local bands make. Their point was to show how the general audience typically behaves when it comes to live events, and the kind of support that artists receive, or don’t receive. Click here to see their response after the show.

The format in which this whole charade was carried out is quite daring and clearly required planning, including the help of the people from CounterCulture. It neatly showed how the general audience are susceptible to accept almost anything for granted, and not support local music nearly as much as they should. The vocalist Amrit Rao had posted his observations on the ‘test’ a day after the gig. Click here to read it. He observed that the online hype created around the event was actually enough to get such a vested interest in Panchamrutha Acoustic that some people had even claimed to have heard them before.

LIVE Banned’s response after the show.

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