DIGITAL MUSIC

With more and more people preferring digital downloads of their music,most musicians are making a beeline to make their music available to the masses via the digital channels.Digital music market is huge.It is a billion dollar industry.However,digital music has its drawbacks and complexities.

While mobile companies ( providing mobile digital downloads esp. Telecom companies like Airtel,Vodafone etc ) draws legal contract only with larger catalogues eg. 50 tracks+, vendor companies like hungama who has VAS services pays infrequently ( at unpredictable long gaps that can be well over 6+months at times ) to the content provider/producer although they do provide the publicity. Many take in the losses and opt for the publicity that they provide/get ( through their various affiliate websites ( or their partner radio stations ) as well as music download shops in the telecom company's mobile homepage ).

It is always better to have contract directly with the telecom company as the middle men i.e hungama eats up a large chunk of the revenue,but at the same time that route has got lot of legal hassles. So,which ever way it is,its the others who benefit the most with your content.

Nonetheless,I had approached Hungama to make my music available through their vast digital download network.They wanted to take it,but since it was a one album project,they asked me to send it through the Krunal music catalogue.Krunal had only manufactured the physical CDs,and also had already taken their commission from it,so it didnot make sense to send my work through their catalogue and let them take an extra profit from it.

So,I decided to cancel the idea altogether and make my catalogue grow a bit before letting it available in the mobile digital market.However,I have explored other digital options like itunes,amazon etc and have found a huge audience there too.But since mobile digital market is the future I cannot ignore it either for long.

Itunes digital are also somewhat ironic too.A single track is 99cents in itunes which is almost half the price of the full album in the local currency.So it would make lot of sense for people to buy the full physical CD in a much lower price instead of a pricy digital download like itunes.However,mobile digital is priced flexibly.Some tracks are as low as Re1 if you purchase a package or a single track can be around Rs.10-15.Rarely does it go up higher than that.And people it seems,are ready to pay that much for a single track and download easily into their phones without the hassle of going to music shop,purchasing the CD,uploading the tracks into a computer then converting to mp3 file before again transporting the same to a mobile device through a USB cable.
So,clearly people have chosen the convinient option and clearly digital music is here to stay.

How mobile digital download works : Once your songs are approved you make a contract with
Hungama giving them the digital rights to your music.Hungama in turn has tie up with all the major telecom companies with a 50-50 share revenue model.Hungama then uploads the music into their server and allots a unique code per song.They also submit the tracks along with the codes to all the telecom companies,who then flashes these songs and their codes to the customers.The customer downloads the song by sending the song code to a 5 digit unique number which belongs to hungama.This number is same for all the telecom providers,so whichever service a customer uses they can simply use this number to download the song.Every download gets recorded by the telecom company,and the money per track is deducted from the user's sim card.Later,the telecom company shares the recorded reports of the downloads with the vendor ie. Hungama and revenue sharing is done.
The artist/producer gets their share in the end only.



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