MUMBAI: Providing a one-stop destination for independent musicians to sell their music through the platform, OK Listen has grown by leaps in the emerging digital backdrop. With differentiation being the core focus of such platforms now, OK Listen has taken customization a step ahead by partnering with various indie music destinations to develop a unique experience.
Currently boasting of a repertoire of around 200 artistes, the platform has now partnered with another digital destination for Independent music – Artist Aloud to increase the reach of music released by them by building a unique experience through a vanity store, and in turn increasing its catalogue and content offering.
The agreement inked recently is mainly a revenue share deal and will focus on promoting the content by Artist Aloud under one vanity URL dedicatedly designed for them. Currently the URL features nine albums priced affordably between Rs 10-90.
Speaking with Radioandmusic.com, OK Listen co-founder Vijay Basrur said, “We wanted to build a synergy and get the content from their platform onto ours, while also building for them a rich user experience. All the content released by them from now on will be under one vanity URL that has been created for them.”
Apart from that, the companies will also work closely to promote music created by Independent musicians with many initiatives planned in the immediate future. OK Listen is also gearing up to develop a special curated set for users, based on the content released by Artist Aloud.
Moreover, with the third edition of the Artist Aloud Awards on the anvil, Basrur stated that a key initiative will be announced by the end of May surrounding the property.
While building up partnerships to create unique content, OK Listen has also tied up with a host of music labels including Times Music and Asli Music to build similar vanity URLs for each and a few international partnerships to expand its reach across the globe are on the anvil.
The Times Music URL comprises of 10 albums and is in the process of getting in more content for music aficionados. They are also in talks to create some exclusive content exclusively for OK Listen, which will be unveiled later in the month.
With Asli Music too, a similar platform has been built to help people discover more music and promote the artistes through the aggregated content.
“We are giving these labels a platform for the future. In turn, we are getting in a lot more content and helping users discover a lot more music and promote it. So our main role here is aggregating and promoting. This is just the beginning and within the next one month you will see three to four partnerships more,” he stated.
A very noticeable aspect in each of these URLs is the price point which has been kept on the lower range for each album. With revenue generation becoming tough for many digital players, OKListen follows a different aim to attract different price points as people like to pay differently.
Basrur elaborated, “Our revenue growth is good and is based on sales and revenue share deals we enter into. There is clear transparency in the revenue generation and since the independent artiste is also open to experimentation, our price points are differentiated.”
As per their policy, 70 per cent of the sales income is given to the artistes, while it varies for record labels as per the deal. But Basrur affirmed that the labels too receive proportionate revenue from the sales.
Thus aiming to maximize the profits more, the platform has also created various sets of curated content by curators Bobin James (entertainment journalist) and Vipin Nair (music blogger). Handpicking content from the platform’s catalogue, the curated sets are available on special discount for users.
“We aim to increase our catalogue and then curate content to offer to users. These curated sets will encourage people to buy new music,” he mentioned.
As the company goes on a different route to encourage content promotion through national and global tie-ups, they are also steadily formulating new ways of presenting the content to users. Earlier, they had developed an album card where bands could distribute them at gigs and fans could download the album or tracks through a unique code provided on the card.
The initiative attained massive success with the band Lagori selling around 200 cards after their concert. OKListen has now taken this forward by attaching the unique codes of any album that has the ability to go on email, t-shirts, cards and more.