MUMBAI: One of the first players to use the digital space, Saregama India plans to re-enter the arena with a vengeance this year.
The company, that revamped its portal late last year, will launch it in style in the coming months – as the one stop online portal for music lovers. On the cards is not just downloadable music, but entertainment news, movie trailers and syndicated content. One of the first steps towards this has been the slow but steady digitisation of content to suit multiple platforms – the iPod, the mobile and radio. With content in place, the company’s plans to press its digital plans forward in a big way in 2008.
The company, which expects to register a 40 per cent increase in its revenue from digital avenues over last year, attributes the growth to the spurt in the growth of mobile subscribers.
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“People are no longer just downloading the mono and poly tunes. The biggest growth is in the CRBT downloads, they are actually going in for the full song downloads and the perennials (old catalogues) are what click the most,” says Saregama’s digital business head Gautam Sarkar.
Not surprisingly, the company is adding 10,000 to 15000 tracks to its digital store each month, and aims to reach a target of 300,000 digitised tracks by 31 March next year.
By which time the Saregama portal will be ready to service the growing Internet base in India and elsewhere. “Planting content with telcos is the easier step. Before that comes digitisation of the content, which itself is a humungous task,” says chief marketing officer Gavin D’Abreo.
Saregama’s objective while pushing the portal is not just music. “You could do music, you can download music – either to your iPod, laptop or mobile. The second thing on our agenda is to build a community of artistes, that will help proliferate regional content. We are also toying with the idea of an Internet radio service within the music space. It can probably be done through the telcos who will use the internet as a backbone for their own mobile radio service,” says D’Abreo.
The portal will also provide news about the latest in the entertainment world, will syndicate content from a variety of partners. The idea is that the consumer who comes in to spend a certain amount of time, expands that time by exploring our other services. “There could be content in the form of movies, movie trailers, it could be licensed content from other labels too. We have already licensed close to two million tracks of music content which is part of my portal. Having just Saregama titles just won’t work. We may have 50 per cent of the archives of music done in India, but you have to keep adding content that the consumer may be interested in,” he adds.
Whether it will be a download model or streaming model will be decided with time.
Saregama was one of the first in the country to use its library online for the innovative concept of Hamara CD, which allowed users to select songs of their choice and order for customised CDs. The new portal will now allow you to download, order for a DVD or CD as HamaraCD will get clubbed into the same portal. HamaraCD will suddenly have a bigger base of people to talk to,” says D’Abreo.
Excerpts of a chat with Saregama chief marketing officer Gavin D’Abreo
Why does Saregama feel the need to be more aggressive in the digital arena this year?
Today, the physical sales of music have stabilised. But the digital space is where the real growth comes in. with more and more radio companies coming in, more telcos taking the VAS route, more Net companies wanting to use content from us, digital is going to fuel growth.
While the Internet could be one of the key drivers of growth, it is also the place that is throwing up newer questions for the industry – should you allow download of content, should you allow DRM or DRM free content, how do you use social networking sites for your content are questions that will not get answered very soon.
But we have to be present in the space to keep pace and evolve with the changes coming in. Planting content with telcos is the easier step. Before that comes digitisation of the content, which itself is a humungous task.
The clear objective this year is that, now that our content is available in a format that can be tweaked for various kinds of uses, we have created calendars to suit the purposes of companies. For example, requisite marketing programmes have been created, say for instance when a telco wants to run content on Rabindranath Tagore in April or May, the relevant content is already in place.
Will Saregama continue to cash in on its trove of archives or will the focus move to new acquisitions?
While new content is popular, it is also true that it gets pirated faster. Whereas, the content we have is something that can be fully exploited over the years. While everyone may say that the youth is the primary target for the telcos, the telcos also have a large base of users that is non youth. Around 70 per cent of the current telco base is not the 15 to 22 year olds, though 10 years from now, that pattern might change.
So, while new Hindi film music may work in certain markets, you will find that there is a huge market for regional music in many other places. And we are one of the large players in regional content. We have close to 22000 artistes who work with us or have worked with us. So, we have the largest content in Tamil Nadu, like the legendary M S Subbulakshmi only worked with us.
Today, in the Internet space, our content is plugged onto iTunes, we have also launched a beta version of our portal.
Our objective on the portal is not just music, we want it to be the one stop shop for entertainment. You could do music, you can download music – either to your iPod, laptop or mobile. The second thing is to build a community of artistes, that will help proliferate regional content. We are also toying with the idea of an Internet radio service within the music space. It can probably be done through the telcos who will use the internet as a backbone for their own mobile radio service.
The portal will also provide news about the latest in the entertainment world, we will syndicate content from a variety of partners. The idea is that the consumer who comes in to spend a certain amount of time, expands that time by exploring our other services. There could be content in the form of movies, movie trailers, it could be licensed content from other labels too. We have already licensed close to two million tracks of music content which is part of my portal. Having just Saregama titles just won’t work. We may have 50 per cent of the archives of music done in India, but you have to keep adding content that the consumer may be interested in.
Will Hamara CD become a part of the larger portal?
We had a steady base of customers for Hamara CD, but it was never marketed as a property. Yet, it worked not just at the corporate level, but among a lot of individuals. Now, we will have a warehouse of content, a platform to publish that content and report that content and thirdly, it will be done on the Net, the mobile and on radio. Right now, we are going with the download model instead of the streaming model. The beta version is being tested with only a few thousand tracks at this time. But by July, we hope to have more than a million tracks.
The portal will allow you to download, order for a DVD or CD as HamaraCD will get clubbed into the same portal. HamaraCD will suddenly have a bigger base of people to talk to. So, we will fulfil the entire discovery process that a consumer seeks on the Net, and will also fulfil the orders that he places with us.
We would stand out distinctly thanks to the quality and variety of music we offer. We would also offer artworks of pieces of music, probably not available anywhere else.
You have also experimented with kiosks that would sell single tracks..
We started the experiment with a company called NXP, which put up the 25 kiosks, and Saregama was responsible for aggregating the content from various sources, which would then be offered to consumers via connectivity at various places like malls and airports. We are still in a beta phase. You need to consolidate the content before launching in a big way. It created a lot of excitement in the markets it launched, because for every handset that was sold, two tracks were being bought. But the concept will work only when we have aggregated all the content.
Is Saregama going slow on fresh movie acquisitions in favour of capitalising on its library?
Acquisitions will now happen only if there’s a revenue model that can be spun out of the content.
The business model value for the content we own is very high than the value for content that is being played today because the ‘latest hits’content is very perishable. But older catalogue content is not perishable. Great content is eternal, and it works well even with younger generations.
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