Music is not always bought authentically, especially in India. Piracy is prevalent, be it in selling Hindi movie mp3s, dvds or latest games and other softwares. Why do people buy pirated stuff? The answer is the cost. They feel these are exorbitantly high priced. Yes, obviously true when compared to the pirated stuff. All that these people have done is copy on to the cheapest available CD-R or DVD. Digital rights management won’t work in India. With widespread Internet usage, P2P downloads, and with mobile Internet in future this problem is only going to escalate.
In one of my previous posts, music modes, i had mentioned how buying of music has gone down over the years, from cassettes to audio CDs to mp3s. Very very few people buy Hindi movie songs, but many listen to them on their mobile phones, computers, ipods and other players. Piracy is the killer of music industry.
Five years down the line, say by 2012, as the Strategy Analytics study shows about 40% of the mobile phones would be touch-screen based, like the iphone. The figure could be the more or less the same in India at that time or may be a year later to that. At least 80% of the urban Indians would have a music phone that will be able to download music directly through WiFi or 3G/4G. If a service provider would sell a song at Rs.5/-, there would be few buyers. I think music industry can afford to sell songs at Rs.0.99/- per song for streaming or download, and still make profit.
If the service provider is giving out songs at 99 paise, people would not not mind buying original songs. 99 paise may seem too cheap to sell music. But the sheer number of people downloading the songs will out weigh this low download cost. A different strategy like 10 songs per month only for Rs.30 would also attract lots of customers, still selling at a price of Rs.3 per song. The price tag will be in the range of some audio cassettes. Caller tunes are used by virtually everyone, shelling out Rs.30 per month. This when only the caller listens to the music. Now, paying to listen music yourself would not be all that bad, ain’t?
Moser Baer Hindi movie DVDs are selling at Rs.38/- and CDs at Rs.28/- presently. Selling audio at that price makes sense now, ain’t it? I agree they are selling older movies at that price, and obviously not at the day of release. But even by selling audio at atrociously cheap price music industry can make good profits is my argument. Now is a situation where almost no one is buying Hindi music CDs, so this strategy could change the face of music industry.