MUMBAI: The fight against piracy is gaining traction, but these were early days and guard could not be dropped, Indian Music Industry’s (IMI) general secretary Savio D’Souza revealed at Radioandmusic.com’s recently concluded Nokia Music Connects 4 in Mumbai.

Speaking on ‘Monetizing Piracy’, D’Souza said that while the IMI and its Mobile Music Exchange (MMX) initiative that was launched in 2009 had strong fundamentals and finances, ‘teething troubles’ were yet to be sorted out.

“The IMI was started to help members make legitimate revenues and our MMX was launched (in 2009) to prevent mobile phone sellers from illegally downloading songs, and to legitimize them,” D’Souza said.

Out of a loss of around Rs 12 billion the industry had incurred in the past year, digital format accounted for around Rs 3 billion. Any content that is offered without a valid license amounts to piracy.

D’Souza said that one of the problems that MMX faced was that many music labels were hedging their bets on how to tackle digital piracy. “A lot of the members are still sitting on the fence, which is a major stumbling block. People need to join and support the organization. To combat piracy, you need enforcement to push the business model,” he said.

Over the past four years, the MMX created 8,000 legitimate music dealers to whom licenses that adhered to the Copyright act were issued in areas where the IMI operated. The service was initially rolled out in Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and West Bengal and has today reached a record number of approximately 13,000 licenses acquired by shopkeepers across the country. The MMX drive earned gross revenues of approximately Rs 145 million during the same period and also saved the industry Rs 200-220 million in potential lost revenues in the process.

“We are creating 8,000 music dealers each year. The issue today is not whether revenues have been collected; it is about how we distribute it to members. We need to find ways to distribute the revenue in a transparent way. But that is an internal matter. The ‘currency’ is new so this are the teething troubles, but we will complete it by the end of 2012,” he assured.

D’Souza informed that the MMX drive would be intensified in the states it was operating in. “We aim to grow revenues from 3-5 per cent to 10 percent. We also plan to penetrate states like Orissa and Kerala,” he said.