MUMBAI: Consumption of music has undergone a drastic change with digital platforms garnering revenues for the physical sale hit music industry. Apart from the music industry, the telecom companies, content aggregators and service providers are exploiting the opportunity to monetise 

To gain impetus from the digital platforms, availability of cohesive data is of key importance believes the content aggregators. Also the music industry must tap other media platforms like DTH, idtv instead of just capitalizing on the conventional platforms like mobile and internet 
Observing the current size of digital media, Hungama Mobile CEO Neeraj Roy stated, There are 440 million subscribers and it keeps adding by 10-12 million subscribers each month. In consumption of music on the digital space, according to traffic India is positioned between 2nd and 5th rank... 

Elaborating on the potential, Onmobile Chariman and CEO Arvind Rao said, According to June 2009 statistics, around 10 billion callers played CRBT and there are 40-45 million active CRBT users in India who pay Rs. 45 per month.... Onmobile introduced the �Press * to copy' and �Music search' concepts in the CRBT tunes. By introducing the �Press * to copy' concept, there has been a 40 per cent increase in sales in the past three months and 45 per cent increase in CRBT by �Music search' model. Innovation is the key in exploring CRBT and way to monetize through music....

Rao continued mentioning that 70 per cent of all music downloads constituted of CRBT but lately is slowly getting replaced by full track downloads. With about 90-95 per cent of mobile content driven by Bollywood initially, it is ruled only by 55 per cent of Bollywood today and rest by regional, devotional and non-music content including commentary, jokes etc....
Saregama was the pioneer in digital music in India with their concept of �Hamara CD'. Saregama VP Atul Churamani states, With the CDs declining, the concept of singles will be brought back by CRBT and digitalization and labels should work with younger artists....

Conversing about the road block in consumption of music on digital and mobile platform   Rao asserted, There is no monetization through social networking sites and a revenue generating model should be weaved. There is absence of regular cohesive data on music downloads, it would be helpful for the industry if the reporting from the telcos increases and regular data is provided....

Observing the Indian market, Jonathan Kim the founder of CRBT said, CRBT is at a growing stage in India and can be utilized as an opportunity to promote digital music.

In a geographical diverse country like India, CRBT can also be instrumental in promoting artist development management....

Nokia India marketing director Vineet Taneja suggested that the music industry must think of innovative ways to exploit the digital space rather than focusing only on CRBT. The music industry must work on the eco system around digital music. A combination of offline and online space must be tapped for access to more consumers either on mobile or internet as only 40 million users are active users of GPRS on their handsets....
Agreeing to Taneja, Roy added, The music industry can think of convergence with DTH, idtv and not only focus on mobile and internet to sell music.... Rao points out that the industry would need to build billing model with consumers and the industry hasn't captialised to invest 10,000 crores invested by telecom industry. It might take as long as seven years for the industry to build transparent billing models to consume music on varied platforms....

Suggesting that the industry has witnessed realignment where some streams have generated revenues when some have dried up. There are options like ad funded mobile entertainment, retail industry, collaborations with pirates, global distribution networks and looking at new forms like SD cards, USBs to monetize money for the ailing music industry....