| Flagging
off the discussion, Hungama Mobile MD and CEO Neeraj Roy observed that in the
digital revolution that is taking the world by storm, music is the most promising
category. "It is driving convergence and there are two key-driving factors.
One is the growth in mobile, PC and IPTV presence and secondly networks are becoming
faster. About 150 songs can be downloaded per second on networks like Verizon
and SingTel," he said. Akamai
Technologies head media and entertainment Arjun Pratap said, "I think physical
sales will not be overtaken by digital sales. But look at the figures - we deliver
about 2 billion songs for iTunes annually. That's about 10 per cent of the $35
billion global music market. Importantly, consumption has gone up 5-6 times since
the digital revolution came in." People
Infocom CEO Manoj Dawane gave an Indian perspective on the mobile value-added-services
(VAS) sector. "Consumption has gone up 27 times and a large part of this
is coming from the B and C class centres across the country." However,
he said that regional music is an area that could spurt the growth even further.
"In the coming days, about 70 per cent of digital music consumption - be
it caller tunes, ringtones and other music VAS is going to come from smaller cities.
Digital content can be monetised more than ever before." However
music director Shamir Tandon said that Indian record labels had been slow to adapt
to digitalisation, hence piracy had become rampant across the music industry.
He further pointed out, "It is sad that in the midst of all this, a fair
share of revenue is not percolating to the end creator of music. This has always
been an issue and it is discouraging people from taking up artistic pursuits."
The
discussion then veered to the topic of digital rights management (DRM) wherein
Tandon presented an example of EMI-Virgin, a music label he had earlier been associated
with. "We launched copy protected CDs for our music, and sales did go up
globally for some time. But today the consumer wants to keep his music on all
possible devices. Hence we had to push back non-DRM CDs into the market."
He however insisted that from a record label perspective, a DRM system was a must.
Adding
to this, Roy said, "Fighting music piracy is a question of prioritisation.
We do not know what will eventually happen to physical sales. Today brands are
shifting more towards lifestyle media and digital music plays a very important
role in this." He
further said, "Its a great time to discover content. Audio and video search
has improved drastically on web and mobile, thanks to fingerprinting technology.
Try searching for a George Bush blooper, you'll get a million results."
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