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News |  24 Mar 2014 20:20 |  By RnMTeam

Believe Digital building their team in Mainland China

Digital businesses in the Asian market are growing, especially the strong growth in the music subscription space. According to a recent study, growth will be seen in certain developing markets where iTunes has relatively recently arrived — notably countries in South East Asia. Making space for overseas digital business to expand in India, one such business that has spread its wings in Asian markets like Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Philippines and Thailand, is Believe Digital. Now, after partnering with Saregama India it is looking forward to strengthening its hold in India. Believe Digital Asia sales head Sylvain Delange shares with Radioandmusic.com’s Jescilia Karayamparambil his company’s plans with Saregama catalogue and Asian market.

Excerpts:

Talking about the partnership with Saregama, how do you plan to distribute their catalogue internationally?

The catalogue of Saregama is rich and covering a large scope of the Indian music history itself. We are very excited to start distributing this catalogue worldwide. Obviously, we want to make sure that the catalogue reaches out to the widest audience. In each territory our local teams will promote it to Indian music lovers, Indian people all around the world, but we also want to introduce it to an audience that is not familiar with this amazing music legacy. We will make this content available throughout all major full track download and streaming services, iTunes of course, but also Spotify, Deezer, Google Play, Amazon Mp3, and the several hundred of services Believe is currently delivering to.

What is the timeframe of this deal?

We will be working on a long term relationship. It is important for us to build a strong relationship with our partner. A high quality catalogue such as Saregama’s really deserves that we spend time on it to put it at its best and to understand the depth of such a large catalogue.

What is the strength of this catalogue?

The strength of this catalogue is definitely its richness. This catalogue literally covers the whole Indian music history. It is actually a great responsibility that we have to make sure that such legacy is made available all around the world to all type of listeners and we are really proud to be part of this. Actually, part of this catalogue has never been made available on digital and there are still plenty of hidden treasures that we are looking forward to releasing.

What are the weaknesses of the Saregama catalogue that you would have to work on?

It might sounds na?ve to say that, but for me there are no weaknesses in this catalogue. The patrimonial content is here. The main question is what should we do to improve the user experience and the way a listener will enjoy this catalogue on his favourite music service?

Believe Digital has invested a lot to improve the way the Indian catalogue is made available and displayed on stores. We have a dedicated team of Indian music experts that literally look at each release, metadata’s and artwork to make sure it is perfect when it goes live on stores.

Top of the line metadata means easier to find content, better user experience, and eventually increased satisfaction. Improve user experience also goes through populating artistes pages with biographies, pictures or releasing extra content like interviews or unreleased material that make the user discover and go deeper in each artiste’s world.

This catalogue is really exciting for us as we see a lot of new avenues to explore and we believe this will largely contribute to the way the whole Indian content will be perceived in the future.

From when will the catalogue be available on various platforms?

We are currently in the final technical process of delivery. Both tech teams are literally working night and day to make all this available in the coming weeks. But new content and previously unreleased content will keep coming every week.

For how long had you been in touch with the company before signing the deal?

Our companies have been in touch regularly for the past years. But we mainly started discussing right after the Nokia Music Connect Event.

Talking about Believe digital, what is its plan in the Asian market?

The past 12 months have been very exciting for Believe in Asia. I have been personally in charge of opening Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Philippines and Thailand and within a few months we have signed more than 150 distribution contracts in the area. We also just put our first step in Mainland China where we are building a team.

Our strength is to build local teams in each territory with people that clearly understand the music industry and the challenges that are brought by the digital business. Our main concern is to provide to our partner a combination of our 10 years global digital expertise with a local in-depth understanding of their home markets.

All around Asia, we are working with all kind of labels. From very strong and established labels like Universal Music Philippines to smaller very high quality labels like KittyWu in Singapore. We also work with independent artistes directly when they are looking for the right partner to help them take full control of their digital strategy.

We know that to really see a strong improvement in user experience on all digital music services, we need to have all catalogues available on all platforms. If this means dig into very old catalogue and rip vinyls, we already did it and we are ready to do it again.

What are the strengths of this market for businesses based overseas?

For me, Asia is an amazing area where music is deeply rooted in all cultures. But except for a very limited number of artistes that succeed in getting out of Asia. Asian music is actually not really known outside of the continent. We look at it as a great opportunity to raise the attention of world music listeners and those looking for never heard before sounds. It is great to give the opportunity to Dangdut to reach outside of Indonesia, or to give OPM a chance to reach European listeners. Our secret dream would be to break an Indonesian or an Indian artiste in France or in the UK.

Actually, we try not to look at Asia as an overseas market. We want to be part of Asia, and Believe being a ‘multi-local’ company we think of Asia as our home market. The whole Asian team is actually from Asia.

How well do you understand the indie space in India when it comes to artistees?

We are of course exploring the indie space in India. VivekRaina who is our country manager for India has long experience in this field and he is the one who is providing us the expertise on this regard. We know that this space is growing pretty fast for the last couple of years. However, what we have realised is that there is more focus on live performances, festivals (which of course is the main revenue generator for artistes). There is no limit to the talent in India. We have also realised that quite a few artistes (including some big ones) have the ability to create huge fanbases, but the big question is how do they use the fanbase to help them create their digital music strategy (aside from traditional Bollywood or Film Music) on what they are really good at and wants to do themselves. Hopefully we should be able to get to work with some good artistees and probably showcase what we can do for them. We have already partnered with labels like Think Music and AP International (Anak) to name but a few.

With offices in the US, how do you plan to grow in the market?

The US is already a very significant market for the sales of Believe distributed content. Our focus is to export music to the US and build our team around the core of trade marketing, social media, digital marketing and digital advertising and sync.

In the US, we mirror our approach globally. We work with all services from big to small, with a remit to grow our labels revenue across all retailers. The quality of our content allows us to gain exposure on projects which do not necessarily have a PR and Marketing footprint in the US market and because our staff is music lovers at heart, retailers trust our submissions. Additionally, while we have a focus on new release projects, a significant focus is also placed on campaigning catalogue. We are very proactive in this area, and our creative approach allows us to expose catalogues to new audiences.

Will we hear about any new deals and partnerships happening in the near future?

Of course. We are strengthening our position everyday in each territory. There a couple of very exciting partnerships that we are currently working on. We are really looking forward tell everyone.

How much do you plan to grow this year, after all the new partnerships?

Our main objective is to achieve a leading position and become the number one indie digital distributor in Asia. Not because we only want to get bigger and bigger, but because we really believe that our very advanced technology, scalability, expertise and transparency on reporting can actually have an impact on the Asian market itself and help bring the whole region to a higher level of standard in terms of digital distribution. We obviously want to be involved actors and contribute to the take off of the digital music industry in Asia.

Games