UTV Motion Pictures, which has been in the business of movie production and distribution for more than 15 years, has now explored a new revenue stream for production houses in India. UTV Motion Pictures has decided to retain the music IP in-house and monetize on the rights. The production house has also entered into a deal with Novex Communications which holds its public performance rights and issues licences for use of its film songs and promos at public events. In a tete-a-tete with Poonam Ahuja, UTV Interactive SVP - voice products and music Lavina Tauro opens up on the business strategy and the idea behind retaining its music IP and monetizing rights. With a strong digital arm and various mediums to exploit music, UTV  will either license the content for a limited period or directly liaise deals with the available mediums.

Excerpts:-

UTV will retain the music IPs of its film ventures and monetize on the rights. What is the idea behind this?

UTV Motion Pictures is an established studio which is into the business of production and distribution of films. Considering we are involved in the process of film making right from the initial stage, we can better leverage the music through various channels/mediums. Retaining our music rights in-house makes logical sense as we believe that in the long run when you have restricted IP, your product thinking is also restricted.

Licensing is another crucial part to this move. Today, the medium to exploit music is beyond physical and for entering into license deals for syndication, on-ground licensing, radio and television; you don’t need to be a music label. As a production house, we would anyway enter into these licensing deals.

UTV has a strong foothold in the digital space with the right partners as well with UTV Interactive, the digital arm of UTV producing content and music being a major part of it. With this strong base we can exploit music to its maximum potential, integrating with the movie promotions.

Also, in terms of television content, 30 per cent of the total inventory of new releases comes from UTV. So it becomes very interesting to hold back rights and then grow the catalogue. We weighed the pros and cons and figured the entire process of licensing deals to different mediums before deciding to retain our IP.

Is this another revenue stream that UTV is exploring?

Music has always been a revenue stream for us. With retaining our IP in-house, we will look at long time monetization.

Will this expand to regional movies also?

Yes, we will be retaining the IP rights for all our South movies as well.

How will UTV interactive market the music of these movies?

Inventory is bought by the UTV Motion Pictures team to promote movies anyways and that inventory is any day more than the song inventory bought by music labels. We will optimize this inventory to promote music across mediums.

Now-a-days music is available free on pirated websites, how is UTV trying to curb music piracy?

Music piracy is a big industry in itself and is only growing by the day.  Due to pirate websites, the monetization over internet gets affected significantly. Within UTV, we have initiated a no-tolerance approach against these websites. With our constant efforts, we have successfully managed to bring down our content from the pirate websites. So, we track it internally and if you check, it would be difficult for you to find songs with IP owned by us, like Delhi Belly, on a pirate website. Most of our songs listed on these websites lead you to a dead link. Due to this, there are a number of pirate websites who have come back to us to enter into legal deals for the content. These websites cannot afford not to have our content because we come up with a full slate year on year.

So, we have ensured that our monetisation is not brought down because of piracy and when we enter into licensing deals, we get better value our content, as it is not freely available.