Saregama’s online store has gone live, with an initial database of 40,000 songs. The tracks are priced at Rs. 12 each, and Saregama has plans to scale up to 4.76 million music tracks online, believed to be be India’s biggest music archive. Mint adds that the company has digitized 300,000 songs and recordings since 2001; most importantly, 60 percent of Saregama’s business is generated by the old repertoire. Apparently, Saregama has stopped bidding aggressively for new content, picking up just 10-15 percent of new music rights. This reduces financial risk, but conversely, Saregama also misses out on potential blockbusters. They’d focused more on distribution - retail stores and corporate clients - since it’s owned by the RPG Group…but physical sales have been declining, hence the attempt at online play. The company’s publishing income has gone up by 132 percent because of FM stations and mobile users. More at FE.

I’d love to know how Saregama arrived at a pricing of Rs. 12/song. Strangely, the album for Maine Pyar Kiya is priced at Rs. 132, Rs. 12 more than what you would pay to buy each of the 10 songs individually. Most other albums appear to be correctly priced. The content is DRM protected, and only windows compatible (“This site does not support Macintosh users”), though the site does not specify whether the content can be copied to more than one device. I disliked the site design, and splash screens are pointless and outdated. The site has a couple of magazines - the music focused mag.e.zine is all right, but embedding Time Out within a frame in the site defies reason.

The Saregama portal has limited music, but a user doesn’t really know or care which label owns the music. So someone looking for music from, say, Om Shanti Om is likely to be disappointed. A store from each label doesn’t make much sense (though that would create an opportunity for a meta-search around music)—I think there needs to be an independent music store that aggregates content from all the labels…Question is, will the labels be willing to relinquish control?

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