Music 20 Cents a Track in India

xzap writes "Indiatimes.com , an Indian portal is now offering "International Chart-Busting" music for download legally at Rs 10 (20 cents U.S) a song. They say they (through a partner) have tied up with music labels like BMG, EMI, Warner, Tips, Times Music, Lahari, Enrico Hindustan (which is the oldest catalogue of HMV) and Archies Music "." I still believe that if the bigs let us download MP3s for a quarter a track, we'd do it.

They can't extort these people

[sketerpot]

They are doing this in India because they can make more money there by selling the tracks cheaply than overcharging horrendously, as they do in rich countries where they can get away wih it.

If they did something like this in America, I would use it. I would very gladly use it if the monet wet to the musicians via FairTunes (FairTracks?), without the big record companies and the RIAA getting their cut of the loot.

not that different from emusic.com

[ip_vjl]

You can download tracks you want right now.

eMusic's offerings are subscription based, but allow unlimited downloads.

I poked around their site, but don't yet see enough artists/titles in their database to be worth my $9.99/month yet. Too bad. It's sort of a catch-22 for them. Probably need more subscribers to build their collection, but can't get more subscribers until their collection is bigger.

Buying music by the track.

[PhunkyOne]

I think this is an awesome idea. I would drop 50 cents or whatever a track of music. I think there are two problems with this and the weak minded music industry.. First is that they have no way to control us - ie there is no good copy protection (well at least not yet). And hell I would require my right to personal reproduction if I bought the damn track. Secondly musicians would have to work a little harder, I can't think of all that many CDs that I think every song is great. Most of the time when I buy a CD there are a couple of good songs and the rest is fluffy poo. It's disappointing that I have finally just accepted it but for the norm that's the way it is. Of course I think the RIAA is screwing most musicians though so who knows... I for one might even pay a buck a song for music...it's cheap when you think about it...hell they have to pay bandwidth and stuff also and if it was something that I wanted the entire CD I could just buy the entire CD. I wish the Music Industry would just catch on and see how much they are missing out on by everyone having to rely on Morpheus or some other thing like that.

ten cents a pop

[Mr. Slippery]

I still believe that if the bigs let us download MP3s for a quarter a track, we'd do it.

25 cents a track is three bucks for a CD's worth (twelve songs) of music. I can do better than that by clever manipulation of CD clubs [hansen1.com].

I think more like ten cents a pop would defintely do it - think ten bucks, one hundred songs.

And if we cut the middlemen out, most artists would probably end up ahead.

I guess you've never used emusic.com

[allism]

Emusic.com [emusic.com] does something similar, except instead of paying a quarter a track, you pay a monthly fee for unlimited downloads. Before we lost our high-speed bandwidth, we were using this service on a regular basis, even if we found we could get music for free. Not EVERYONE is out to pirate music, I'm just not willing to pay $15-20 for a CD I can't listen to tracks to before buying and may (probably does) suck.

Re:Don't believe it

[Tim C]

its not like CD's where you get something 'better' having an original...

Oh yes you do:

1) Guaranteed quality - no chance of an incomplete, low bit rate copy of a CD that skips part way through the track
2) Guaranteed availability - no searching for tracks, only to find that the host is too busy, just go to the website and there it is, quick 'n' easy
3) Peace of mind - no worries about getting busted for having illegal copies of music on your machine, no worrying about your ISP logging your activity, etc

Okay, so 3) is pushing things a little, but I'd pay for 1) and 2). In fact, I only started using P2P apps to find music when I was unable to find a way to legally, quickly obtain a certain song that I just had to listen to (I get like that sometimes). I couldn't even find anywhere online to buy a CD single of it, let alone download it.

20 minutes later, I'd installed Kazaa (yeah, I know now, and it's history), found it, and downloaded it. At the time, I would have happily paid 2 or 3 pounds sterling (roughly 3-5 dollars, or around 10 times as much as in the article) to have legally downloaded a high quality electronic copy.

Of course there will be people who will download illegal copies regardless of how cheap, quick and easy it is to buy them legally, but I think you'd be surprised how many people will think "how cheap? At that price, I might as well just buy it"

Cheers,

Tim

Re:Har har har.

[evilned]

While I agree that the mp3 piracy most probably will continue even if they did that sort of plan, I personally would pay a quarter a track for a high bitrate mp3 or ogg vorbis file. Secondly, the tracks I get off of the trading services have a bad habit of being cut off early as well. If they give me high bitrate and guaranteed download, thats worth a quarter to me. In fact thats the main reason I still buy CD's, 128 sounds like garbage to me on both ogg and mp3, and 160 is barely usable on ogg, and I always know when I do my own rips, that I am getting the full song. The record companies have to market themselves differently, they have already lost the price war, so the only thing they can market themselves with is quality, but they will be carried kicking and screaming down that path.

RIAA Strawman?

[Corporate Drone]

OK... so you've established that $0.25 / track is worth a whole lot more in India than in the States.

Why, then, are the bells going off in my head, telling me that RIAA will use the argument, "We tried. It cost only a quarter a song , and it failed. See! That business model doesn't work!"

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[SkyLeach]

"You have to remember something about this:

There's a huge difference between 25 cents here and 25 cents in India. The average income is much lower.

For instance, 25 cents in India could equate to around $4.00 there.

Now do you really want to pay four bucks a track? $40.00+ per CD?"

found here [slashdot.org]
and

"Rs = Roupees, current exchange rate is about 1 dollar = 49 Roupees.

Studies vary, but the "average" family income in India works out at about $450 per year." found here [slashdot.org]

Very interesting and informative here. Proves price fixing doesn't it? You see, if the cost/person in Indea compaired to their income is the same as the cost/person in America compared to our income and the cost in the UK/person comapred to their income all work out to about the same rate, then we know they are fixing prices globaly.

I think that 10 Rp to an Indian making $450/year works out at about 22,050 Rp. That means an average income equivalant to the US, about $20k/year/citizen.

IANA Economist, but I would love to know if Indians are having to pay the same amount of their salary for music as Americans would have to pay for their music.

Some sample returns

[mblase]

I'd be very interested in statistics on usage, downloads, burn rate, etc. This is going to be a fun one to track.

Search For smash mouth in Artist Names [Search]
No matches found....

Search For madonna in Artist Names [Search]
No matches found....

(Maybe if I search for "All Star" or "Lucky Star" individually....)

Search For star in Song Titles [Search]
25 Results from: Atari Teenage Riot, James Taylor Quartet, Double Vision, Patric Catani...

Clearly the major record labels are giving Soundbuzz.com nowhere near their entire collections of music. At this price, I'm reasonably certain they never will. Nothing to see here, folks.

Had the record industry done this pre-napster...

[Mean_Nishka]

.... they wouldn't be in this mess right now.

Let's face it, the only reason why Napster et. al. came into being was that it was friggin difficult to find mp3 music! Had the record industry been there with every song ever made for .20 a track, they would have probably expanded sales considerably.

Music has never been 'secure.' Whether it's a dual deck casette boom box or a cd burner, people have always copied music. But the industry managed to still sell it when it was reasonably priced. I believe the same would have occured had the industry flat out adopted MP3.

A Nice Idea that will Never Work

[Tokerat]

Imagine a P2P program which, instead of allowing you to download a song from someone's computer, let you listen to a low-quality stream, sent from their collection. If you like the track you can then send a request to the P2P's "host" company (a record label, perhaps??) and pay your $0.25 per track to them. Their servers are fast, so downloading is quick. And, for additional increments of say $0.02, you can up the quality to as much as 320Kbps. Also accessible is the entire catalog of the record company, cross-referenced with any covers or remixes of their artists' songs that appear on other labels, so you can easily find what you want right away, instead of browsing other users.

Problem is, once you realize many non-geek computer users still have 650MHz Compaq Presarios or 300MHz iMacs with AOL and a 56K modems, you stop thinking streaming to 8-10 users at once would be a good idea :-D.

Of couse, workarounds could be to have the client (i.e. the streamee) search for the fastest availible connection with the requested track, and also implement a system of queues, etc. but this quickly becomes a bandwidth-hogging pain in the ass.

Oh well, maybe in a perfect world when we all run > 1GHz and everyone has fiber-to-the-home...

Works out to the same

[Anonymous Coward]

Price of an Indian CD (with Indian music) = Rs. 180 (about $4)
# tracks on CD = 15
Price per track = Rs. 12

Price of a US CD = $15 (average)
# tracks on CD = 12 (approx. US$0.25)
price you'd have to pay (per track) = $1.25

Re:Paying per track == stupidity

[Luminous]

Since we are talking hypothetical, the cost per track is the core of the discussion. I agree the cost should be variable, based on many different factors. Length shouldn't necessarily be a key factor, though. I don't want bands doing 15 minute intros to their songs to boost price.

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[shri]

Is not about the average income. Its about the income of the folks who have internet access. About a million or so people (vaguely rememever some surveys from NUA) have internet access and even fewer are accessing the 'net from home or a location where they could download and collect the MP3s.

Bottom line is that the median income of the folks with Internet access is well above the average income of the total population.

Re:Blowing smoke

[pmz]

Here's something worth considering:

If most people will choose free over inexpensive, then why do the major Linux distributors, such as RedHat, make the money they do (looking at gross revenues)? This isn't pocket change, here.

For example, I have decided that I don't want to pay $600/year for a broadband connection and that my 33.6kbs modem is mostly just fine. However, I also found that the time involved in downloading software packages is prohibitive. I, then, quickly decided that time saved is worth some money, which is why I have purchased CD distributions of Linux and OpenBSD without any regrets. Also, I like the idea of providing some money in support of free software.

If the music industry can achieve something similar--providing high quality downloads & CDs for the market value of the time saved by not using peer-to-peer priateware--then they just got for themselves a guranteed revenue stream, since time will always equal money in the minds of many people for as long as people exist.