Indian Music Depends On Mobile Now, Not On Internet

It looks like after decline of sales of Cds and cassettes, Indian Music is now depended more on mobile phones sales now. Mobile phones are becoming huge driver of sales as people are not using mobile phones just for call now. Since mobile phones are not much susceptible to piracy as PCs because wireless operators tightly control what they sell it is likely to be beneficial for Indian Music Industry in future.
Many Indians like to download music on the Internet, Whether its a latest song, album or an oldie they always try to find it on Internet for free download. But not to forget, this is an illegal way of getting Music and is called Piracy. To prevent this there was an opening for Google to launch a service in India where you can find legitimately licensed music.


India's huge mobile phone users had slowly started to use there mobile phones more than just making calls. Since sales of ringtones and songs from mobile phones are already contributing 30% of the Indian Music Industry's total revenue which is about 7.5 billion rupees. It is expected that it will become two-third of 18.7 billion rupee market by 2012. At that time, It is expected that Internet market will only be 400 million.

According to India's largest wireless carrier Bharti Airtel, In 2009 Airtel users completed over 200 million music downloads which shows that this number is very likely to increase much in future. Most of sales were driven by states like Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Punjab, the company says.
 According to Kunal Bajaj, India director for Analysys Mason, a telecom and media consulting firm, says India hasn’t even begun to tap the potential of its music market. While India has about 30% penetration for mobile music services, China has over 80%, he says. People need to find ways to get price down, At the current prices it is not likely to go much ahead. However it is expected that 3G will also boost music usage.

It is not clear yet as how much share telecom operators take from these mobile phone sales. While telecom operators don't disclose how much share they keep of these sales, Consultants and people in the industry say its more than 80% that don't leaves much money on table for labels.