(3 November 2007 2:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Radiohead's initiative to release songs from their latest album In Rainbows on the web for free, is being hailed as a case study of sorts. The band has now officially signed UK label XL and the question being asked is whether a physical release is necessary at all.

The 'Music-Hear It!' session at the IAMAI Entertainment 2.0 attempted to answer this question amongst other things, that has followed the iPodisation of music.

Flagging off the discussion, Hungama Mobile MD and CEO Neeraj Roy observed that in the digital revolution that is taking the world by storm, music is the most promising category. "It is driving convergence and there are two key-driving factors. One is the growth in mobile, PC and IPTV presence and secondly networks are becoming faster. About 150 songs can be downloaded per second on networks like Verizon and SingTel," he said.

Akamai Technologies head media and entertainment Arjun Pratap said, "I think physical sales will not be overtaken by digital sales. But look at the figures - we deliver about 2 billion songs for iTunes annually. That's about 10 per cent of the $35 billion global music market. Importantly, consumption has gone up 5-6 times since the digital revolution came in."

People Infocom CEO Manoj Dawane gave an Indian perspective on the mobile value-added-services (VAS) sector. "Consumption has gone up 27 times and a large part of this is coming from the B and C class centres across the country."

However, he said that regional music is an area that could spurt the growth even further. "In the coming days, about 70 per cent of digital music consumption - be it caller tunes, ringtones and other music VAS is going to come from smaller cities. Digital content can be monetised more than ever before."

However music director Shamir Tandon said that Indian record labels had been slow to adapt to digitalisation, hence piracy had become rampant across the music industry. He further pointed out, "It is sad that in the midst of all this, a fair share of revenue is not percolating to the end creator of music. This has always been an issue and it is discouraging people from taking up artistic pursuits."

The discussion then veered to the topic of digital rights management (DRM) wherein Tandon presented an example of EMI-Virgin, a music label he had earlier been associated with. "We launched copy protected CDs for our music, and sales did go up globally for some time. But today the consumer wants to keep his music on all possible devices. Hence we had to push back non-DRM CDs into the market." He, however, insisted that from a record label perspective, a DRM system was a must.

Adding to this, Roy said, "Fighting music piracy is a question of prioritisation. We do not know what will eventually happen to physical sales. Today brands are shifting more towards lifestyle media and digital music plays a very important role in this."

He further said, "Its a great time to discover content. Audio and video search has improved drastically on web and mobile, thanks to fingerprinting technology. Try searching for a George Bush blooper, you'll get a million results."