Mumbai’s All About Music Conference came on the scene when Music Ally was invited to attend the inaugural ceremony at the end of September.
The event attracted 850 attendees spanning all aspects of the Indian music industry from key executives and some of the country’s biggest artists through to DIY musicians.
The conference attracted over 850 attendees over two days and the incredibly positive atmosphere it generated shows that the new Indian industry is there, it’s just waiting to emerge from behind the shadows of Bollywood.
All About Music is the brainchild of manager Tarsame Mittal. “All About Music is a platform curated to put the spotlight on the potential of India’s music industry, and to set new benchmarks and goals. Our aim is to bring the stakeholders together in a wide ‘all about music’ discussion, so we shape the opportunity, shape the future, together,” he informs.
“India is one of the world’s largest music markets. With 1.3 billion music lovers and strong economic growth, the value of music in India is expected to double by 2020,” he adds.
While both the recorded and live music industries have struggled for umpteen number of years to get people to pay for music, India’s potential is clearly huge, arguably as huge as its neighbour China with whom Outdustry’s Ed Peto compared the country in a keynote speech at the event.
Peto outlined the similarities, two emerging markets with the biggest populations on earth, with the vast majority of the population unwilling to pay, or at least pay much, for music, but with a diverse variety of localised streaming services, and with infrastructure changes that are now creating the potential for real growth.
But whereas the long-predicted ‘hockey stick’ growth is finally beginning to take place in China, India is still all about potential.
Let’s look at the problems first. The biggest issue is the general music consumer’s apparent unwillingness to pay for music. While India-based streaming services may have amassed over 100m users, the overall conversion rate to paying is reckoned to be just 1%.
While Saavn boasts a higher conversion rate of about 10% (with 22m subscribers) this percentage figure is massively skewed by the service’s US audience.
According to Devraj Sanyal, MD and CEO Universal Music Group, India and South Asia, “In the era of the CD in India people bought the CD, in the era of CBRT (call back ringtones), even now, people have always been willing to pay,” he said.
“The problem (and the opportunity) is with the younger generation who have got used to the idea that music is free. People have no problem spending a couple of hundred rupees (£2) on a cup of coffee every day at Starbucks but they do have a perceived problem spending less than what one cup of coffee costs, on music”.
Piracy is still cited as a big hurdle to growth by the local industry as Saavn co-founder and Executive Chairman Paramdeep Singh explains, “There is a massive retail business of pirated MP3s that are sold on SD cards and side-loaded on to users’ mobile phones. This entire business of selling pirated music to paying users is estimated to be a $1billion industry.” And then of course there’s YouTube.
But the problem with being unwilling to pay doesn’t just lie with recorded music. The live business has faced its own problems with the way it has grown to rely on having to give away so many tickets – to licensing authorities, sponsors, politicians, VIPS – and thereby creating a whole culture which has ended up almost devaluing those who bother to buy tickets, as Sabbas Joseph, Director of Wizcraft Entertainment, one of India’s leading live events and entertainment companies, explained.
“99% of the time you end up having to cough up passes to all the officials who give you licences. Added to that it then becomes a very sponsor-driven market. And why should any sponsor give you money if you’re not giving them tickets? In India we suffer from a malaise of a VIP culture. You are not important, influential if you don’t get invited. It’s been like this since the beginning of time. You become very dependent on people other than consumers paying. Consumers paying has almost become an added benefit.”
Then there’s the dominance of Bollywood. In many ways the All About Music conference felt like a platform for the independent market which in India seems to mean anything which is not Bollywood to fight back and emerge from the stranglehold which Bollywood has exerted on the music business for the past twenty or so years. Bollywood’s share of India’s musical output is around 70-80%, depending on who you believe.
Bollywood’s dominance has also had a knock on effect on the music industry’s infrastructure and skills levels. The Indian film industry was able to make its songwriters effectively work for hire with a copyright regime which bestowed first ownership on film producers rather than songwriters.
The fact that it’s taken so long for an event such as All About Music to take place and the conversations at the event around the need to better co-ordinate and upskill the local industry highlights the work that still needs to be done for the independent side of the business to start to punch its weight.
