Entertainment - Q&A CEO Big Music

Arcopol Chauduri

Kulmeet Makkar, CEO, Big Music and Home Entertainment, has his hands full. He leads a company that is part of the Reliance ADA Group, but yet has kept a low profile, building its physical distribution network over the last one year. The floodgates opened recently with the success of Big Pictures’ Rock On and the company can expect more of it in the coming year through line-up of releases. In this interview to DNA Money’s Arcopol Chaudhuri, Makkar says the music company is now ‘digital-ready’ to launch an online music store soon and customised audio CDs next year. Excerpts:The digital music landscape has evolved in a big way over the last few years and you’ve spent close to two decades in this business working with Saregama. How would you summarise the changes that have taken place?These days, the way music is being marketed; it has become far more important than ever before for a corporate or a technology company to get into the business. That’s because now you can break up the music rights into various pieces and exploit it. We can’t sell only albums. Every song is treated like a sachet. Different rights have emerged in mobile-ringtones, truetones, caller tunes, images, text messages-radio rights, internet downloads, social networking, publishing, licensing, rights for television, public performance. The smaller, traditional players without any technological support have moved out of the business. And it’s getting really consolidated with the technology players. Either a player like Hungama or Mauj will take charge, or people will come together to exploit the business.What is the working model that Big Music is looking at?We spent the last one year in getting our physical and digital distribution in place. The content acquisition will follow now. On the internet space, we don’t want to charge for music. We want to build an advertiser-driven model for music, similar to MySpace. For mobile, which will form a majority of our revenues, we are ready with a mobile VAS company model, which means companies have already started approaching us to be the aggregator.Are there any plans of launching an online music store?We’re launching a B2B site and a B2C site soon. The B2B site will be for licensing to partners, radio stations, publishing societies, talent companies, events and enlist our music catalogue with reviews, home video title listings. The B2C site will have downloads, and users will be able to buy CDs, home video, download songs, wallpapers, and users can also network with each other. We’re also looking at possibility of selling a scratch card through our retail partners. So, you can buy this card for say Rs 100 and download certain number of songs. You could recharge the card and download more. We are also working on a format where customers can go to our Reliance World outlets, download songs and compile a CD of their choice.This one’s similar to the Hamara CD format from Saregama?That had a logistics issue. You had to go online to book it and it took three days to ship it. Our format will enable you to go our R-world stores and create a CD, design a cover and take it home within 10 minutes. Work is in progress for this.Which are the most critical revenue streams for you today? Mobile is the number one revenue stream, followed by radio. We are now going to focus on driving our business through technology, artist management and events. Our entire non-film artist roll out will start from October. We’re investing in the artist, not in the music and we’re doing it through events, using them as an RJ or a VJ, even in brand endorsements. The physical side i.e. recorded music business contributes about 30-40% to our revenues. Rest of the money has to come from the other forms I just mentioned.