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.

Comments

Soundbuzz

[proxybyproxy]

Although not mentioned in the article (why?), the site is already up at Soundbuzz.com

Re:Soundbuzz

[twodiddyliddy]

The site crapped when searching for songs (asp timeout), and besides it's napster ripoff logo, it seems like the real thing.

A google search did come up with a lot of mirrors for "Soundbuzz - The Digital Music Revolution" (Christ, what a .com slogan)
www.channelv.com/ferhad/
hk.soundbuzz.ly cosasia.com/
www.geocities.com/truly1206/tru9913. htm
ip is: http://203.126.135.171/
(looks like a basement project :)

Anyway, I got this to work:
http://203.126.135.171/freedownload.asp but when trying to actually get a file, it was not available.

.... which would explain them not linking to soundbuzz in the article.

Buying Power Is More Like $2.50 USD

[Josh]

Please understand that most all of the costs in this situation are sunk costs and that the buying power of 10 RS in India is perhaps equivalent to $2.50 USD or more. It is not really so different to what would be charged in the U.S.

oldest catalogue in HMV?

[YakumoFuji]

hmm bollocks. I work in the data warehouse of HMV UK (where HMV started), and I can tell you its not the first entry in the master catalogue!

not sure where indiatimes got their info from...

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Contact]

Erm, nope.

Firstly, emusic isn't 5-10 bucks a month, it's 10-15.

Secondly, their range is pretty restricted. For example, their "Rock / Alternative" section lists the grand total of 45 bands - if they're trying to promote new music, why isn't there more available? I may be missing something but when I trialled emusic I basically couldn't find enough to occupy me for a day, let alone the minimum three month subscription (or 12 months if you want to get the lower, 10 dollar a month rate).

Thirdly, their MP3s are hardly high bitrate - everything is as 128 kbits, which might have been classed as high quality a few years ago, but in these days of vbr lame rips sounds decidedly shoddy.

The emusic concept is quite good, but to entice me they'd need around 10-100 times as much content and decent quality mp3s.