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

Re:Don't believe it

[Tim C]

its not like CD's where you get something 'better' having an original...

Oh yes you do:

1) Guaranteed quality - no chance of an incomplete, low bit rate copy of a CD that skips part way through the track
2) Guaranteed availability - no searching for tracks, only to find that the host is too busy, just go to the website and there it is, quick 'n' easy
3) Peace of mind - no worries about getting busted for having illegal copies of music on your machine, no worrying about your ISP logging your activity, etc

Okay, so 3) is pushing things a little, but I'd pay for 1) and 2). In fact, I only started using P2P apps to find music when I was unable to find a way to legally, quickly obtain a certain song that I just had to listen to (I get like that sometimes). I couldn't even find anywhere online to buy a CD single of it, let alone download it.

20 minutes later, I'd installed Kazaa (yeah, I know now, and it's history), found it, and downloaded it. At the time, I would have happily paid 2 or 3 pounds sterling (roughly 3-5 dollars, or around 10 times as much as in the article) to have legally downloaded a high quality electronic copy.

Of course there will be people who will download illegal copies regardless of how cheap, quick and easy it is to buy them legally, but I think you'd be surprised how many people will think "how cheap? At that price, I might as well just buy it"

Cheers,

Tim

RIAA Strawman?

[Corporate Drone]

OK... so you've established that $0.25 / track is worth a whole lot more in India than in the States.

Why, then, are the bells going off in my head, telling me that RIAA will use the argument, "We tried. It cost only a quarter a song , and it failed. See! That business model doesn't work!"

Re:Which is what in comparison?

[SkyLeach]

"You have to remember something about this:

There's a huge difference between 25 cents here and 25 cents in India. The average income is much lower.

For instance, 25 cents in India could equate to around $4.00 there.

Now do you really want to pay four bucks a track? $40.00+ per CD?"

found here
and

"Rs = Roupees, current exchange rate is about 1 dollar = 49 Roupees.

Studies vary, but the "average" family income in India works out at about $450 per year." found here

Very interesting and informative here. Proves price fixing doesn't it? You see, if the cost/person in Indea compaired to their income is the same as the cost/person in America compared to our income and the cost in the UK/person comapred to their income all work out to about the same rate, then we know they are fixing prices globaly.

I think that 10 Rp to an Indian making $450/year works out at about 22,050 Rp. That means an average income equivalant to the US, about $20k/year/citizen.

IANA Economist, but I would love to know if Indians are having to pay the same amount of their salary for music as Americans would have to pay for their music.