MUMBAI:  The recently launched Gracenote Global Music Data of Record has declared open a humongous categorized source of data to music providing services in India. But, the question arises, that in a market with megascale volumes and with consumers loathe to pay for music, will industry open its wallets and pay for data and analytics?

Gracenote India managing director Geet Lulla believes the business will welcome their services. Says he, “What makes us very bullish, positive about where the Indian market is headed, is this entire move to digital streaming. This kind of micro-segmentation enables the consumption of much larger volume of music and hence allows music labels to make more money of their own, which was not possible earlier.”

Gracenote vice- president product and music Tom Retting credits this to the revolution witnessed by digital streaming services. He said, “Streaming services are creating, for the first time, revenue growth globally for music. We have seen this happening in markets that boasts of robust content streaming. We expect that to happen in India. The other is that there is actually increasing consumption of Indian music outside. We see this sort of growth there in terms of our interest in our global customers. So, people like Spotify, Amazon, Samsung etc. have an interest in having a really good, robust, accurate metadata for the Indian market.”

Besides, the cheap cost of data is another factor that has accelerated the consumption of audio and video content. On this, Lulla said, “Data cost in India use to be high two years ago, which have dropped now. There is an increase in the audio and video consumption at the consumer level. Data costs are low, smart devices; entertainment has become peculiarly an individual activity, which earlier use to be a family activity.”

“I think it’s important for streaming services to also know that catalogues are not available only on one platform, as you will find the same music on different streaming services. I think there it becomes a function of not just the size of the catalogue, but also the kind of user interface, experience, so-called VOI, VX and recommendations, they provide to users,” Geet Lulla added.

Retting concluded, “Streaming consumption has blown out the transaction volume. When you sell one album, it takes cares of the consumer’s experience of those 10 songs in one transaction. If I like an album and listen to all the songs repeatedly every day, for months, then it’s certainly thousands of transactions. This is really providing data but also tremendous insights. This is providing collective data. Also, presenting a transition in the industry around how the rights management has to be much more rigorous than it used to be earlier.”