After 18 years in the entertainment business and engaged with music and allied activities with entities like Pepsi, Channel V, Soundbuzz, Motorola MDB and Paul Consulting, and having spent over the last 18 months on his own boutique services consulting firm which was engaged for Digital Strategy  by Endemol, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Oranjuice Entertainment, Inreco Hindusthan Records, Sunshine Pictures and Cinema Capital Venture Fund among others, Vivek Paul is now Director Digital – Sony Music. RadioAndMusic caught up with him for a quick chat on his role and assessment of the Digital space. Excerpts.

As Director Digital, what is your stated mandate at Sony Music? What geographies, and to whom do you report?

My mandate is to create visibility of Sony Music Offering across all the digital touch points, in partnerships and direct consumer offerings  The role would primarily entail  introduction of  new products in the market place, extending  learnings to the international services for the Indian market,  and highlighting  key challenges on consumer behavior during the product  building cycle. In a manner that the services can be optimized to the Indian audience and eco-system. I will be reporting to Shridhar Subramaniam, MD – Sony Music : India and Middle East.

What are your specific objectives in the short  term, and over 2011-12?

To consolidate our digital distribution efforts and its reach to the consumer in a more focused framework, launch new products and innovate on the existing structure of the business with our partners in distribution.

What learnings and strengths do you bring from your immediate- and overall past experience to your new role at Sony Music?

Over the last 18 years in the entertainment business, my learnings and strengths are to interconnect music in various eco-systems -- previously fmcg, Broadcasting, Digital Media and Consulting -- through multiple products and initiatives that engaged consumer and music in multiple forms.

In addition, insights on technologies and applications that interconnect or sit between the application framework making it easy on navigation, search, browsing or engagement between the music ip and its consumer. Transparency in reporting systems, reconciliation processes and monetization being the other important aspects 

With Digital having already surged ahead, and now waiting to explode with the advent of 3G in India, what is your expectation from the Digital space for the Music Industry in general and Sony Music in particular in India?

In the evolving digital market, Music will be much digital in the road ahead and social element will play a key role in viral promotion. The version 2.0 of the Indian music market will move to streaming, social and cloud. A few key services will make the difference in music consumption; the key will be in ease of use to the customer, simple UI and unified databases, and the music business will re-invent itself by addressing the emerging needs of artist-centric music, live music segment, ad-supported music etc etc.

Sony Music is strong across film music in Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and  other regional music. How will you approach these on the Digital space, and what differences do you perceive in the way music is consumed and even sold digitally across languages? Also, what is the Digital scenario like for International Music in India for the music Industry in general and Sony Music in particular?

User profiling, recommendation and cross promotion of catalogue. This can be achieved by intelligent applications that have built in user preferences. The Indian digital music market is pretty much moving away from download to subscription models, the emerging models are testimony to that, where in download will become option rather than main lead product.

At this junction, where the next wave of digital consumption lumped with access based services and  higher stream is becoming evident, we need to change the approach to the product building exercise and bring in customer and preferences in the centre of the digital universe. This will create a new market place and an eco-system.

International Music availability and usage on services is yet to emerge in a bigger way and I do find it to be a huge potential segment. Let's face it, 10 years of digital music in India and real transactional revenue streams came from two mobile products -  ringtones and caller back tones. Both the products operated on minimal libraries. In the next stage, the access is on richer media and in its full form, it's a different behavior, needs a different attention, compelling libraries, new products and few management layers.

How will you market Sony Music's Digital offerings?

Through key partnerships and direct consumer interaction to sample, stream, buy, share, recommend and search.

What are the biggest threats and opportunities to Digital Music. How will you plan to combat / capitalize on  them respectively?

Fragmentation in repertoire and distribution. This can be addressed by innovation on products and unified digital libraries with assets. Music is getting created and consumed on a daily basis. Our efforts should be bridge the gap.

I think the critical aspect of the music business is to have the ability to monitor the usage of content. So metadata, its management and reporting systems, are of importance, which we essentially see missing in most of the digital strategies and product build up  More engagement on the distribution side via programming and management will create interesting product offerings and we should look at bringing in technologies eg: Gracenote in the mix at product and distribution level, so we can eliminate the exercise of multiple metadata creation and better optimization of products offering.