MUMBAI: The RPG group plans to invest Rs 600 million over the next two years in its music retailing chain, Music world. As part of the plans, the company would be rolling out 30-40 stores by this year end.
Music World president speciality retail business division K Dasaratharaman elaborates, "The amount spent will primarily depend on the size of the stores. It would cost around Rs five million to Rs 10 million per store depending on the location of the store and the floor space."

Music World presently has 90 retail chain outlets in 35 cities including metros and tier one cities. "We are essentially looking to fill the gaps in tier one cities by opening more stores and further penetrating in tier two cities," adds Dasaratharaman.

Music World had recently tied up with Apple to make Apple products available at their outlets. The tie up includes stocking a whole range of products in shop-in-shop format in Music World, including iPods and accessories. "Apple products occupy 100-120 sq.ft. of our floor space and we plan to include more products related to music like gadgets, MP3, headphones, music hardware etc. The consumers have responded fairly to our gadget section so, we plan to offer complete personal entertainment."

Music World plans to revamp its retail outlets and give it a new touch-and-feel look by segmenting the stores according to the genres and adding more musical related features.

To boost the listenership and curtail piracy, Music World has unplugged counters at malls and other outlets where music lovers can listen to tracks.
However, Music World hasn't provided the facility to download the tracks. "We did experiment with digital downloads at these counters but it didn't work out. There are no aggregators having the entire range of songs catering to our consumers."

Music World houses tracks of all genres like Hindustani, classical, ghazals and international genres like rock, jazz, metal, hip hop etc. "We have huge amount of Bollywood songs as there is always a rage for it. There is a huge regionwise demand for regional content like telugu in Andhra Pradesh, tamil in south etc. But now we plan to make the regional content available all over rather than being area specific."

Music World believes in a simple philosophy, 'You have it in your blood; we have it on our axe.' The USP of the outlet remains the availability of the tracks demanded by the consumers. Consumers can place a request at the counter and the store makes an attempt to make the CD available for the consumers.