Rajshri Entertainment Private Limited MD and CEO Rajjat A. Barjatya

Year 2014

This year was more about laying the foundation; we have done two things this year. We have launched ‘Rajshri Soul’ which is our devotional music vertical and the other is ‘Peekaboo’- our kid’s vertical.

Before the end of the year, we will launch a vertical for popular Hindi and English content. From day one, I have maintained that I will not acquire film music or work in a film music section which I have continued till date. The orientation is different with film music as the infrastructure required is different in the film space. The challenge with film music is that everything depends on the ‘Big Friday’. Rajshri strongly believes in non-film music.
It was a strategic year for our music segment. The activities we did for 2014 will help us next year. I believe that 2014 was a very important year for me when I look back 10 years from now. It was a year when lot of our plans came alive. We were clear about the path we were following.

Partnerships

Believe Digital is a very strong partnership we had this year. We are in process of uploading the vast catalogue of audio content on Believe Digital which will then be populated on various stores that they work with. It is early to give feedback on what will happen as it will take couple of months for us to get perfect meta-data in place. It is a slow process but once the meta-data is made available then Believe Digital can deploy content across various platforms, which will target global audiences.

New vertical

We are working on multiple things in the popular music space- English and Hindi. We have finished our recording, and now we are mixing and mastering the audio. The next step will be the music video and planning the release. I do hope that later this year or early next year, you will hear a lot of popular music that we will put out.

Building infrastructure

Having a studio was part of the 360 degree plan for our company. If we wanted to strengthen ourselves then we had to have infrastructure in place. We have two recording studios and more than 15 editing studios. Here, we are able to produce the type of content we want to produce. It is a huge facility to have in-house. We want to produce globally relevant content from India.

Artistes

We are open to working with all artistes. We have worked with around 100 musicians in 2014 and the year is still on. The reason we have so many musicians is because we encourage lot of live music even though there is a space for programming. It is a little expensive but the kind of results that we get is worth every penny we spend. It is hard to say how many musician lives we will touch next year because we will have many verticals in place by then, so we can have a significant increase in numbers. We are hoping that we have a greater impact not just in India but globally.

Music Industry

There is lot of innovation happening in the music industry and I hope that we can be part of that eco-system. Along with that, it is important that we add value to our music lovers worldwide.
I think lot of people are doing great work when it comes to taking content to audiences via our digital platform.

Live space

Entering into the live space will be an extension to what we intend to do. We will be doing all kinds of music. Your songs and label will have to be popular for the expansion. There are other forms of expansion like publishing and synchronisation. There are multiple opportunities today for good music. We have to be very open about the avenues for monetisation of our content.   

Next year

In 2015, we will look at building the verticals that we have started in 2014. It will be our milestone and also scale up our popular music brand in Hindi and English.