Thursday, March 20, 2003

Desi music sites rock


Have you tried any of the streaming audio stations online? The ones that stream American music are really sad - try Launch for example, the best I could find online... The genre definitions are screwed up and you can never select up to song-level granularity.

Compare that to SmasHits.com, a desi music site. You can select albums and songs within albums. Yes, it doesn't allow you to select multiple albums, and yes, there are problems with the ads popping up in profusion and Spyware trying its best to get itself installed on your machine. But if you are prepared to deal with it for a bit in the beginning, its smooth sailing afterwards.

So I wonder what's stopping the major record labels from adopting such strategy. They can allow radio stations to operate this way online - sort of like audio-on-demand, with the same ad-based revenue models that the radio stations already have in place right now.

Oh well, on second thoughts, both audio-on-demand and video-on-demand can significantly challenge the present-day audio/video business models.

So here's another thought: how come, desi music sites can afford to do this? Is it because the laws are really lax in India? Or is it that music is cheaper to manufacture in India and so the Indian music industry can afford to sell music at lower costs...

In which case, let's come up with business models to produce music in India, Russia and Latin America and export it cheap... Alright, I see problems with that too... But something is possible here, no?


Tora Bora again


The first attack on Saddam sounds eerily like the Tora Bora attacks on bin Laden. The same rhetoric: was an amazing opportunity, we don't know if he's alive, the bad guy's videotape is on the air, and yeah, there's medical help for the bad guys. Why are the bad guys so much harder to get?


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