I read an interesting article on billboard.com the other day (link at the bottom), which discussed the relationship between mobile phones and piracy in India. Seeing as India is still a developing nation, it lacks the resources to efficiently support the physical sale of music. Thus, only 250 million of India’s potential 8 billion dollar music industry is actually accounted for; a majority of the potential revenue is lost due to physical and digital piracy.
What’s unique about India however, is that most of society skipped the whole broadband craze and instead jumped straight into having mobile-phone fever. In fact, almost 90% of internet subscriptions in India are wireless. So if we put two and two together: the surge in the mobile phone market in the recent years has given the Indian music industry a chance to claim back some of that 7.75 billion dollars it is losing because of piracy.
There has already been progress made. A little over a year and a half ago the music streaming service Saavn was released. Saavn is a vibrant, free, and most importantly easy to use streaming service available on all major mobile platforms. Saavn has reportedly been downloaded over a million times on Android platforms alone.
Source:
http://www.bgr.in/news/in-mobile-first-india-87-internet-connections-are-wireless/
