Motomusic in India

"Motorola is expanding its business in Asia. Recently, they launched another one of their Motomusic service in India. It is an added service provider for music or radio and net purposes of mobile phones. Bharti Airtel will be the first telecom to offer Motomusic." [Source]

Although the official website for Motorola isn't reflecting this change yet, I am hoping for an early rollout of this service. Given the proliferation of MP3 enabled mobile devices, a formal channel for music download is an imperative for the music business. I also happened to watch this video in the series Authors@Google with Don Tapscott. He is the author of the book Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything . He made a wonderful statment about the music industry.

"Music should become a service, not a good....Nobody will steal music. You will never want to take possession of a song, if for say $7 you can have access to any recorded music ever, and any kind of service around it - say Mike Jagger's favourite folk songs."

The first statement is quite astonishing. What it implies is that once re-engineered, the cost structure of music business will be completely different. we won't be paying for the storage, manufacturing or distribution costs for music. Since the medium will be MP3 (or evolved versions of that), those heads come down to almost zero. Instead the payment will be for useful information. The MP3 will just be a part of the service. All the tagging, ranking and 'iLike' activity on platforms such as Facebook will actually be little computational activities that help sort the music according to taste, popularity etc. As such music choices is heavily weighed down by a bandwagon effect (choosing what others seem to like). Hence I'd gladly pick and choose those titles that are popular or sorted well. Another interesting effect of this shift is called The Long Tail - which is a shift in revenue proportion from mass-market v.s niche titles.

I hope the Indian music industry will embrace this well :)

p.s - Seth Godin recently wrote a similar piece for the publishing industry, which itself is going through a major shift. Read it here.