Motorola Plans Music Service For India
By Nikhil Pahwa - Mon 08 Oct 2007 04:55 AM PST
That Motorola (NYSE: MOT) is focusing on music to sell its handsets in India is pretty obvious from it’s promotional campaigns with Bollywood superstar Abhishek Bachchan. ChicagoBusiness reports that the company is ready to launch MotoMusic, its music service, in India. MotoMusic has been operational in China for three years now, content is offered in partnership with Chinese telcos. However, while China has two telcos, Motorola will have to deal with 12 telcos in India...and perhaps many more in the near future as the government intends to give more licenses.
I don’t think an online portal for music would really work in India, because of lack of adequate payment mechanisms, low broadband penetration (just 2.5 million connections) and rampant piracy. Also bear in mind that although mobile music sales are expected to surpass physical format sales this year, mobile music includes Caller Ring Back Tones (CRBT (NYSE: BT)s) which are operator dependent and have a recurring monthly cost, of which full track downloads are believed to be much smaller.
(kidding). They should provide interface on cellphones as well to search for favorite albums and dld it for like 10 or 15 or 20 Rs.
