What do MG Motor, Fabindia and Pepe Jeans have in common? They are all playing music by independent creators today, a shift in the case of many retailers from Bollywood and global chartbusters. For Valentine’s Day, people could send their special other a custom-made song created just for them, again by indie musicians. Enabling indie music to reach such points of sale and discover newer opportunities are platforms like Songdew Media.
The company, which enables a connect between artistes, music lovers and brands in myriad ways, is seeing newer avenues of monetisation in recent times, said Founder Sunil Khanna, in conversation with MediaNews4u.com.
“Brands like Fabindia, MG Motors, Pepe Jeans are now playing music which is created by independent music artistes in all their outlets across India exclusively through Songdew, and we are sharing the royalties with the artistes. It’s a completely new stream of revenue which is getting created for artistes,” he said.
For Valentine’s Day, a brand wanted messages to be converted into jingles within 24 hours – the messages were made into songs for folks to dedicate to their special someone. Brand benefited, as did creators and users of the innovation. When Platinum Guild Association wanted people to share stories after Covid, for someone they felt gratitude towards, those feelings again were morphed into songs.
“So that’s where artistes create the content and work as influencers because the songs are shared by them on their platforms also with the brand name, so it goes to their fan following both as a content producer as well as influencer,” added Khanna.
Songdew’s claims to have over 55,000 artistes and bands using one or more of its services. The team comprises 35 people currently and Khanna said revenue is doubling year on year.
Besides digital platforms, it claims a televised reach of over 200 million households through distribution platforms including DTH, Cable, and OTT, via Songdew TV.
Khanna underlined, “In metros a lot of people have moved to digital platforms, but for Tier 2 and Tier 3 the main source of entertainment is still linear platforms. We are getting a lot of traffic on the site from Tier 2, Tier 3 towns and keeping that in mind we will initiate language versions of Songdew.com in the coming months. We will start first with Hindi, because one of the problems in Tier 2 towns is that people are not very conversant with English.”
From its base in NCR, the company plans to expand with branches in Mumbai and South India.
“Our plan is two-fold. One, add more value to the artiste by having more digital tools and also collaborate with the other partners who can add value; second is take this platform to other countries (in three to six months’ time) because the features which we have are superior to anyone else globally,” noted the spokesperson.
It has structured operations with a ‘Music Business Administration’ offering recently. It is meant to serve as a one-point-contact for distribution, promotion and monetisation of music globally.
