Sridhar Subramaniam, Managing Director, Sony India
Sridhar
graduated from Sydenham College of Commerce & Economics before moving to
the USA to pursue his MBA from Case Western Reserve University,
Cleveland. He was back in India to join Titan in 1988. In 1994 he became
General Manager Marketing - Titan International based in London, and
managed Titans entry into the European market. His entry into the music
industry happened in 1996 when he joined Sony Music India as Marketing
Director. He quickly became the Managing Director in 2002. He was also
the Chairman of IMI (Indian Music Industry - an IFPI affiliated body
that represents over 200 Indian record companies). He was also the MD of
Sony BMG Thailand for a couple of years starting 2006. Here he
successfully turned the company around and put a new management team in
place that was better geared for the future. Under his management and
vision, Sony Music India has grown rapidly in a challenging market and
expanded its footprint in India by entering into regional language film
music & producing Bollywood Movies.
Devotional music in
India I believe has a market share of approximately 8-10%. It has
traditionally been a genre that sells well on low priced physical
formats. Cassettes, CDs and now MP3 CDs fetch high volumes for
devotional music. Large part of what companies like T-Series and
Saregama used to sell was devotional music.
Perhaps the religious nature of our country is a boon and adds to the
beauty of this business. We have many religions, numerous gods,
different styles of singing to the gods and various types of singers. If
we add all this up, we have a huge complex matrix of deities, temples,
singers, period of the year, language, geography, male-female - that
define the scope of content in this genre.
India is a country of the masses and most people cannot read or write –
but they don’t need to be literate to understand devotional songs.
Devotional music has always been an important part of our social fabric.
But somehow the music industry seems to have ignored this category for
the last 7-8 years – the internet years. There has been some kind of
vacuum in this space. In constant endeavors to deliver popular content,
devotional music is ignored and played very little or negligible on
radio and TV.
Earlier what T-series used to have “Gulshan Kumar presenting” devotional
products and advertise them a lot on television and radio, which you
don’t even see anymore. The whole music industry has got blinded by
Bollywood and devotional music has been forgotten as a hugely important
segment.
But ironically it is technology in the form of mobile phones, which is
highlighting the strength of devotional music once again. Mobile phones
have percolated to the masses and are within purchasing reach of even
the poor. For illiterate people, who don’t know Bollywood - for them the
image of “God” is important. The biggest screensavers are of deities as
they are considered auspicious, and the biggest ring back tones are of
devotional hymns as they reflect on personalities. The devotional market
I suspect is as high as 15-20%
of the market of the ring back tones.
The potential of this business is well recognized by the telecomm
companies, they have specialist programmers devoted for this category.
Almost 40% of the Top 100 loaded ring back tones would be devotional
music. We keep forgetting how
spiritual we Indians are and like to carry God with us anywhere we go.
This is where the cell phone comes in. If you were to ask me again “what
is the single most important non Bollywood area?” my answer would be
“Devotional”- it is not pop or rock or even classical.
There are only two big categories- Film Music and Devotional music.
These are the two largest categories in Indian music. Devotional music
has great potential for people to rekindle, modernize it and built pop
icons in this base.
-RIA SHAH
