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Vending music digitally

CHENNAI: Gone are the days, where a music buff needs to stack CDs and cassettes to listen to his favourite songs. With the advent of technology and launch of various storage devices, stacking of CDs and cassettes has come down.

This has been further simplified by digital vending machines, which enables a customer to pick his favourite song and load it onto his personal devices such as MP3 player, UBS port, mobile phones or even DVDs.

A Chennai-based Mango Digital Vending Machines Network Pvt. Ltd., (Mango DVM) is planning to launch these digital vending machines by this month-end. These machines resemble an old version of jukebox model.

The company plans to launch a network of 20 digital music vending machines across Chennai by June-end. The company has tied-up with 50 music recording companies in South India and has a catalogue of more than 70,000 songs. The company has obtained licences for these songs for downloading, according to R. S. Ramkumar amd Deepak Ramesh, founders of Mango DVM.

The music recording companies will have a revenue sharing model with Mango DVM by which 50 per cent of the income goes to the music companies and the balance is shared between retailers and Mango DVM.

Initially, the company planned to set up two of these kiosks in Puducherry and three in Chennai. The company was in talks with organised retailers for installing these vending machines in their retail outlets. It had also appointed two distributors for reaching out to the unorganised market, said Mr. Ramkumar. He wants these kiosks to be located at airports, bus and railway stations like PCOs and Xerox machines in all retail locations and sell digital music for Rs. 12-15 a song.

The digital vending machines, sourced initially from Via Technologies, a Taiwanese company, will have a touch screen to offer interfaces in Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Bengali, apart from English.

Mango DVM raised Rs. 62 lakh in seed capital from five angel investors last year. It plans to go in for second round of funding by this month-end.

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