
In May, Saregama launched a retro-styled device called Carvaan. It was packed with 5,000 songs and had the charm of the good old radio.
India’s oldest record label pulled a retro number on the fans of its music last month. In May, the company launched a retro-styled device called Carvaan. It was packed with 5,000 songs and had the charm of the good old radio.
If you end up liking most of the songs on it and if you find the songs the player picks for your different moods are perfect, it’s no accident. There’s some nifty tech and data analytics that’s gone into making it just right.
In May, Saregama launched a retro-styled device called Carvaan. It was packed with 5,000 songs and had the charm of the good old radio
Around 2014, Saregama said it wanted to sell to consumers directly. In 2015, the company commissioned studies to understand audience behaviour. What was the soundscape like? Were there any underserved niches it could enter?
By 2015, the company added album art as well as metadata to its catalogue, which was now fully digitised. Imagine a company that started in 1901, which recorded the first-ever music track in India, and has a music catalog of over 117,000 songs in 14 languages.
The effort was going to pay off for Saregama. Digitised tracks and consumption data across various channels would become the foundation of a data platform, that is now core to the way the company launches new products.
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“Every time my content gets used, the data shows back. That gives us a great opportunity to make models,” says Mehra. Many of the company’s new launches are guided by data and gleaned by expert curators.
“We used a year of consumption data to create the long list of songs. This unified view was used as the starting point for preparing the list of songs for each channel” — Avinash Mudaliar, head of Internet Products and Services at Saregama India
The plan was to load the device with evergreen songs, make it simple to operate and also evocative enough when it comes to design. For added measure, the company threw in USB and Bluetooth support. It also plays FM radio
The latest from Saregama is Carvaan, a product that has been in the making for more than a year and is flying off the shelf real quick. The company said it can’t share exact numbers (being a listed company, it is bound by disclosure norms) but said that it was among the fastest selling goods on Amazon and it was having difficulty keeping up with demand.
Carvaan’s music catalog is premised on another one of those underserved niches. Indians aged over 50, who loved to listen to Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar and the great singers of the past. “Research showed that people in the 50 years-plus age group still yearn for their Kishore, Lata and Rafi songs and are finding it difficult to get access to their old music,” said Mudaliar. The older generation wanted easier ways to listen to music.
The plan was to load the device with evergreen songs, make it simple to operate and also evocative enough when it comes to design. For added measure, the company threw in USB and Bluetooth support. It also plays FM radio.
Over 5,000 songs from Saregama’s massive catalogue were shortlisted with the help of its analytics platform. “We used a year of consumption data to create the long list of songs,” says Kumar Ajit, vice-president of sales and marketing at Saregama. He was previously the head of analytics at dish television operator Tata Sky (managing director Mehra is also a Tata Sky alum).
The device currently doesn’t connect to the internet. While that sounds contrarian in the age of internet of things and music platforms such as iTunes and Pandora, that’s also the beauty of Carvaan
It’s not just the packaging of Carvaan that’s Apple-sque. If you look closely, this is smart strategy by Saregama. By now, most music industry players have realised that the battle against music sharing, streaming and piracy is a losing battle. Many of them have started finding ‘adjacencies’ to their core business to expand. For Saregama, its catalog becomes a “complement,” as Harvard Business School professor Bharat Anand describes in his book The Content Trap and Carvaan (or other products that come along) becomes a money spinner.
It’s a move from the Apple playbook. Apple made almost no profits from $10 billion in music sales on iTunes between 2002 and 2013, Anand points out. But that’s not the way to look at it. “Think of songs on iTunes as a standalone product and you’ll charge as much as possible. Think of them as complements and you’ll charge as little as possible. That’s because iPods were how Apple made its money,” Anand writes.
The advent of digital music has also opened up new doors for the company. “The music part of our business has been growing steadily in the last two years it’s all courtesy to digital,” says Mehra, declining to share a breakup of its digital music business. It not only allows the company to penetrate markets that it would have otherwise foregone (think of a Rafi fan in Uganda or a Mukesh aficionado in Russia), but also lets the company mine data to sell its music better. For instance, the data generated by caller ring back tunes from one operator can be used to predict which song will do well on another operator in the same state. Similarly, data helps Saregama create better playlists for its Youtube channel which gets close to 100 million views a month. “You use customer insights to keep improving,” says Mehra.
While it’s yet to be seen how many takers its new products will find, Saregama’s stock seems to be responding well to its complements strategy. Carvaan, it seems, is just the start of a new beginning for the 116-year-old company.
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Update: 15 June 2017, 2.03 PM IST: Updated to change Avinash Mudaliar’s designation as VP, Product and Technology at Saregama India.