India's First Ever Music Industry Conclave Talks About "Work In Progress"

Indian Music Industry (IMI), International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) jointly held the first ever Indian Music Industry Conclave in Chennai and Chandigarh last week. The idea of the conclave was to talk about the future of the music industry in India and what are the steps to better it.

the objective of the conclave is to strengthen specific regional chapters of the music industry with updates from international and national trends and to allow an open forum for discussions on regional market specific challenges. - Blaise Fernandez, President and CEO, IMI

The conclave began by lighting the inaugural lamp and felicitating leading luminaries such as Mr. Manohar Naidu of Lahari Music (Bengaluru), Mr. Aditya Gupta of Aditya Music (Hyderabad), Mr. Mandar Thakur of Times Music India and Mr. Naveen Bhandari of Muzik 247 (Chennai)in the Southern Chapter and Mr. Satinder Singh of Speed Records(Jalandhar) in the Northern Chapter. The conclave focused a lot on regional music and the non metro cities which are believed to be the upcoming music markets. In his opening remarks to the various regional music labels present, Mr. Fernandes said,

The objective of the conclave is to strengthen specific regional chapters of the music industry with updates from international and national trends and to allow an open forum for discussions on regional market specific challenges. - Blaise Fernandez, CEO & President, IMI

Mr. Fernandes presented a “Work in Progress Agenda” of the Indian Music Industry for the next three years, encouraged the stakeholders to become more engaged in helping to create the agenda hence its title “Work in Progress” and join IMI’s lobbying efforts on key issues like Anti-piracy, Value Gap and 31D.Steps that need to be taken to build a robust subscription based eco-system. Key speakers at the two events included; Regional Director, IFPI,Mr. Ang Kwee Tiang and President & CEO, PPL, Mr. Rajat Kakar. This was Mr. Ang’s third trip to India in the last 9 months, showing a deepening of commitment from the international body to the fast-growing Indian market. Mr. Kakar, representing PPL said in his speech,

We have aggressive plans to increase revenues with a strategy to engage with clients and simplify tariffs alongside professionalism and transparency.  The revamped PPL will have a roadmap for the upcoming years with a goal to increase annual Public Performance royalties collection by 38% in 2019. We plan to implement new technology such as Online Licensing andAudio Fingerprinting to improve licensing efficacy and also work on enhancing the logging and disbursement methodology.

Mr. KT Ang addressed the attendees with optimism towards the future of the Indian music industry despite some major hurdles such as value gap, digital piracy and a lack of paid subscriber base in India. Mr. Ang said,

Despite double-digit growth for two consecutive years, aided by the incredible success of the music streaming in India, the Indian music industry is yet to achieve its true growth potential or match the trends of the early 2000s. The inability to remunerate the rights owners fairly and the menace of digital piracy continue to hinder progress.

Mr. Ang also presented some key insights from last year’s IFPI Global Music Report 2017 on the Global market and discussed the various challenges in fighting online piracy in India.