Landmark, the books and retail chain in which the Tata group owns 76 percent stake, intends to retail books and music online, reports Televisionpoint, quoting official sources.
If you visit Landmark’s site, it appears they’ve outsourced online sales and distribution to Sify – most of the links lead to Sify Shopping. If Landmark goes solo, that’ll be a significant loss for Sify, since books and music are two of the key products bought online.
Update: Landmark should remove its old site . It appears they’ve gone solo, and are retailing their own books. Thanks for pointing it out Gopal.
What’s interesting is that they’re planning to set up a music store, where users can buy single tracks after sampling online, and also enable users to pause and resume downloads. According to the source based report, the group will set up a separate online venture, and is in talks for online retail rights for music.
Now online retail of music is not new in India, but it’s hardly anything to write home about – it’s been attempted in the past by Soundbuzz (now owned by Motorola), MotoMusic (powered by Soundbuzz) and music label Saregama. I just checked, and Saregama’s site is currently down for maintenance, while their CD retail website – HamaraCD – doesn’t load. Who uses these sites anyway? The problem for most of the retailers is the piracy rampant online – does a user download the music, easily available at a consistent speed, from bittorrent, or a site like Saregama.
The other key issue is the pricing – songs are for around Rs. 12-15 each, and yet are DRM protected which means buyers can port them only to a limited number of devices (usually 1-3 devices). Why bother?
Related:
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5 Comments until now.
Rediff Books is also a channel for Landmark’s online sales (they’re a vendor on the Rediff Shopping platform). They’ve been serious about online retail for a while, but in all honesty, they haven’t a clue how to go about it. They’ll need to go into this venture with some major investment, in design, infrastructure, pricing strategies, marketing and logistics. I foresee difficult times ahead for them if they don’t do it right, especially the song downloads. They’ll have to depend heavily on a strong catalogue and competitive pricing for an international audience, because no self-respecting Indian will ever pay for music. Especially DRM-laden crap.
Nikhil,
On the contrary, it was Sify which had outsourced its book shopping to Landmark and Sify would sell and Landmark would ship.
You are looking at on older version of the Landmark website. Landmark has already gone solo and ended its tie-up with sify. If you go to the shopping.sify.com website, you will realize that the page hasn’t been updated in 6 months. http://www.landmarkonthenet.com/index.aspx is their homepage and they have been selling and shipping their books themselves for the last 3-4 months.
3 million Landmark books are completely available at shopping.indiatimes.com…music is next on the plan albeit a little more tricky than books!
[...] closer home, Medianama recently carried a story of Landmark making a foray into online music sales, with a ‘pay per song’ model. I agree [...]
Just a couple of hours ago saw an updated Landmark homepage with Movies and Music verticals added to their online store. Missed getting a screenshot. They were taking pre-orders for the music of Aamir Khan’s next movie Ghajini. Looks like they were only testing it or something, the old site is back now.