In conversation with MediaNama, Vijay Nair, the founder of Only Much Louder, an independent music business, and music streaming website and event NH7, explains how very large music labels in India operates, how it is similar to a media buying, and the dependency of the business on Caller Ringback Tones: MediaNama: How has one label become so dominant in the Indian industry? Vijay Nair: I think some of the larger labels in the country, apart from the part that they have the cash to bid for music rights for some of the biggest films, also hold media inventory. Assume that a movie X has released, and they want to buy outdoor media and television spots. If you look at it, for a majority of the big TV networks, their spots are full of movie promos. Instead of the producers directly buying this inventory, the music label ends up buying a lot of it, because they have a lot of TV inventory sitting with them. This inventory is sometimes bought at dirt cheap prices from the network, because they don't charge the networks for playing their music. Say you have a label, say fictional Label Q. If a TV channel, for example an MTV, wants to play a certain amount of music from Label Q, because they want to use it in programming, for cutting spots - they get a blanket license to do all of that, and in return they give a certain amount of TV inventory to the music…
