Music label, film company — and now hardware seller — Saregama is transitioning out of its reliance on the mobile VAS business and is monetizing its music more on streaming services and YouTube. "This year apart from being the big growth driver that came in, has also been a year we have taken a very conscious call to get out of some businesses," said Vikram Mehra, managing director at Saregama. "WAP business is one of them. This is a feature that we used to support on feature phones across this telecom operator, it used to be a large topline business, but we realize, it is a dying business and secondly, it is a non-IP business. We were playing a role of an aggregator and that is not what is a core of Saregama." Read: Saregama exceeds expectations, sells 389,000 units of Carvaan The numbers Saregama's B2B business, which is essentially its licensing of music to streaming services, is paying off more due to rapidly declining data costs. "Data cost, which was some 250 bucks when I joined this company has fallen down below 5 bucks per GB," Mehra said. In the last one year, OTT streams, which is essentially playbacks on apps like Saavn, Gaana, and Wynk Music, have grown by 44%, to 724 million in Q4-2018 alone. It's important to note that music labels get paid by streaming services on a per-play basis, regardless of whether the listeners are paying subscribers or not. "3.1 billion times a Saregama music IP…
