All this happiness is being promised to the industry by Lahari Media, which holds the digital distribution rights of Lahari Recording company, the prominent southern Indian music player, after its tie up with the Israeli company Everad, a technology provider for distribution of advertisement-supported digital content over the internet. "We are in talks with a couple of recording companies. I can't disclose the names right now, but one of them is a big player. And, the response has been good because revenue sharing between the music content provider, the Web site affiliate and the technology provider is equal. The best thing is that the end-user, the music lover, still gets his music free," says Indraneel Mukherjee, vice president, Lahari Media., Technology allows the end-user to download the music file from the Internet.

But the music comes along with a visual aperture on the computer screen that carries the advertisement, both online and offline. "This creates a legal platform for the music content provider. In a way, you can call us the legal Napster. We get the distribution rights from the recording company and the advertiser pays only if the advertisement impressions are seen,'' says Ben-Tsur Lior, vice president (international marketing and sales) of Everad. The user cannot minimise the advertisement or it scroll away," he adds.

Everad, which has notched up a number of music labels in the US in just five months, provides for real time tracking. Not only does it track advertisement impressions and verifies that they are, in fact, being viewed by the targeted audience, it also measures which advertisement is generating the best response. "The fund of information that is generated on the user profile from an analysis of usage, demographic and geographic data is immense. The data also helps the music content provider inmaking intelligent business decisions and target another market for his CDs if in one region, the music is not attractive," says Lior.

And for the Web site partner or affiliate this technology provides a new revenue source and a large catalog of quality and legal music. More than that, it provides a permanent desktop based channel to web users. Everad launched www.playj.com for music lovers to download music. "You can play any other player, also," adds Lior.

He is not prepared to discuss revenue figures, suffice it to say "even if a track is played 10 times a year, revenue would be flowing in. There are several impressions in a three-and-a-half minute song. In the last five months, music content providers are happy in the US" And Mukherjee is excited because Lahari Media has the distribution rights for devotional and spiritual music that run for several more minutes than the standard film songs. Lahari boasts of 65,000 plus all time audio tracks and 20,000 film music video tracks in Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and other languages. It also has 500 Hindi film and light evergreens and 1,300 light, film and folk music tracks in other regional languages.

(India Abroad News Service)