Instead of having your desi tunes illegally copied @ the local grocery store, you can now get an online store to do it for you –
San Francisco, Feb 4 : A California company has launched what it calls the first online music download store dedicated to music from India and the Indian sub-continent. CrimsonBay offers music from premiere Indian labels such as Saregama India Ltd, Ishq Records, Yatra Communications and others. The online marketplace, which is similar to Apple’s hugely successfully music download business iTunes, carries over 40,000 songs. A company press release said currently it was offering Hindi content including memorable songs from films such as “Umrao Jaan”, “Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge”, “Aradhana” and artists such as Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, Bally Sagoo and Rishi Rich. It plans to update its catalogue regularly.
As before, I suppose there’s a chance that music purchased from CrimsonBay will end up compensating the original artists, but call me a skeptic.
very little (usually none) of music sales goes to the smaller artists these days anyway. That is, they get a fixed payment up front, but no royalties. And that payment gets whittled away by promotional costs and marketing costs.
they have neither of the soundtracks that i want, a tiny selection of instrumentals (says the karaoke queen) … i guess i will return later.
Just visited crimsonbay.com after reading this page – this is good news for the Indian music industry – this may even allow more independents to showcase their music for download and get away from the formats that are accepted by the Indian labels.
CrimsonBay’s catalog of hindi music is quite good, although they need to get more Indian pop and classical music on their site. I give them an A+ for the idea – will now run and get a portable player!
You should actually check Desihits.com – they just did a collaboration with iTunes itself to launche the world’s first Desi itunes store at http://www.desihits.com/itunes