Om Shanti Om's music goes global in digital format

Shah Rukh Khan's much talked about forthcoming production Om Shanti Om is set to make a new record. It is for the first time that a Bollywood film's music album will be available for full downloads on mobile handsets and digital media including itunes across 23 countries including India, Singapore, UK, US, UAE, Sri Lanka and Malaysia.

Music company T-Series, which holds the music rights of the film directed by Farah Khan, will facilitate the service through its mobile content partner Hungama Mobile. T-Series will simultaneously launch the music on CDs.

The announcement will be made in Dubai over the weekend, followed by an announcement in India early next week. T-Series confirmed the development.

"It is true that the music of Om Shanti Om will be released across platforms," Bhushan Kumar, chairman & managing director of T-Series told Business Standard.

Apart from tie-ups with all the leading telecom service providers in India, Hungama has partnered with several service providers across countries where the music will be made available.

Some of the carriers are UAE-based telecom service providers Du and ETISALAT, UK-based Vodafone, European mobile phone network provider O2, Singapore's Singtel and US-based Verizon.

Hungama already has tie-ups with around 150 telecom service provider worldwide.

Neeraj Roy, CEO of Hungama Mobile said, "Our aim is to release the music across digital formats globally. Since Om Shanti Om is a much-awaited film starring Shah Rukh Khan, the music will have a massive appeal even overseas." He added that the price points for music download on handsets will be in line with the respective markets.

For instance, download per song will cost 2-3 dhirams in UAE, while it will cost 1.99 pounds on the O2 network. The downloading price in India is around Rs 25 a song, with additional download costs on mobile handsets.

The additional cost is usually 10 paise per 10 kilobytes and the average size of each song is 500 kilobytes. However, itunes will cost 99 cents.

The pricing for internet downloads varies, as the user can either download the entire album or a few songs.

T-Series and Hungama were the first to introduce fully downloadable songs in India for the mobile handset. This was done for Hrithik Roshan starrer, Krrish. However, Hutch was the only service provider back then.

The mobile music market in India consists of ringback tones, polyphonic tones, truetones, fulltrack downloads and caller ID tunes. It is estimated to be 60 per cent of all digital sales in the world for the next two years, according to PricewaterhouseCooper report.