Idea's 'Madhur' to bring folk music on mobiles

Mobile service operator Idea Cellular Limited is currently working on an innovative initiative christened ‘Idea Madhur’ “to bring to the limelight the forgotten artistes and keep the grassroot-level music intact,” according to its chief marketing officer Pradeep Shrivastava.

“Of late, we have been putting a lot of focus on localised content. The idea behind the Idea Madhur programme is to create content with like-minded people and provide it as value-added services (VAS) including dialler tones, background tones and SMS tones on the mobile to our over 45 million subscribers,” he said.

Shrivastava was speaking to Business Standard on the sidelines of a curtain-raiser press conference on Monday on the forthcoming 56th IDEA Filmfare Awards 2008 (South), scheduled to be held in Hyderabad on July 31, 2009.

As per the internal statistics of Idea, four out of 10 subscribers of the company use dialler tones. While VAS currently accounts for 10 per cent of Indian cellular operators’ overall revenues, this is expected to grow to about 25 per cent in the next five years, like in China. “Music and filmy content form a major chunk of VAS. And, the rural markets are bigger than urban areas now,” he said.

Shrivastava said Idea had identified select markets to unearth authentic folk music and had already started a pilot in Andhra Pradesh. “At present, we are working with music companies and grassroot-level artistes to create content based on seven genres of folk music in the state. However, it will take a couple of months for us to introduce this content on the mobile as it requires high-quality music recording and then converting the content to the mobile format, before launching it in other regions,” he added.