The Evolution Of The Music Experience

Digital music has completely changed the way consumers buy and consume music. It is also changing the way music is marketed by the music companies.

There are three major trends which are already visible and which will ensure that by 2015, everything changes fundamentally and the world of music will never be the same again-

• Consumers prefer to listen to music on mobile devices. A trend that started with the Sony Walkman in the 1980s has accelerated through the iPod and the mobile phone era.
• Mobile music devices will all be high-speed wireless Internet devices well before 2015.
• A number of service providers will emerge, providing high-quality preprogrammed streaming music channels, streamed music on demand, recommendation and other services, direct to mobile devices.

The Need For Great Discovery And Recommendation

Today, there is no comprehensive Indian music service available, which works across devices, provides content across languages and genres, and has excellent discovery and recommendation capabilities as well as social features.

One of the main reasons for this lacuna is that a comprehensive system of discovery and recommendation for Indian music is challenging to achieve. There is a plethora of information which needs to be collated for every title and this requires that it be analysed and evaluated by professionals whose understanding of that genre is based on knowledge of music, language, genre and its relevance to the Indian consumer. Unlike international music, no such comprehensive meta database exists for Indian music.

The Need For Distributed And Multimodal Technology

It is not feasible to provide a popular streaming music service on a mobile telephone network, unless the content delivery infrastructure is distributed across a network and delivers content from the edge of network. In addition, the service must work well and be acceptable to consumers even on today's 2.5 G networks and must be capable of smoothly morphing into an enhanced service when the consumer moves to a 3G experience in the near future.

In the case of some telcos who would like to provide their own streaming radio services, there is the added requirement of commonality of service and technology platforms across the various networks and devices that they serve. For example, leading telecom companies in India are active as ISPs for PC Internet, mobile telephony, fixed line telephony, IPTV, DTH etc. They must have one single service and one smooth and uniform experience for their consumer, across all these networks and devices.

The Banyan Music Solution

Banyan mobile has invested in the creation of a technology platform and a comprehensive music service that can be used by telcos and media companies TODAY to provide a great streaming radio Indian music service to their consumers across Mobile, PC, IPTV, DTH, kiosk and more.

Discovery and recommendations are enabled by India's most comprehensive music classification database-the Indian music genome, which has been compiled over the last 10 years by teams of music professionals at Banyan Tree, India’s leading radio programming company. This music genome powers the Banyan Music recommendation and discovery engines.

The Banyan music solution is powered by a technology platform that is multimodal and can be distributed to deliver content from the edge of network. This resolves the problems of delivering the service effectively over mobile networks and of delivering the service over multiple networks and multiple device types.