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More on My Space’s India Strategy
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MySpace – for those of you who don’t know is a unit of Fox Interactive Media owned by Media Baron Rupert Murdoch. It’s a community forum that has sites in countries such as the US, Brazil, Canada, Austria, Denmark, and recently Korea.
According to various reports MySpace globally signs on 300, 000 new users daily and already has a base of 110 million users (though some say it is now lower than Facebook).
Initially MySpace seems to be looking to create awareness with events and a presence on Mass Media Vehicles. They are tying up with Star TV owned Channel [V]’s Campus Star (no surprises there – cross media synergy, Murdoch owns a lot of Star TV). They look to include MySpace audiences at the voting stage. My guess is that they will also have special profiles created for the contestants and a zone around campus start to engage traffic for longer and get them familiar with the MySpace UI.
MySpace is also signing up with Saregama to launch an ‘Underground Series’ of Music albums with about 30 bands. This is keeping in mind their USP of music.
MySpace will also encourage Indian developers to work with the company in order to develop customized applications for the social networking portal.
In the US, MySpace had recently announced plans for a new online music download service, pitting it directly against Apple iTunes and raising the stakes on the digital media battlefront.
The venture, called MySpace Music, offers free streaming music, MP3 downloads, concert tickets, mobile phone ringtones and band merchandise. MySpace along with music labels like Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group have their music catalogs available on MySpace Music. Amit Kapur, COO of MySpace India is not ruling out a similar tie-up for the India market, “We think it will be easy to replicate the partnerships for Indian audiences where the market is much larger for such multimedia content.”
Apart from that MySpace is also launching MySpace Live. This includes a series of concerts to be broadcast on TV. Look out for one on Zee Café’s ‘The Gig’ soon.
I have a feeling that sooner or later MySpace will engage users even through it’s sister Media concern Star Plus’ platform. One may also see more integration of MySpace into Star World.
It may seem like MySpace is a late entrant and there are concerns about its ‘Music led approach’ in a market which thrives on Bollywood Music and where there are established Bollywood labels who for now would not be willing to part with anything. But one thing is for sure – MySpace will use its cross media synergy very effectively to get ahead of the curve.
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Any updates from MySpace India? April was a long time ago. But hey- India is not an easy market.
From my experience with social networking, globally and with extensive work with Indian users, any kind of social application for the Indian market needs to take into consideration the local needs which are very different from the classic social networks that are meant for the ‘West’ and rely heavily on the proven success ‘formula’ of the Web. The nuances, the user behaviour, cultural hot buttons are so different and vary widely from region to region even within India. Very different, certainly a challenge but really fun and a pleasure to participate in and watch grow.
That said, it does need special handling. I suppose it is OK to start a basic mobile application that targets the metros- where one can cut and paste the ‘formula’ to make it somewhat work but we cannot forget what Bollywood learnt decades ago- that for India the true key to success is the B, C and D cities. The key here is to balance the ‘formula’ and the cultural needs.
India is a weird combination - still stuck in the 70s and 80s with the music and movies on one end and with the super trendy nightclubs on the other. And even though people are really tech savvy- they may not know how to read or write but can work the mobile phones with really advanced features- they are most comfortable talking in the language they are most comfortable with. Yes, even the Post-Docs. Note: I said talk. NOT text. It is not to say they cannot learn to text- that too using English characters for writing in Hindi or Tamil or… but why not simply let them use their voice and talk. It is amazing to see how quickly they walk away from text chat if they can use voice - in the language of their choice.
Eagerly watching the social networking space heat up with voice and video along with better connections for data services for the phone. I’m not a fan of the text connections. It is already getting warmer in there… Watch out for new comers like RockeTalk. This is a really exciting time for this space.