MyBand Provides Online Digital Store For Music Bands

India lives on music, albeit most of them are from movies. Each one of us would remember those batch mates from college who was the best singer or the best drummer in town – guys who would save the face of the batch each time an inter-college fest was around. What happened to them after they passed out of college? Nobody knows.

Perhaps we still do not have a strong foundation for music – entrepreneurship. And this is exactly what I think MyBand, a Mumbai based startup can offer. Founded by Debashis Dey, a former media executive in February, the company is now offering a digital platform for Indian music bands to sell their content online. We had covered myband before here.

The company claims they have over 800 bands from across the country signed up on the website since its inception, which is fairly decent. What can give the startup a real boost is the fact that most music bands come out of colleges and the company can use this community to effect a viral branding effect of its portal – think MySpace! While it is well known that MySpace helped local music bands grow, it is not well acknowledged that these music bands with their followers also gave MySpace a fillip in popularity. MyBand could take a leaf from this.

MyBand intends to charge 5-10% of all music sales that happen through their site. Does that make good business sense? I doubt. But what this does give the music bands is a good platform to showcase their talents and sale of content can be reassuring towards those wanting to make a career out of music. For MyBand, its success is solely dependent on how successful bands coming out of the site get as this can in turn grow the site.

However, the business model is more about organizing concerts involving these bands and monetizing through sponsorships. That does look financially sound and it will be interesting to revisit this startup a few months down the line.