We have quite few big players in the market selling albums from production houses. What about indie music? We found a cool website – OkListen, that helps users discover, listen to and legally download Indian indie music.
Founded by Vijay Basrur and Bhavin Badheka, they mention that the seeds of OK Listen! were sown when they tried looking for options to buy music of a few Independent artists and discovered that they were relying on Indian Postal Service to send out their CD’s. They had no other option. So, OkListen is created as a truly pro-musician digital platform that musicians could trust and a destination consumers could come to for discovering music and supporting the musicians they love.
A user can expect to find all kinds of indie music such as rock, Indian folk, progressive and blues among many others. They also have the “Top” lists to know what’s selling at the moment. User can buy an entire album or a single record as an mp3. When a song gets sold, the musician gets 70% of the net price of the music being sold. Folks at OkListen are also planning to add record labels to their collection in the near future.
One of the cool features of the website is Album Cards. It means, assigning unique codes to every music on their site. Using these codes the content owners can easily use music for quick gratification online for any customer feedback or contests. These codes can also be printed on cards and sold at on ground venues. The user who gets the code, comes to OKListen, redeems the code and starts downloading the music.
A detailed interview with the founder can be found here.
What do we think of OkListen?
These kind of startups address a very obvious need in the market – ofcourse indie music cannot be delivered by Indian Postal System!! It is a win-win : both for the bands and for the music lovers. From the site, it appears that social integration still needs to be addressed. This website will get lot of competition from newly launched startups such as tune patrol. We believe that, having personalized offerings to users and exclusive contracts will be of great help in the future.
Long live Indie Music! We wish Team OkListen all the best.
