Entertainment

India's mobile music industry will apparently soon overtake its conventional counterpart, with projected sales for 2006 set at INR 7.2 billion.

Airtel has a subscriber base of 20m, out of which 6m use mobile music services. During the last financial year, the company registered about 50m downloads. This year, music downloads are slated to go up as the company adds more subscribers.

For instance almost all operators have launched an "Easy Music" service that allows subscribers to walk into a mobile phone outlet, choose their favorite music from a huge catalogue of music in as many as 20 languages and download onto their mobile phones -- or even other digital devices like iPod -- for as little as 15 cents each for a Hindi song or 30 cents for an international song.

Gamasutra is covering a report by Pearl Research that forecasts the Indian gaming market to be worth USD 200 million by 2010.

In addition, there were more than 100,000 Internet cafes in India in 2005. Internet cafes can derive 30% to 40% of revenues from users playing games. Games are a “sticky” activity, thus users tend to spend more time and money at Internet cafes that offer games, according to the report. The latest trend is the opening of gaming-oriented cafes such as Sify’s Gamedromes to satisfy the growing demand for games. Internet cafes with broadband connections and fast PCs are increasingly replacing many of India’s outdated Internet cafes that use dial-up.