Make mobile music, mint some moolah!

BANGALORE: If you spend a hefty sum on your monthly mobile bill, then this opportunity is designed just for you. You could now use your mobile phone and your creativity to earn some money. Cellebrum, the VAS arm of M-Corp, now plans to pay its consumers royalty fees for ringtones and pictures composed by them if they are downloaded by others users.

And according to research carried out by the industry, consumers are open to the model of earning money through content generation and advertisements.

“We are piloting user-generated content in Punjab and Karnataka. Users can generate their own content and upload it to our data centre. Each such content will be protected through a username and password. On any content that is downloaded the user who generated that content will be paid a royalty.

Content will be monitored and checked by our moderators,” said Saket Agarwal, COO, Cellebrum. The company is planning to launch this service by the end of this month.

User-generated content is a fairly new model being tried by VAS players as a means to increase their revenues. “VAS providers pay royalty to music companies for using their content.

If this model works, then their revenues will increase, because the royalty they pay to the users will be significantly lower than the royalty they pay to music companies. This model could work if user-generated content catches on with people,” said Manzoor Ameen, COO (Karnataka), Tata Teleservices.

However, some players feel that it is unlikely to be a huge revenue generator. “Companies started this only to ensure interactivity with the consumers and make them feel important. This is not a huge revenue generation segment. But the user-generated content industry has not been monetised yet.

Going forward it might become a revenue generation model as some players start focussing only on user-generated content,” said Mandar Thakur, general manager, Soundbuzz.com, a music content website. Making money and music now seem to have found a perfect match!