Distribution and promotion strategies for global marketing of Indian entertainment products: film and music

Abstract

The Indian film and Music industries are unique blends of commerce and performing arts.People’s lifestyle, sociology, aspirations have been reflected through the films and music.In spite of being the largest film producing country in the world, the presence of Indian cinema is hardly felt outside India except for a few countries.Other than the NRI population existing in virtually all countries of the world, people in some countries like Japan, Russia have shown interest in Indian films. The recent publicity Indian films got through the nominations in different international awards have provided the launching pad that may be significantly used to the advantage of Indian film and music producer to produce and market content for global markets. The recent popularity of Spanish, Arabic songs in their original and translated versions, Chinese films dubbed in English and Hindi indicate the opportunities for entertainment content for even the countries where English or Hindi are not the main spoken languages. The recent ill performance of music and film industries in India inspired this study, which mainly focuses on the distribution and promotion of films and music and how that may be used at an advantage for higher revenues for the players in the industry. The two contradicting views from industry analysts and industry players were observed regarding the music industry. The players in the industry stressed that the demand and amount of music listened to people has increased, but the sales have gone to pirates and ISPs through whom consumers directly downloaded music files from different Internet sites.To block their claim, they have also provided data. However, industry analysts say that music as an entertainment source is losing out to other forms of entertainment. This has been compared to changes in people’s entertainment habits changing when TV and cable Television started becoming popular. However, statistics, supporting this claim is not available in public domain and is not present in this report. In the case of films, the demand is unpredictable and unstable (unmanaged content in films, resulting in unmanageable demand and other competing sources of entertainment).There also exists a mismatch in demand and supply. The areas where this report just touched and has left scope for further work are :- Establishing the framework to track and manage the change in entertainment consumption habits of consumers. Study on the effectiveness and acceptance of different channels of communication for marketing entertainment content. Study on the integration of different channels and forms of entertainment and exploring and testing revenue models on the basis of cross-selling between different forms of entertainment.