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Are you listening?

PHOTO: R. SHIVAJI RAO

Hear, hear Chennai-based entrepreneurs Ramkumar and Deepak Ganesh

What if there was a lounge or café dedicated entirely to browsing and compiling your favourite music? What if you no longer had to go through shelves and shelves of CDs at music stores while your feet are killing you or wait impatiently for slow online downloads of all the songs you want?

That’s what Chennai-based entrepreneurs Ramkumar and Deepak Ganesh are promising with their new music retailing system, the Mango Digital Vending Machine (DVM) — a whole new way to experience buying music.

“With the Mango DVM, customers can sit at a music café and browse through one to three lakh songs, even listening to snippets, before choosing their songs and putting them on their mp3 players or burning them on a CD,” explains founder and managing director Ramkumar, who worked in management and marketing for 18 years prior to developing Mango DVM. “The difference is that since all the songs are stored locally on the system (hence the name ‘vending machine’), there’s absolutely no download time or bandwidth cost.” Sounds good, doesn’t it? The pair has already signed up with 200 music labels across India to get access to music in all regional languages.

“We’re waiting to sign on 50-100 franchisees before our commercial launch in Tamil Nadu,” says Ramkumar.

Apart from the café or lounge format where buyers can experiment with various songs or genres before putting together their CD or song-list (at Rs. 150 for an hour of music), Mango DVM will also be available in a ‘kiosk format’ for quick buys of a couple of popular songs at, for example, cell phone outlets, and in a ‘table-top format’ in semi-urban areas where customers are likely to be less tech savvy.

“With the table-top format, the shopkeeper puts the songs together for the customer, similar to the old system where you gave a shopkeeper a blank cassette and asked him to record songs for you,” he remarks, adding with a smile, “except, of course, that this is legal.”

Mango DVM actually emerged from a two-page ‘idea’ that Ramkumar and his 27-year-old techie partner Deepak presented at the Intel India business plan competition back in 2006, which went on to became one of the six plans finally selected by Intel that year.

But the two still didn’t have the financial backing to turn that business plan into a commercial reality. That piece fell into place when they made a presentation before TiE Chennai Fund, a non-profit entrepreneur development company founded in the Silicon Valley, and received funding from venture capitalists.

Eventually, the two want to convert Mango into a branded music retail chain ala Apple (hence, apparently, the similarly fruity brand name). But for now, keep your eye out for Mango DVM lounges or kiosks coming to your locality or at your favourite books-and-music shop; buying music may have just gotten easier on your feet and your pocket book.

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