Introduction Models Pricing Catalog Genre DRM Software Trial Period Conclusion

The Catalog

The catalog is almost the same in all the download services which carry a substantial number of ICM songs - iTMS, MSN Music & eMusic. They have the same mistakes too. I suspect the catalog is provided by the same content provider (or Saregama itself ?). The number of tracks are probably in the low thousands. You will find both popular artists like Bhimsen Joshi or M S Subbulakshmi and rare old recordings of Abdul Karim Khan or even some obscure ones.

But, there are several problems with the catalog of music available with all the download services. Since all the download services have the problems I'm going to discuss, I'm not sure who is to blame - Saregama or the Service Providers.

i. Linking Multiple Artists To A Track

This is the most important problem with the catalog of all the services. Let us take an example to explain the problem. If you try to search on Subbulakshmi in MSN Music, you get names of 6 artists.

Six Different Subbulakshmis ?

As we know, these are not six separate artists ! The problem here is that the download services assume that a track is to be associated with only one artist. So, in cases where more than one artist is involved in a track, they have "made up" a new artist by combining the names of artists who contributed to that track. This gets hilarious when you look at Hindi film music, where a search on Mukesh yields 170 artists.

Ofcourse, another problem is various spellings of the same artist. Some include the salutation (pandit ot ustad) and some don't. Some will use a shortened form of salutation (Pt or Pt.).

       Pricing - Pg 2               Albums - Pg 4