By Roop Karnani

The dough before the re and the mi is what counts. Can Mandar Agashe and Gautam Godse-a.k.a.www.musicurry.com-really make their tunes play the sound of money? Sure, everyone knows by now that the Netspace is ripe for the music-makers to homestead, offering their products for fast and easy downloads and killing the old-fashioned delivery mechanism of CDs and cassettes.

By that logic, musicurry, which is trying to tap the nascent space for Indian music by e-beaming 24 hours of music through 6 channels-covering Hindi film songs, classical music, ghazals, Indipop, instrumental music, and devotional songs, with Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam channels to be added soon-should have tuned in a good proposition. After all, the 3-month-old venture, which has been made under the banner of Agashe and Mandar's Pune-based company, Questionable Ventures (QV), is built around the proposition of offering some 20,000 songs for on-line listeners.

That should attract customers among Indian music-starved Non-Resident Indians (NRI) as well as local music-lovers surfing the Net. Best of all, musicurry is the first multi-channel Web radio operating out of India. Says Godse, 30: ''We'd like to maintain the headstart we have over competition, and improve our content by offering more channels and doubling our song library in the next 2 to 3 months.''

The crucial issue, however, is whether-and how-Agashe and Godse can leverage the edge they have in terms of content over the conventional music sites that challenge them for traffic. For instance, indiafm.com-recently snapped up by hungama.com-has as many as 5 channels in its audio Netcast, but offers only 350 songs. There is also All India Radio (air.com), which currently offers 24-hour music but on one channel only, and All India Internet Radio (aiir.com), which offers 3 channels of Hindi music. And, of course, indiatimes. com's music channel, Jukebox (jukebox. indiatimes.com), boasts of 400 downloadable songs. Joining them soon will be rediff.com and broadcastindia.com. ''Musicurry seems to have the best fare,'' says Chaitanya Belwal, 23, the Webmaster at the ISP ETH Internet.

That's the precise proposition that both Agashe and Godse have to play up. And quickly. Says Jaideep Banerjee, 35, the CEO of bonernet.com, which runs broadcastindia.com: ''We'll be going live with TV programmes as well as music channels within the next 3 months.'' So, musicurry has to establish a lead in customer-retention which, admittedly, 6 channels of music should help secure.

Of course, Agashe and Godse haven't stopped there. The site also includes gossip and trivia, on-line polls and quizzes, and an innovation in the form of an on-line music tutor, who is currently giving lessons in how to play the guitar. However, musicurry, which uses the popular Real Audio format for streaming its content, has chosen to offer its music only to customers who take the trouble of registering and logging in each time they hit the site. While this helps build a database of customers and their preferences-which is crucial for selling ad-space and ad-time-it may prove a minor turn-off. Admits Agashe, 36: ''We are considering doing away with registration in the near future.''

Realising that a 24-hour radio station implies a high level of multiple usage, Agashe and Godse picked their server-location with heavy traffic-density in mind. Their choice: 2 servers located at the Internet Exchange (IX) in California, US. Created by a consortium of telecom majors, including Sprint, MCI, and AT&T, this is the site where, inter alia, the Yahoo! and AltaVista servers operate from. Says Godse: ''Our benchmark is a trace-time of 250 milliseconds from anywhere in the world. IX meets that.''

The servers are scaleable affairs whose capacity can be ramped up if necessary. There is, of course, a Real Audio server to handle the streaming of the content while the operating system is that Webmaster's hot-pick, Linux. The Website has been designed using PERL, PHP, and Javascript, with MySQL as the database at the back-end.

There's no denying that Indian music can be a hot product on the Net. Says Agashe: ''There is a great demand for desi music from Indians residing abroad. In the US alone, there are an estimated 3-4 million Indians who are connected to the Net. These are our target customers to begin with.'' In India, they are training their sights on employees at companies with leased lines in particular-since streaming music needs fat bandwidths and reliable connectivity, which dial-up accounts often fail to provide. ''In Pune alone,'' enumerates Godse, ''there are 80 companies, with an average of 125 people each, with leased lines. So, you are talking about 10,000 potential customers right away.''

They're both right. Which is why the initial response from on-line music-seekers has been good. In the first 50 days, the site notched up-according to its own claims-over half-a-million hits, and 9,000 registered users. The target: 3 lakh hits a day, which will translate into a user-base of some 100,000 people-a number sizeable enough to offer to advertisers. For that, a brand-building blitz is on the cards. Says Mandar: ''We plan to use billboards, print, and TV ads.''

That such a customer-base-if it can be achieved-will be tailor-made for advertisers is obvious. For starters, music companies will be more than interested. Says Harish Dayani, 44, Vice-President (Sales), Gramophone Company: ''The software of music is synergistic with the Net; so, the idea is good.'' Second, the large NRI component of the customer universe should bring in ads from companies targeting that segment. Says Bonernet's Banerjee: ''Financial services companies, for instance, would be a good bet.'' Adds Agashe: ''Our marketing team is on the road now. And we expect advertising revenues shortly.''

As a related potential stream of revenue, the tunesome twosome are readying to launch and sell music directly through their site, in the MP3 format-music that will not be available through the conventional media. While the on-line music store Fabmart.com pioneered the concept in India, putting an exclusive-to-the-Net song by Remo Fernandes on-line for downloading, musicurry is planning this as a commercial, and not a brand-building, activity. Recording the songs at its own studios-1 in Mumbai, the other in Pune-musicurry will sell them for Rs 30 each in India, and $1 globally.

Says Godse: ''We plan to offer about 100 songs every 3 months.'' Also in the works is an extension into real-world broadcasting, with an alliance having been sewn up with the Silicon Valley radio station KBZS, which wants to target the Indian diaspora in the Valley.

To tap this potential, though, QV will first have to scale up its investments, not just in services and infrastructure, but also in marketing itself. So far, the company has been running on an initial combined investment of Rs 30 lakh, from Agashe and Godse's personal funds. The operating costs of Rs 10 lakh a month have been met by profits from QV's other Net-based activities, which include designing Websites. And since they pay a fat royalty of Rs 5 to the Indian Phonographic & Recording Society every time a song is aired, those costs will only rise. Not surprisingly, therefore, they are now looking for venture capital, with a target of raising between $3-5 million.

Meanwhile, the company has grown from a 6-person set-up to 65 employees now. But the real growth will come only if musicurry can capture the taste of the on-line music-listener-and leave its competitors stewing in their own juices. But, at least the recipe is right.

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