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New twist to fight piracy?
Fighting Bollywood piracy in South Africa :
[Entertainment News, India] By Fakir Hassen, Johannesburg, April 22 : When Ekbal Umarjee arrived in South Africa from Mumbai 15 years ago, he had a vision of Bollywood music and movies getting global exposure one day, and began investing in it on a small scale.
Today Umarjee's company Global Bollywood Music has the widest network of Indian music and movie shops in South Africa, retailing to the public and supplying wholesale to smaller dealers all over the country.
Starting out as a small shop in Bruma, east of here, a decade ago, the company's growth has been really rapid, helping rekindle the market for legal Indian music and DVDs in South Africa, which was rampant with poor quality pirated products that had become the norm.
Now Umarjee, in tandem with local regulatory authorities, is determined to fight the piracy market for Indian music and movies in South Africa, mainly sourced from Pakistan.
Umarjee believes that discerning lovers of Indian music and movies are increasingly realising the value of paying a few rand more for a quality, guaranteed product, rather than buying from a street vendor who can sometimes not be found after the product turns out to be defective or of poor quality.
Now, after two years of hard work convincing some of the major Indian music companies to appoint him as their official distributor in South Africa, Umarjee believes the strategies he is planning to put in place will get rid of the remaining pirate dealers.
Already, the corner has been turned with a price reduction in the titles of the largest Indian music company in India, T-Series, for which Umarjee holds the rights to the whole of Africa.
These prices no longer make it competitive enough for pirates to offer titles to consumers, who have been quick to realise this as well.
Global Bollywood Music also has the South African rights for other top Indian music and film companies like Venus, Eros, and Yashraj.
But Umarjee does not believe he is in the music and movie market to make a fortune for himself. Just a few months after opening his first store, Umarjee was not only running branches in major Indian areas Lenasia and Pietermaritzburg, but also giving other entrepreneurs opportunities to develop businesses in the rapidly growing market.
"The more people we can get on board to run outlets selling legitimate and quality, guaranteed products, the quicker we can wipe out the scourge of piracy, which not only helps criminals, but also causes unemployment and basically amounts to theft," Umarjee told IANS.
"Our promise at Global Bollywood Music is that we will offer the best quality service to any customer, no matter how large or small the order."
At the flagship store in Fordsburg, customers can find almost anything they might want on CD and DVD, from ghazals, qawwali, classical and religious titles to the very latest films in Hindi and Tamil.
Weekends sees the store staying open late into the night as thousands of Indians flock to the adjacent Fordsburg Square, many having developed a ritual to browse at the Global Bollywood Music store to see if the latest titles have arrived.
--Indo-Asian News Service
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