GMM Grammy takes on pirates

The partnership is aimed to cutting the use of pirated CDs, GMM chairman Paiboon Damrongchaitham said yesterday.

The firms' "Happy Vampires" package allows DTAC customers to download unlimited and up-to-date music and ring tones from GMM to their mobile phones for a monthly fee of Bt20. It is exclusive to DTAC's subscribers for six months, and subscribers can forward the downloaded music on to others.

If it proves successful, GMM will join with other cellular operators to promote the same business model.

Mobile phone subscribers currently pay between Bt15 and Bt40 per song download to their phones.

DTAC chief commercial officer Thana Thienachariya said he expected the package to attract 1 million subscriptions within six months, rising to 12 million in one year. DTAC has more than 17 million mobile phone subscribers.

DTAC and GMM will share revenue from the monthly fees and from the use of DTAC's high-speed cellular network by its subscribers to download GMM music.

The companies will jointly spend Bt100 million on marketing campaigns for Happy Vampires.

GMM managing director Suwat Damrongchaitham said his company had not linked up with True Move for a similar low-cost offering because True Move has far fewer subscribers. It has also not joined with Advanced Info Service (AIS) due to some pending problems between the two.

Piroon Paireepairit, multimedia content director of True Corp, the parent of True Move, said he was confident that with sizeable digital content inventory, True Move could compete with Happy Vampires.

GMM earlier targeted revenue of Bt600 million from its digital content business this year, up from Bt419 million last year. It has, however, now revised its growth target upward by 20 per cent after the launch of Happy Vampires.

Of last year's revenue, 60 per cent was contributed by content downloads via mobile phones.