I’m surprised that music business is still thriving in India. It beats me why more and more people are quitting jobs to pursue a career in music when piracy is so rampant (one of my colleagues did). Where is the money? Isn’t piracy making a big hole in your pockets yet?

Amit Agarwal has posted a list of top mobile websites by country, and in India, songs.pk, which is notorious for letting people download songs for free comes fourth on the list. So people download tracks on the move too? Isn’t there any way to put an end to this piracy? Doesn’t anyone have any solution? I would have stopped at these questions if not for two amazing services I saw yesterday and today.

The first, from Nokia, lets you download tracks for free. Yes you heard me right; you can download without shelling out a penny. At least for now, provided you have a coupon code. Along with a lot of Bangaloreans, I was given codes at Nokia Music Boot Camp and a chance to give the product a run. You can download tracks from mobile or from your desktop using apps which run on Nokia handsets and windows systems respectively. Overall, it’s pretty impressive except for the fact that these tracks have a DRM. But there was also a mention of taking-off DRM later on and a promise of bringing in social-networking features. Vinu Thomas and Raghu has written about the event in detail here, here and here.

The other product is from Hungama, and to put it bluntly, is an Indian version of iTunes. You can access their list of songs via mobile, desktop app or via browser, so Linux and Mac users are not left out like in the case of Nokia’s music store.

However, they have a smaller collection of songs – around 2,00,000 as of now — and is in closed-beta. Also unlike Nokia they will be charging for songs, but I like their pricing-plans. Rs10 for a single song (no DRM), Rs20 for a pack of four songs of your choice (no DRM), and unlimited downloads at (Rs99) per month. Good or not?

Well the goodness doesn’t end with the pricing actually, from what I was told, they’ll soon be allowing people to log-in via facebook connect and even Orkut-id (via an app I think).

The main problem if you ask me, is that there were only artists who came up through labels present on the site. Someone from Radio Verve had asked a similar question yesterday at the Nokia event too. But Nokia’s store doesn’t restrict itself to mainstream movie songs, which is what Hungama is doing now. But it’s okay considering they’re in closed beta. More updates on the service to follow, once I get a month’s trial tomorrow.