Legal download of Tamil film songs

I am surprised that none of the popular bloggers have blogged about this. This is something I have been wanting and waiting for so long. Downloading songs form the internet - this is something many of us are guilty of. Just bcos the fact that the crime is a milder one and we get off without any problem, it does not justify our actions. It is for this piracy sake, I never download & watch movies from those numerous websites. I always wait for the original DVD of the movie to arrive here in the local Indian store. But downloading songs form the internet - I have always been doing it. Even though I have been feeling guilty about the whole thing, I haven’t been able to restrain myself from downloading them. The urge to download the songs whenever a new album is released is too tempting to overcome.

I have in fact thought very hard about ways to overcome this guilt of mine. One thing I was seriously contemplating about is to purchase audio rights of Tamil albums released in India and sell them through the local Indian store here in Redmond. Currently, we only have some high profile Tamil albums that make it to the store here and they too are exorbitantly priced at 9$ a CD and most importantly, usually reach the store a good 1-2 months after the audio was released in India. So, I was reasoning that if we were to sell the albums at say 3-4$ a CD, many would buy it. But since the scope of that working out is very slim, I dropped it. And so, the other thing I recently decided was that in future, I will do this – every time I download a new album from the internet, I will ask my sister in Chennai to buy the original CD of the same album and keep it there. And I would then collect it from her when I visit India next. All this to assuage the guilt feeling.

So, amidst all this, comes this news about legal downloads as a huge relief. This report here in the Hindu has all the details about the new venture by Galatta.com. The songs are up here in the Galatta.com website. The cost of the songs too are not too expensive. The price of a single song is anywhere between Rs 12 and Rs. 15 whereas a whole album can cost you anything between Rs. 35 and Rs. 100. The ability to buy individual songs is the biggest advantage of this idea and whoever came up with this idea should be lauded. They have got almost all the latest albums right up to Kedi, in there. They are in the process of adding the old albums/ classics like Johnny too but I am sure it is going to take some time to do that. I only wish that they carry this forward in full swing and develop this into a comprehensive database of Tamil songs.

So, to start things, I went ahead and bought the complete Raam album, for a decent 1.98$. And my mind is so much free of the guilty consciousness which was killing me all these days. I know so many of my friends had the same feeling about downloading songs from the internet and now it is time to propagate this good news far and wide. So, spread the word around and spare yourself & your friends from the guilt of downloading songs, illegally. Happy downloading :)