Taazi.com: Pakistan’s first Digital Music Delivery Service

Taazi.com in collaboration with Ufone is providing Pakistan’s first web-based platform for emerging and seasoned musicians to showcase their talents and retain intellectual property rights, and raising a voice against piracy.

When the era of the walkman started to fade away, and iPods became a part of every pocket (or mp3 players), there was a major shift in the business models of the music industry. Music also became more digitized than before. iTunes, Reverbnation, Google Play, Youtube and SoundCloud made it easy for listeners to buy music and share their favorite tracks. However, due to the lack of a proper platform in Pakistan, most of these services full potential could never be utilized.

This posed a great deal of problems for musicians and record labels in Pakistan. They minted money via the sell of Audio cassettes and CD’s, but were unable to adapt to the changing environment of mp3 music. Piracy, trust issues and myopic industry insights led the industry into a major downfall. Even credit cards in Pakistan are not optimized to pay for these online services, whether its iTunes or Google Play.

If credit cards don’t work, paypal doesn’t work and other payment systems are not recognized by these services, then should the Pakistani’s just abandon their thirst for unpirated quality music? No, you don’t need to do that as long as Taazi.com is around.

“Taazi.com is an effort to help promote the incredible music talent in Pakistan, discourage piracy and provide artists an opportunity to earn money from their original content. As a musician myself I understand the challenges faced by music artists. Taazi.com is an original ground breaking portal for artists and it is the first of its kind anywhere in the world.” Haroon, CEO Unicorn Black remarks about his new project of a digital media delivery platform.

How does it work?

We all have cell phones and credit in them, well, most of us do. Almost all the mobile phones are now equipped with mp3 players and we all have a payment system as well (EasyLoad, Scratch Cards etc). Along with that, our numbers are our identities as they are linked with the NADRA, so in that case, our numbers can be called our Unique Identification.

Taazi.com incorporates all these into its powerful system, and uses the number to enable a buyer purchase a song legally. The process is simple:

• You browse for a song you want to buy
• You listen to a preview of that song
• Click on it to buy it
• You use your phone number to pay for the music
• Your payment is done via a deduction from your balance.

And you’re done! Simple. Easy. Secure.

Haroon, in partnership with Ufone, has just revolutionized the Pakistani music industry. Taazi.com is a combination of technologies like Youtube, Facebook Videos, SoundCloud, and the amazing Playit.pk, along with the integration of features of social media sharing. It has simple payment mechanism where your mobile phone balance is your one way ticket to legal music, that is not all, as Taazi.com also uses PayPal for international music enthusiasts.

Another great feature in Taazi.com it is a musician’s source of making some hard earned money, as 70% of proceeds from the sales of the music you are going will go directly to the artist. At a time, when musicians can only make money by performing live in concerts or by endorsing a brand, Taazi.com comes as a sigh of relief. And for that matter, lots of big names are already on board including (but not limited to) Zoe Viccaji, QB, Abbas Ali Khan, Ali Azmat, Qayaas and Haroon to name a few.

Ufone has always been at the forefront when it came to innovation. Their target market of youth has been their core focus with initiatives like Uthrecords, which gave young musicians a platform to showcase their talent. By partnering with Taazi.com, Ufone has once again proved themselves as the trendsetters and innovators in the industry.