India the home for popular music such as Carnatic, Classical, Bhangra and instruments like Sitara, Tabla etc is losing its sheen with the current generation youngsters embracing Western Music. To cash in on this emerging market, Furtados Music has teamed up with Yamaha to retail sophisticated instruments for professional pursuits. Furtados is the key dealer for Yamaha in core territories across India. Furtados aims to be the most comprehensive music instrument store.
Furtados has launched the first exclusive Yamaha showroom at Ambience Mall, Gurgaon. This store will be a one stop shop for all sales, service and needs of Western musical instruments. Mr. Philip Rodericks, MD of Furtados said,
Our aim is to create a stimulus for learning and propagating music. The Indian audience is tuned to the global market and western music is gaining acceptance. The company plans to take the store count to 20 by end of2010.
Furtados plans to have stores in all Tier-I and key Tier-II cities. The cost of setting up a single store is estimated to be between Rs 2 to Rs 2.5 crore. The company will stock grand painos, electric guitars, violins beside other musical instruments. The entire SKUs in a fully loades store is expected to be around 20,000. Other brands that maybe found on the shelf are Samick, Mapex, Perl River and Ritmuller.
With the trends towards Western music and such big bang push by organized retailing, can the original Indian music survive ?