The Qtel Group’s Backstage Music Service Brings Bollywood to customers across Group’s footprint
Qtel Group’s Tie-Up with Top Hindi Hit Aggregator, Hungama Mobile, Sends Total Number of Tracks Past One Million Mark
Doha, Qatar and Barcelona, Spain
The Qtel Group’s popular mobile music service, Backstage, has announced the exponential growth of its online offering from 150,000 international musical tracks to more than 1,000,000 as a result of its tie-up with the worlds’ number one aggregator of Bollywood and South Asian entertainment, Hungama Mobile.
The Bollywood genre of music is crucially important to Backstage’s growth in the GCC states in particular, as the GCC states collectively hold a significant expatriate population of residents from South Asia. The Backstage-Hungama partnership will allow Backstage customers in Qatar, Kuwait and Oman to download the latest hits from Indian and Bollywood content as well as Pakistani, Afghani and Tamil music genres.
Hungama Mobile’s content library includes recent hit music from films such as Tees Maar Khan, Dabanng, Band Baaja Baraat, and Three Idiots. Music from the films of leading superstars such as Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Akshay Kumar, Hrithik Roshan, Kareena Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone are all part of Hungama’s catalogue and available to the Backstage service subscribers.
Backstage offers unlimited music downloads for mobile phones and PCs, as well as privileged access to industry stars and music heroes. With the slogan “Live it First”, Backstage customers get exclusive material ahead of release dates and the chance to meet world-famous artists backstage, attend recording sessions, and win VIP concert tickets – enabling the Qtel Group to be the only operator in any of its markets – to offer a total music and entertainment service of this calibre.
With an easy subscription process via SMS, PC or WAP, and for a minimal flat- rate monthly fee, customers can enjoy unlimited downloads from an international catalogue of now more than one million international tracks.
Backstage customers can build their own collections, create playlists to suit their mood, search by track, artist, genre or album, and share playlists with other fans and friends, through a specially-designed interface.
For English language musical tracks, Backstage has partnered with the world’s largest music company, Universal Music Group, which represents a host of the most famous names in music, including Lady Gaga, Akon, Justin Bieber, Enrique Iglesias, Black Eyed Peas, Mariah Carey, 50 Cent, Nelly Furtado, Stevie Wonder, Sting, and Kanye West, among many others.
Backstage also offers unlimited access to two of the region’s most popular Arabic labels, Melody and Mazzika – which represent leading Arab artists including Amr Diab, Ragheb Alama, Haifa Wehbe, Myriam Fares, Abdallah El-Rweished, Angham, Asala, and many more – to provide a wide range of choice and value to customers.
Backstage is now available through Qtel in Qatar, Nawras in Oman and Wataniya in Kuwait and is expected to roll out across the rest of the Group.
The Backstage service demonstrates the Qtel Group’s continuing commitment to superior innovation and product differentiation.
Photo caption: Dr. Nasser Marafih, Group CEO, Qtel discusses the new enhancements to Backstage with Hungama Mobile.
– END –
About the Qtel Group
Qatar Telecom (Qtel) provides a full range of telecommunications services in Qatar and across its presence in 17 countries. Our vision is to be among the top 20 telecommunications companies in the world by 2020 through expansion in both the MENA region and South East Asia.
About Hungama
Hungama Digital Media Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. is the largest aggregator, developer, publisher and distributor of Bollywood and South-Asian entertainment content in the world. With partnerships with over 305 content creators, across record labels, studios, broadcasters Hungama has licensed worldwide exclusive digital rights to over 2 million music and video titles. We serve content to consumers in 46 countries across mobile, Internet, IPTV services and has more than 150 partners across the world. Hungama has successfully managed more than 2000 mobile and digital campaigns for as many as 300 brands globally. Specific to the mobile entertainment industry, we have built its expertise in the following areas- Mobile Content, Mobile Marketing, Managed Services and Media.
