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Mumbai — India is driving Spotify’s international expansion, making it one of the top five regions for total users on the platform just four years after launching in India.
“India is the single largest contributor to our global growth last year. Gustav Gillenhammar, Vice President of Market and Subscriber Growth at Spotify. Gyllenhammar said the company’s user base in India has tripled over the past two years.
Spotify doesn’t provide figures, but Comscore estimates that the platform has around 55 million monthly active users (MAUs) in India, with Spotify enjoying around 10 billion tracks in January alone. is streamed in India and is the country’s top audio streaming service in terms of engagement. , a source close to the company said. Last year, Bollywood Playback his singer Arijit Singh tallied more streams on the app than Beyonce, according to Spotify. Then, in January, Singh ranked in the top 10 of Spotify’s Global Top His Artists chart, although most of his plays took place in India.
Nonetheless, India is not the service’s top five revenue market, Gyllenhammar said, as the country’s music market, with a population of 1.4 billion, is expected to soon overtake China as the most populous country. shows the limits of Multiple factors are at play, including India’s significantly lower payouts per stream, reluctance to pay for music subscriptions, and the challenges of a market with two official languages and another 22 regional languages.
According to IFPI’s Global Music Report, India will be the 17th largest recorded music market in 2021 with revenue of $219 million, up 20% from 2020, driven mainly by streaming. But per capita music income is only $0.16, one of the lowest in the world.
India’s economy is one of the largest in the world, but a 2022 report by the International Monetary Fund ranked India’s per capita income 140 out of 190 countries, with streaming services becoming more popular. It contributes to the problem of asking consumers to pay for subscriptions. The monthly subscription fee for Spotify is 119 rupees ($1.45), compared to $9.99 in the US. Gyllenhammar said the service has no plans to increase prices in India in the near future.
The MAU of the Indian streaming market is estimated at over 300 million. (For comparison, the US has 219 million.) When Spotify launched in 2019, it was the eighth major audio player to enter a market dominated by local streaming services Gaana, JioSaavn and Wynk. It has since overtaken Gaana, which became a subscription-only service after acquisition talks by telco Bharti Airtel, Wynk’s parent company, fell through. Last year, JioSaavn saw a drop in engagement following a top management review.
JioSaavn and Wynk still have more MAU than Spotify, but 20.1% of respondents chose Spotify as their favorite music streaming service. National Recorded Music Industry Association. (YouTube topped the list with his 46%.)
Spotify’s closest competitor for engagements is ByteDance-owned Resso, which officially launched in India in March 2020 as one of three test markets for the app outside of China, according to industry sources. (Indonesia and Brazil are among others.) They say Resso has a stronger presence in smaller cities, tallying similar numbers of streams. But it’s been growing at a slower rate than Spotify, and after Sony pulled that title from his service in September, Sony Music’s catalog, which included soundtracks to several hit Indian films, was lost. have been affected by
Indian music industry executives say Spotify’s superior technology in generating algorithmic recommendations and playlist personalization gives it an edge over domestic rivals. It also emulated regional competition by emphasizing the importance of regional language music and generously creating ad-based hierarchies.
In India, Spotify offers a mobile-only “mini” subscription, where users pay 7 rupees ($0.09) per day. Offers ad-free music on phones, group listening sessions, and downloads of his 30 songs per device. There is no limit to the number of songs free users can stream in the ad-based tier.
Focus on supporting local languages
Today, Spotify offers services in 12 Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and Urdu, in addition to English. To focus on local languages, Spotify needed to customize operations. “Until I came to India, most [of our] market [were dominated by] One or two languages.” Amarjit Singh Batra, GM/Managing Director of India. “The whole structure had to be revisited, from teams to how we work, to recommendations, to how we view curation.”
For example, local content accounts for about 85% of viewing on domestic platforms such as JioSaavn and Wynk, but initially accounted for only 20% to 30% of Spotify streams in the market. “When we launched, consumption was very similar to many other countries in the world. [which is] It’s mostly international English music,” says Gyllenhammar. Spotify then pushed to expand its audience beyond India’s big cities and today, of Spotify’s 184 markets, India has the highest share of local consumption at 70% of his.
As competitors tightened their budgets during the pandemic, the Swedish company said it spent heavily on national and region-specific advertising and marketing, including advertising for broadcast and streaming TV. I’ve never paid so much attention to marketing,” says Gyllenhammar. The platform conducts marketing his campaigns in Hindi and English, as well as his four major languages spoken in South India (Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam).
Spotify has also resisted pressure from labels to ensure its songs appear at the top of playlists that music companies have come to expect from Indian platforms. Says ‘They keep thinking Spotify is going to be like that’ Padmanavan “Paddy” NS, Head of Artist and Label Partnerships at Spotify. Instead, Spotify recognized the potential of indie music and non-film music early on and showcased them through playlists and programs like Radar. This strategy has paid off during a pandemic when movie theater closures led to a shortage of new soundtrack releases on which local platforms relied.
Since launching in India, Spotify has more than doubled its India-based workforce, with Gyllenhammar and Singh saying it plans to grow its ad sales team in India fivefold by the end of the year. is. (They declined to share how many employees the company currently employs in India.)
India is primarily low-price, high-volume play for Spotify, but the country has tremendous growth potential. Internet and smartphone users are her second largest in the world (after China), at about 658 million, which is less than half of the total population. (The US and UK both boast her 90% internet penetration). [India is] It’s a billion-dollar market for global players,” says Gyllenhammar.
Singh Batra said Spotify’s focus over the next four years will be “to ensure that all core audiences [Indian] By focusing on regional language listeners, Spotify aims to reach new consumers in small cities and rural areas. dominate those areas.
According to the company, it is gaining subscribers in India faster than its total number of users. In 2022, premium subscriptions are up 85% year-over-year and MAUs are up 80% of his. Spotify executives see India following the same growth path as Latin America.
Since Spotify launched in Brazil in 2014, it has taken eight years for the region to reach 40% levels, Gyllenhammar says. “It didn’t happen in his first four years,” he observes. “It happened in the second phase of eight years. Similarly, for India, the next four years will be a period of improvement on this front.”
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