Spotify, Gaana on the Struggles to Convert Indian Listeners to Subscribers

Music streaming trade in India has grown to new ranges prior to now few years. Gamers together with Amazon Music and Spotify entered the trade a couple of years again. Native rivals reminiscent of Gaana and JioSaavn additionally launched new options to their platforms within the current previous to remain related in opposition to their world counterparts. The growth of the trade has introduced new native artistes and podcast creators to the market. However, there’s nonetheless an extended strategy to go for the trade, because the particular company for this week’s episode of the Devices 360 podcast Orbital — Gaana CEO Sandeep Lodha and Spotify Head of Market Operations in India Akshat Harbola — inform Orbital host Akhil Arora.

Spotify entered the Indian market in February 2019 and is presently celebrating its three years of journey within the nation. The platform claims that it has introduced greater than 6,000 native artistes on board by way of its creator training programme referred to as Masterclasses during the last three years.

Since its launch, Spotify says the variety of Indian artistes on its platform has grown by 13 occasions. The Stockholm, Sweden-headquartered streaming big additionally has programmes together with EQUAL, RADAR, and Contemporary Minds to convey new artistes from the nation to its world audiences.

Spotify additionally claims that the variety of cities and cities within the nation the place it has streamed music in 2021 has grown to over 7,500. Harbola tells us that English, Hindi, Punjabi, Telugu, and Tamil are amongst the favored languages during which the music has to date been streamed by way of the platform.

Much like Spotify, Lodha says that Gaana has seen development in each its listenership and content material. The Indian platform will have a good time its twelfth 12 months later in 2022.

Lodha states that each music and podcasts are the core to Gaana. He mentions that the platform lately began providing solutions to customers on the premise of their listening patterns to make the expertise extra personalised and interesting. This can be a characteristic that its rivals have lengthy had. The personalisation contact has helped develop person retention on the platform, Lodha says, with out detailing any specific numbers.

Development apart, each Spotify and Gaana consider that India is a special market altogether for audio streaming over the US and different western markets. Harbola mentioned: “India nonetheless data the very best charges of piracy on this planet with regards to music. So, right here, the market context during which we’re working could be very, very completely different.”

One of many key challenges for platforms together with Spotify and Gaana is to persuade customers to pay for his or her subscription. Quite a lot of their potential customers are listening to music by way of YouTube — if not by way of any pirated sources.

Spotify is attempting to steer folks to purchase for its paid subscription by way of a sachet-pricing mannequin referred to as Premium Mini. Launched in December 2020, the Premium Mini mannequin provides ad-free music streaming and the power to obtain songs on one cellular machine at Rs. 7 a day.

Harbola tells us that Spotify took Premium Mini to markets together with Indonesia after experimenting with it in India. Nonetheless, he does take into account that there’s nonetheless rather a lot to analysis to develop paid subscriptions within the Indian market.

Much like Harbola, Lodha additionally believes that market gamers together with Gaana want to determine new methods to develop subscriptions within the nation.

“I believe the subsequent three, 4 years, because the financial system is creating, and also you see this throughout creating economies that subscription charges do develop, because the economies change into increasingly mature because the trade turns into extra mature,” he says.

Having mentioned that, each Harbola and Lodha inform us that the expansion within the pay tier of music streaming platforms within the nation is quicker in the previous few months than the earlier two years.

The following large wave on this planet of audio streaming is coming from podcasts. However India is just not that mature compared with western markets, together with the US and UK. Nonetheless, there are promising indicators.

“We’re already seeing type of pretty first rate traction, so one in 4 podcast listeners on the market or Spotify listeners on the market are listening to podcasts regularly, and particularly Gen Z” says Harbola. “Youngest customers are adapting to the brand new media in a brand new, fairly large method.”

Lodha factors out that the selection of podcasts amongst their listeners is usually based mostly on their music listening preferences.

“We’ve lots of people who hearken to crypto or hearken to autobiography stuff,” he says. “And there are lots of people who will hearken to, you recognize, Ramayana, and Mahabharata, and, or romantic or horror tales.”

Platforms together with Spotify and Gaana are additionally in search of methods to monetise creators to spice up each quantity and high quality of podcasts within the nation.

“We’re transferring right into a extra market sort of setting like a YouTube,” says Lodha.

Spotify has its providing referred to as Anchor that podcasters can use to distribute their podcasts to a wide range of listening apps together with Spotify itself, in addition to entry instruments reminiscent of analytics. It additionally lets podcasters monetise their podcasts with completely different adverts, podcast subscriptions, and common donations from their listeners.

“There is a little bit of a rooster and egg state of affairs,” underlines Harbola. “Quite a lot of creators want monetisation. There is no query about it. However on the identical time, manufacturers need audiences.”

We discuss extra about all that and extra — together with the 2022 roadmap for each Spotify and Gaana. You may hearken to all this and extra by hitting the play button on the Spotify participant above.

If you’re new to our web site, yow will discover the Devices 360 podcast Orbital in your favorite platform — whether or not it’s the aforementioned Gaana and Spotify, or Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, JioSaavn, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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New Orbital episodes launch each Friday, so be sure to tune in every week.