Analysis of the product adoption lifecycle for the Music Streaming Services in India

On 5th Jan 2021, Arijit Singh has overcome another milestone in his career where he is the number one artist to be followed on platforms !

Rings the bell ? Music Streaming is mainstream in India with Music Stars being measured by the no. of followers across the 4 major players like Wynk Music, Jio Saavn, Apple Music & Spotify and may be Gaana as well.

India’s music streaming industry estimated at $200 million, today an average Indian Music lover is spoilt for choices. According to a study by Kantar and audience measurement and analytics company VTION in January 2020, India’s audio streaming market is :

• Gaana.com is India’s largest commercial music streaming service, owned by Times Internet Ltd, with over 200 million monthly users. It was launched in April 2010, today it offers music in over 21 Indian languages with salient features like playlist creation, publication and bookmarking their favourite ones.
• JioSaavn — Owned by India’s biggest 4G mobile operator Reliance Jio after acquiring homegrown Saavn music in 2018 for over $1 billion.
• Wynk- Owned by India’s 2nd biggest 4G mobile operator Airtel, Wynk was organically developed and grown into a massive streaming music service. Salient features include Personalized recommendations based
  on listening history, personalized radio station, Save upto 70% Data, Voice search, Sharing without Internet and New Music alerts.
• Spotify — A Swedish company since 2008, as of October 2020, Spotify platform has 320 million monthly active users, including 144 million paying subscribers. Launched in February 2019 in India.
• Youtube Music — Evolved Google play music with a freemium model, well-integrated with Youtube video streaming service.
• Apple Music — launched on June 30, 2015, in 100 countries. New users receive a three-month free trial subscription. Salient features include Stream over 70 million songs ad‑free(with paid subscription), Download your favourite tracks to play them offline, exclusive & curated playlists, Sing Along with Lyrics, and live radio. option to Listen across all of your devices including CarPlay and Apple Watch

However lucrative the numbers look, given the Total addressable market potential in India, in my opinion, Digital Music is still not crossed the chasm even after the cheap data era in India spearheaded by Reliance Jio.

Though the product adoption curve of free music, in my opinion, has been in late majority stage, the premium paid services adoption is still in Early adopters phase with just 1% paying Users, owing to the price sensitivity of the India market. Some of the challenges that exist in the adoption growth are:

• Smartphone hardware limits
• Lack of intuitive user experience needed for searching and playing music and consistent playlist experience for additive repetition.
• Stronger and addictive social video watching patterns — consumers spent most of their time watching shared videos on Social media and mobile messaging platforms. Music alone just doesn’t offer the same additive experience.

Owing to the adoption challenges above, the monetisation has been tough for most audio streaming companies, even for popular content such as music. A recent report by RedSeer Consulting says that only 1% of the total user base of the top five music streaming apps in India are paid subscribers.

Product Adoption and pricing comparison:

Growth Hacks and Path forward :

Some of the Growth hacks used to gain the adopters are playing the Broadcasting media game as Wynk did with Online concerts during the Navratri and New year by hosting Young and upcoming Music stars.

Others like Spotify are taking the leaf from Netflix’s trick book by coming up with Micro subscription plan like Rs. 7 per day and Rs. 25 per week, even though that appears to be still costly for the masses given mobile subscription with unlimited calls and data is as low as 3–5 Rs. per day!

With Covid Pandemic fuelled growth, it would be interesting to see how the music streaming industry grows in coming years with sustainable monetization in this razor-sharp margin market.