Music Streaming Services in India
India, where people have traditionally relied on radio and television to listen to music, now has over 200 million listeners using music streaming services. Gaana, almost 10 years old music streaming service in India, recently became the first streaming music service to reach over 150 million monthly active users in the country.
After Jio introduced cheap data services in 2016, these streaming services have gained popularity. Saavn, a music streaming service partnered with Jio to increase its market penetration. Rapid growth in this market has attracted global players such as Amazon Prime Music, YouTube Music, and Spotify in a few years.
Spotify and Apple Music are also leveraged the cheaper data services in India to find their presence in the market, but local players have the advantage of attractive music catalogs of trendy soundtracks, spiritual music, and regional music.
Globally, Spotify has 271 million users. They launched the service last year in India and amazingly it had already crossed 2 Million marks by the first quarter. Being positive on the reducing charges of data services in India, I believe Gaana and JioSaavn will soon surpass that figure in a few years in India.
One of the other discouraging factors in India is, we don’t really want to pay for listening to music. Initially, the music streaming services in India attracted users by allowing free access to the services. After people developed an interest in online music, these streaming services introduced premium plans for users who are comfortable in paying money to remove advertisements and download music on the device as offline mode.
Product Adoption Lifecycle and user profile analysis
Each product goes through a lifecycle and this can be mapped to the product adoption curve. It basically is a model that reflects “who buys and when”.
The adoption curve can be divided into 5 stages. Different customers of the product fall under any of this category. Let’s understand how these stages work.
Innovators
These consumers are the First set of unique tech enthusiasts who are highly motivated to try new products in the market. They are obsessed with technology or they want to be ahead in the game of trying the service.
The user of Music streaming in this phase:
· Highly exposed to any new technology and they can spend money to get it.
· Young age group who is of a very young age and wants any new thing first.
· Have high-end smartphones and they have money to buy any streaming app which is available.
Early Adopters
The consumer in this phase are the group of visionaries who waited for a product to arrive. They want to try new products but a bit more hesitant compared to the innovators. Such consumers need a few reviews to consult before using a product.
Consumers in Music streaming service are:
· They like to try new products, but they do not want it the very first day.
· Most of the reviews and updates for music streaming app updates come from this group.
· Gets any new music streaming app, uses it and suggests about its playlist, music collections, sound quality, and pricing.
· Teenagers are the user base of this phase.
Early Majority
The consumer in the Early Majority are the Third in the curve who are pragmatists. They will definitely use a product after it tried and tested. A product must certainly showcase some value to these early majority population to get rewarded with a boost in the sales by a big number of
Consumers in Music streaming service are:
· This group is primarily affected by Innovators and Early adopters.
· Millennials are major users.
· This group does not want to use any streaming service immediately, but they wait, analyze the reviews, and compare the services and music quality.
· This group may not be using the paid version but might be using the versions available with ads.
· 30–50 age group fall into this group but are economically and socially strong. This group is also of teenagers and young adults.
Late Majority
Late Majority are the Fourth in the curve who are downright conservatives. The product needs to work a little hard to conquer them. These customers will the established product. They are skeptical to use a product until they are convinced of the product value. If a product has reached this stage in its lifecycle it means it is at its highest peak of sales.
Consumers in Music streaming service are:
· These users are one of the major parts of the curve.
· This user group is the one who does not care if they have the latest music streaming app
· They don’t care about the innovation of the service, it's just a way of listening to music.
· Middle-age (50–65) fall into this group who are economically and socially weak.
Laggards
Consumers in this group are highly skeptical group of the consumers, they come last in the curve. They might have heard about the product but would finally use it when all the hype is gone and a long period after the product was launched.
Consumers in Music streaming service are:
· This user group is the one who does not care if they have the app for listening to music.
· They are okay with FM or radio or TV music.
· This user group is primarily elderly aged consumers.
In the product lifecycle, where the product can hit the wall and face difficulty to move to next phase of the curve. It’s called the chasm. In most product adoption curves, there’s a point that can make or break the success of the product. It’s the point between the early adopter stage and the early majority stage. If a product fails to do that, it may die in the depths of chasm itself, not going forward anymore.
Product benchmarking
Most of the music streaming services available in India have premium subscriptions at Rs 99/month, except for Amazon Music, which comes with Amazon Prime subscription. Apple Music, goes for a high Rs 120 for an individual membership.
Wynk service pricing is on the type of OS. If you are an Android user, the subscription costs the usual Rs 99/month. iOS users have to shell out Rs 120 per month, but iOS users with an Airtel SIM get a discounted rate of Rs 60/month. The little to no difference here makes any comparison depend on all the add-ons you get with the subscription.
User Experience
The user experience subjective to the user. Spotify has a clean and modern interface, it is regularly updated to include new features and elements while Amazon Prime Music’s interface is not that appealing. It feels like you’re using an app from the early 2000.
Spotify tops in the list because of the black background, neatly laid out playlists, granular settings, and playback controls. Apple Music is good in experience than YouTube Music.
Apple Music is completely all-white UI, with not much clutter and random options here and there. There’s an Apple-like simplicity to the service and it’s the perfect app for iOS users while its Android app needs major improvements. YouTube Music, brings the familiarity of YouTube in the form of a dedicated music streaming app to you. It has managed to bring audio and video together in the best way possible, but the follow/subscription thing has me really confused.
Coming to Indian streaming services, well, both JioSaavn and Gaana feature a clean and likable user interface. The former improves on Saavn’s previous UI and makes it simply better — with playlist, history, downloads, and everything else accessible easily.
Streaming Quality
Price Comparison
Industry analysis
Few Factors and Challenges which impacts the music streaming services in India:
· Internet: Though this is not a concern now in India with multiple service providers, still most users are not smartphone users. As they are not using the internet on mobiles, it restricts them.
· Pricing: The Indian market is price sensitive, especially in such products where alternative products are available. Consumers are still ok with watching advs. while using the service.
· Usability: Many consumers are not mobile-friendly when it comes to the usability of applications. They tend to use the high-end mobile but do not use the features.
Growth and product adoption comparison among India music streaming services:
Wynk, JioSaavn, Ganna, Amazon Music, and Apple music are the major streaming services in India. The market has responded well to the streaming industry and had close to 150 Mn active users in 2018. As per the ET, Gaana emerged as the most favored app (25%), followed up by Apple Music (20%), YouTube (20%) and Airtel-owned Wynk (14%)
For more adoption of music service, these could be few hacks:
· Partner with mobile service providers and penetrate in larger market.
· Providing features like karaoke along with the soundtrack may being new consumers to these product services.
· Bring international local music to India e.g. African Tribal music or music from Afghanistan .
SUMMARY
Music streaming services are in their teenage in India but there is huge potential to capture a larger market than anywhere in the world. And with the increased use of the internet, more mobile users and low data cost may bring heavy competition in the market and benefit the consumers.