India amongst top 10 markets for Spotify globally in content consumption

In just three years since the arrival of Spotify in India, the country has made it to the top 10 markets for the Swedish audio streaming service, Amarjit Singh Batra, Managing Director, Spotify India told Business Today. Founded in 2006, Spotify is available in over 180 countries.

“It's been a great experience overall and although it doesn't seem like it's been three years, we are looking forward to a long journey here in India. India is a long-term market, and we are investing in Indian creators to steam up the market,” says Batra. 

Last year was phenomenal for Spotify as the overall growth of its audio streaming service deepened more with the interior parts of India opening up to it. There are more than 7500 cities where people listen to Spotify for music and podcasts. This includes cities like Lucknow, Nagpur, Ernakulam, Imphal, Mohali, Kozhikode, Madurai, Rohtak, Machhagan, Kottayam, Tiruchi, Salim, Guntur, Kollam. 

“Even multiple languages are starting to show up on our charts, and people are consuming the content around those languages and creating content in more languages. Besides, we were able to work with a lot of great creators in the podcast segment as well as in the music segment. On the music side, we of course work with artists, where we focused on film music and non-film music, but largely on non-film music because we believe there is a lot of potential for it in India,” Batra argues.

Spotify also brought in initiatives like Fresh Finds and also developed a program RADAR. Indian artists were taken abroad to showcase their talents around the world including Times square and were featured on different Spotify playlists globally. 

“We were also able to bring Ilaiyaraaja to the south market and that was the amazing campaign that we did. Outside of that we curate and create content across languages,” adds Batra.

India is a very competitive and price-sensitive market, and Spotify’s strategies have worked in favour of the company. Other than music, Spotify’s podcast story is proving to be a success for the company. Spotify launched Original Podcasts for the country's audience in November 2019 and now has a whole bunch of series on crime, 22 Yarns with Gaurav Kapur, Bhaskar Bose, and a whole bunch of other talk shows. 

“The great thing is we looked at the podcast market from three lenses. First, what is that we are looking to create our own. Second is how can we encourage the overall podcast ecosystem in India which includes not just our creator focus through Anchor but also other podcast production companies to build more podcasts and will help them use Spotify to reach their audience. And last, on the audience front, we are looking at how to make podcast listening a habit for our audiences. Our task is to build a podcasting ecosystem in the country. In terms of creating our podcast, we focussed on Indian languages and we saw substantial success,” points out Dhruvank Vaidya, Head of Podcasts, Spotify India. 

For Spotify, content creation is now happening in over 13 languages and markets like Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, etc. are now the regions hosting some big podcast creators. That’s where the company has seen a lot of actual growth of podcasts happening.

Overall, without sharing the subscription figures, Spotify says it has witnessed a double growth in its overall subscriber base since last year. Also, there is an increase in willingness to pay for premium Spotify and during this time India became the top in the market for Spotify globally. 

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