Focused on Indian artists with eye on global stage: Spotify

Audio streaming firm Spotify is focusing on onboarding Indian creators from various vernacular languages on its platform to take them global.

“India is much deeper in culture and languages than the streaming or music industry shows. We are quite heavily skewed to film music. Because of that there is a paucity of content as films don’t produce hundreds of songs; one film produces three to four songs on average today. The idea is how do we bring more creators who are into non-film [content], whether it is podcast or music, to come and experiment. And that depth of work requires going very regional, very local,” Spotify India managing director Amarjit Singh Batra tells Fortune India.

While Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu have remained the top four languages in India, outside English, on Spotify in India, other languages like Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Bhojpuri, Haryanvi and such have also started to see growth on the platform, Batra points out.

Spotify says number of Indian artists associated with it has increased 13 times since its launch. Podcasts created in India using Spotify’s Anchor tool have gone up 130 times.

On Spotify for Artists, a dedicated analytics app for creators, the platform lists knowhow and best practices to help artists find their audience by providing them helpful insights. More than 6,000 artists have joined Spotify for Artists, the streaming service claims.

“We want to make sure that our product and our content is localised, as well as curated for the needs of different types of listeners in the country so that everybody is able to access Spotify in the best way possible. Within that, there are many aspects of things we want to focus on. We want to make sure we bring more and more people who have never used streaming to come on streaming platforms,” says Batra.

'Growth in subscriber base to bolster premium segment'

A bigger objective is to onboard more listeners, which will eventually lead to a rise in the number of paid subscribers, says Spotify India managing director Amarjit Singh Batra. Batra says the streaming platform is focussed on inculcating audio streaming into Indians’ daily habit, while promoting domestic creators on the global stage.

“We have been focussed on paid [subscriptions]... We knew when we came in that this is not a hugely paid market. The listening habits were not established when we came in. There were a lot of good options available, people were doing a great job, but the market was still very immature,” Batra tells Fortune India.

The focus is now on making the platform stickier and moving people towards better listening habits, he adds. “We have seen that as more and more people start using Spotify for longer times, they shift to premium. On top of it we are also realising that not everybody wants to take an annual subscription or monthly subscription, so we have come up with innovative ideas like sachet plans... We are looking at options to help people remove the friction for payment, as well as giving them choice of what they want to do. And of course, give them good value.”

Spotify says it will continue to invest in India to build a stronger streaming market as well as help the music industry’s topline.

Podcasts on the rise

Podcasts, which were first introduced to India some 6-7 years ago, grew in popularity with commuters listening to them while driving. However, the Covid-19 era saw growth in the segment despite restrictions on movement, elaborates Dhruvank Vaidya, head of podcasts at Spotify India, as people found new use cases.

“With people sitting more and more at home, what we also started finding that people were listening to podcasts while they were doing household chores, while they were exercising. One big use case that we see is people are using podcasts to help them sleep,” Vaidya states.

So much so that podcasts have become the primary source of information research in some circles. Sharing an example, the Mission ISRO podcast, a Spotify original narrated by Harsha Bhogle, was used as for pre-production in Sony LIV’s now-popular web series Rocket Boys, which portrays the lives of renowned Indian scientists Homi J. Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai.

“On the content genre side, what we are seeing now is that podcasts have become ingrained in an individual’s daily habit. Apart from news, if you look at genres like personal finance, investing and entrepreneurship, there are so many podcasts which talk about this. There are a lot of people talking about entrepreneur journeys, they’ll be talking about founders, there are a lot of people talking about investment, bitcoin, crypto, etc.,” says Vaidya.

This repository of podcasts on Spotify is being used by students as well as professionals to look for information, ranging from book reviews to pricing strategies and everything in between, he adds.