Analyse the product adoption life cycle for Music streaming services in India

8 min readOct 21, 2020

Indian consumers spend 21.58 hours per week listening to music, higher than the global average of 17.89 hours per week, clearly making India a music-loving country.

There is tremendous adoption of technology in music streaming industry during the last two decades. This has fueled considerable growth in streaming content in India and all over the world. With exponential growth of smartphone usage, high-speed internet penetration, competitive mobile data prices, minimal subscription fee or free ad supported models for music streaming helped them to increase their footprint and thus increasing their revenue.

The digital music providers are driving inventions across the consumers’ music experience through smart phones, tablets, computers, voice assistance and other smart devices. The availability of in-vehicle infotainment systems and smart speakers in car and home respectively has given the music streaming providers an opportunity to captivate users and propel their business.

Once-a-century pandemic has accelerated consumers to stream more music to manage stress and thus resulting in spike music listening population. The playlists and podcasts related to meditation, wellness, instrumental music have gotten listener’s interest. With Work From Home being new normal, with consistent access to WiFi, consumers listen to playlists, even during their house-hold work and working hours to beat the stress. This has also increased expectation in the creativity of the platforms providers to customize the playlist based on the activity such as work out, cooking or mood-based.

The music apps have also have given platform to new emerging artists to showcase their talent and release their singles on their music app exclusively.

List of current breeds of companies which have set out to challenge the music industry’s status-quo: on-demand music streaming services

1. JioSaavn — JioSaavn offers 45 million Bollywood in 15 languages such as Hindi, English and Indian regional songs. Platform has custom radio station, Saavn also offers some exclusive content, including shows and podcasts for the paid tier.

2. Gaana — Gaana.com features music from 21 languages. Gaana also offers a Gaana Assistant, which is similar but rudimentary compared to Alexa and can only directly search for terms you speak to it.

3. Wynk owned by Airtel offers 30 million songs in 14 languages. Wynk features include ad-free music with full track audio streaming, unlimited in-app downloads, mp3 purchase and caller ring back tone.

4. Hungama runs two popular streaming services — Hungama Music for music streaming and Hungama Play for video streaming. Hungama offers a multilingual and multi-genre library of songs, music videos and more, along with a unique loyalty program, Hungama Rewards that allows fans to earn and redeem points for every action they take on either of the streaming platforms.

5. Spotify has millions of tracks and episodes and it’s available on a range of devices, making it a great choice. Users can browse through the collections of friends, artists, and celebrities, or create a radio station.

6. Apple music — allows users to stream 70 million songs. The service offers curated playlists by music experts and recommendations tailored to a user’s music preference. Integrates well with Siri, Home pod and apple watch.

7. Amazon music — works on a range of platforms. Tightly integrated with Alexa streams at 256kbps. Tens of millions of songs. Greats discount for Amazon price and echo users, No content other than music.

8. YouTube music — works on range of platforms and has good integration with google services and also offers location-based playlists. The platform does not have integration with other voice assistance services such as Alexa and there is no content apart from music.

Product adoption curve

Innovators (2.5%) — First individuals to adopt an innovation, risk -oriented such as Music production houses, Music Artists. They are youngest in age, have the highest social class and have great financial lucidity. Innovators will often have connection to the scientific discipline in which a new product is generated from and will socialize with other innovators in their chosen product categories.

Early Adopters (13.5%) — Second fastest category who adopt an innovation. These are the most influential people within any market space and they will often have a degree of “thought leadership” for other potential adopters. Early adopters are typically younger in age, have a higher social status, have more financial lucidity, advanced education, and are more socially forward than late adopters. They will try to obtain more information than an innovator in this decision-making process.

Early Majority (34%) — The early majority represent the growth to the top of the bell curve in the technology adoption life cycle. Otherwise known as pragmatists, they only adopt products that are ‘complete’ and solve their problem. They form ~34% of the total product users. They belong to 26–42 age group and live mostly in Metros, Tier 1&2 cities. Most of them are entry-level or budget smartphone users who might have received review/feedback from Innovators or early adaptors. Most of them use music-streaming apps because of promotions/offers by the service providers.

Late Majority (34%) — The late majority is rather more skeptical about product adoption than the first three classes of adopters. Individuals in this category will adopt an innovation after the average member of the society. Late Majority have below average social status, very little financial lucidity, in contact with others in late majority and the late majority rarely offer any form of thought leadership in a field.

Laggards (16%) — Individuals in this category are the last to adopt an innovation. Unlike some of the previous categories, individuals in this category show little to no opinion leadership. These individuals typically have an aversion to change-agents and be advanced in age who prefer to old method of listening to music such as cassettes, radio, TV. Laggards typically are focused on “traditions”, likely to have lowest social status, less familiar with technology, lowest financial fluidity, be oldest of all other adopters, in contact with only family and close friends, very little to no opinion leadership.

Note: It is important to realize that, as with any generalization, not all members of a class of adopter will conform to the general patterns of that class. There will be high-income, well-educated, risk-taking, laggards as well as low-income, poorly educated, non-thought leader early adopters. There are also plenty of older people familiar with technology. These categories are useful for generic planning for market entry and should not be used to stereotype individuals.

According to statistics music streaming services have crossed the initial stages of ‘Innovators’ and ‘Early Adopters’ and falls into ‘Early Majority’ category of Product Adoption Life Cycle.

Factors and challenges which affected the rate of music streaming service adoption

Reliant on free services — Music streaming service is a booming market in India but consumers are still reliant on free services. The culture shift from using ad-enabled free music streaming to ad-free paid music streaming is definitely a major challenge

Fierce Competition / Subscription offers — New entrants into the market is a threat and competitors are quick enough to slash prices on subscription plans increasing the options for consumers to switch

Internet penetration — Remote areas and rural India is lagging in connectivity owing to challenges in the deployment of fixed broadband, which could impact the usage of music streaming.

High quality and less data usage — With more rural/remote consumers having restricted network bandwidth, it is important to meet their expectation of providing high bitrate music streaming services using less data

Integration with smart devices — Considerable range of smart devices are used in urban areas and it is necessary for the service provider to Integrate with voice assistance services and other smart devices

Support on various platforms — Service provider will have to keep up with the support services on a variety of platforms such as Android, Web, iOS, etc

Language support — It would be a challenge to keep up to speed with the variety of regional languages along with international music. Also, support for regional languages UI could help increase the market reach however this is challenging.

Mobile data charges — Increase in mobile data charges could impact the adoption and the use of the streaming services

Growth and product adoption comparison

Growth hacks

Due to rapid increase in the number of consumers, service providers of the music streaming industry have come up with various growth hack:

Freemium model — India is a highly price-sensitive market, music streaming companies are dealing with this by offering free registration which provides access to music streaming, podcasts etc. The trial period ranges from 30 days to 90 days which is certainly enough to give a preview.

Range of Music — Service providers offers an extensive range of music and podcast collection from international to local collections with variety of languages which allows consumer who have a mix of music taste who listen to variety of music

Technology — Be it AI (Artificial Intelligence) based curated playlist, light weight apps, lesser data usage or integration with smart devices. Service providers are getting to be more innovative to retain the consumers

Add-ons services — Business from live concerts, shows, and podcasts have been the alternative revenue streams for the service provider which also increases the adoption rate

Marketplace for artists — The music streaming platforms serves as stage for Music Artists which in turn attract their fan followers to the platform

Growth hack of Spotify

In 2016, Spotify integrated with Facebook Messenger allowing people to share their Spotify songs or playlists directly within a chatbox. This integration accelerated Spotify’s growth through referral traffic. Ultimately, millions of Facebook users also became advocates of the music platform because it filled the users’ desire to share their music socially.

The campaign is called Thanks 2016, it’s been weird, it was released in October 2016 and featured outdoor billboards containing funny messages based on the weird, wonderful and emotional playlists Spotify users had created.

During the course of the campaign’s run, Spotify subscription growth easily broke all company records. The increase in monthly active users exceeded targets, with over 1 billion streams directly attributed to the campaign, and over half a million reactivated users. The central focus of the campaign was customization: Spotify wanted to re-state the freedom users have to mix up their playlists and get creative.

Summary

Indian music industry has changed drastically over the past few years. Over 200 million consumers in India listen to music on online streaming services as per April 2020 figures.

User subscriptions could be a big challenge in India, according to Counterpoint Research. Ad-based listening and music subscriptions provided by telecoms are popular among users in India.

Companies need to understand vast music streaming landscape and options to find the service that best fits one’s individual needs. Business should come up with pre-releasing new music, events, offering unique content such as concerts. Podcasts, curated playlists and more innovative options to stay competitive in this evolving industry.

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