Last week saw the All About Music conference take place in India, with plenty of talk about how big the Indian music market is, and how large it might grow in the future. Journalist Amit Gurbaxani has published some of his key takeaways from the conference (as well as another event, Dialogue) which make for interesting reading.
He notes that India was the 19th biggest music market in the world last year according to the IFPI, which calculated that its recorded-music revenues were $130.7m, up 13.6% year-on-year, with streaming accounting for two thirds of that total. There’s a strong ambition in the Indian industry to grow into one of the top 10 global markets, following China.
That will rely on growing the current base of around 100 million monthly active music-streaming listeners (“the most frequently quoted number” at both conferences) with industry body IMI’s chairman Shridhar Subramaniam announcing the ambition to quadruple that figure by 2020.
It will also rely on boosting the percentage of paid subscribers however. “Notably, the one figure that everybody agreed upon at both conferences was the percentage of paid subscribers, which is a lowly 1 percent,” wrote Gurbaxani. The IFPI’s last report suggested that India generated $33.7m from streaming subscriptions in 2017 – nearly 26% of the total recorded-music revenues that year.
There’s some good reading today on some of the ways that growth might be stimulated. The Indian Express has a piece on how Apple Music is betting big on independent artists in India, for example. Meanwhile, Radio and Music has an interesting piece on how Virgin EMI and Universal Music India are hoping to break some Indian artists globally, starting with artist Anushqa.
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