Our lead story in today’s bulletin talks about the Indian music industry’s ambitions to be a top-10 global market by 2022. Telcos are going to play a crucial role in that, so our attention was grabbed this morning by the latest financial results from Reliance Industries, the parent company of mobile network Jio – which is the telco whose Jio Music streaming service has merged with Saavn. The pair were only mentioned in the financials once, in a claim that “JioMusic and Saavn together is music powerhouse with over 40 million songs”, but it’s the wider metrics that are interesting.
In the last quarter alone, Jio added a net 37 million new subscribers – so just to stress, this is mobile customers, NOT music subscribers – taking it to 252.3 million overall. The average subscriber consumes 11GB of data a month, and watches 17.5 hours of video. That last stat is key to the boom that YouTube has been seeing in India: for example, this week the top music artist on YouTube globally is Indian – Alka Yagnik – with Udit Narayan and Kumar Sanu joining her in the top 10. The music industry will be hoping that Jio’s data-hungry users will show a similar appetite for JioMusic/Saavn as the telco throws more weight behind them.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…