We wrote about Moodagent’s plans to launch in India in our country profile published in October 2020. Last week, the Copenhagen-headquartered audio-streaming service, whose plans to enter the nation we’ve been hearing about since 2018, finally arrived in India.
It’s the fourth market for the company following its Denmark and Germany launch in 2020, and Australia where it began operations in May this year.
While India is an already overcrowded audio streaming market with nine major players, Moodagent claims an edge over rivals thanks to its ”patented core technology that combines artificial intelligence with in-depth music analysis” that enables listeners “to automatically create highly personalised, interactive playlists and then intuitively adjust them to match their individual moods, even as those change”.
It does this by asking users to tweak the levels of ‘mood sliders’, namely ‘sensual’, ‘tender’, ‘happy’, ‘angry’ and ‘tempo’, depending on how they’re feeling and then generates playlists accordingly.
If the name Moodagent sounds familiar it could be because the platform, founded by Berg Steffensen and Mikael Henderson in 2019, had an earlier avatar as an app that used your existing music library to create playlists based on your mood using the aforementioned parameters.
In India, the service will be headed by executive vice president and managing director Jyoti Handa, who has previously worked with Dialogic and Intel.
He will run offices in New Delhi and Mumbai where he will have the formidable task of getting customers to pay in a price-sensitive market where leading domestic DSPs Gaana and JioSaavn as well as international upstarts like Spotify have repeatedly slashed subscription rates.
Moodagent does not offer an ad-supported tier and is currently tagged at Rs119 per month ($1,61) with the option of a 15-day free trial.
For now though, this seems very much like a soft launch as the Danish DSP has yet to onboard music from most major Indian labels, which is key to success in the region where consumption of local repertoire far outstrips international catalogue.
Nevertheless, Moodagent’s move into India is another signifier that the country’s large young population and burgeoning internet penetration remains a huge draw for international streaming platforms.
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