Author Archives: Amit Gurbaxani
Posted inNews

Independent music, not Bollywood, may be India’s global crossover

by Amit Gurbaxani

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek recently told Music Ally that he believes “100% that we’re going to see a rise of Bollywood and new types of Indian music making it into the global scene in the very near future”.

As an Indian journalist who’s been covering Bollywood and other types of Indian music for two over decades, I only half-agree with Ek. I don’t believe Bollywood is going into the global charts any time soon, and I’ll tell you exactly why. But first…

Indian pop quiz time!

Q1. Who’s the most streamed artist on Spotify in India?

A1. Hindi film playback singing superstar Arijit Singh.

Q2. What’s Arijit Singh’s rank on Spotify overall?

A2. At the end of January this year, his 8.78 million monthly listeners were enough to place him at No.500 in the world.

Spotify doesn’t display artist rankings below that position and last month, even though Singh’s listenership grew to more than nine million users, he fell out of the top 500.

Posted inNews

Three big takeaways from Spotify India’s year-end charts

by Amit Gurbaxani

Spotfiy’s detractors might delight in the fact that in India, the global market leader is in the position of an upstart, with a fraction of the customer base of local rivals such as Gaana and JioSaavn, both of which claim over 150 million monthly active users.

Yet, in the 20 months it has been around, Spotify’s growth has been impressive. While the service, which launched in India at the end of February 2019, has shared no official figures for the country since it announced it had reached more than two million monthly active users in April 2019, industry insiders say that number had risen to between 12 and 15 million by the third quarter of 2020.

That six-fold to seven-fold increase is corroborated by the surge in the streams on the platform. In the last week of March 2019, Spotify India’s top 200 tracks tallied 13.4m streams. In the last week of March 2020, the corresponding total was 51.1m, and this grew to 66.6m in the last week of September, and then 93.8m at the end of November.

The answer as to what fuelled this growth can be discerned to an extent by a close look at its year-end charts, longer versions of which have been exclusively shared with Music Ally.

Posted inCountry Profile

Country Profile – India 2020

by Amit Gurbaxani

As in most countries, the nationwide lockdowns imposed in India to contain the spread of Covid-19 have had severe effects on the music industry there over the past six months. That’s not because India is a strong market for physical sales: at $132.8m, streaming accounted for 73.2% of the $181.4m Indian recorded music market in […]

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Posted inNews

India’s music industry in 2020: non-film growth, short-video boom, paywall pressure and more

by Amit Gurbaxani

As in most countries, the nationwide lockdowns imposed in India to contain the spread of Covid-19 have had severe effects on the music industry there over the past six months.

That’s not because India is a strong market for physical sales: at $132.8m, streaming accounted for 73.2% of the $181.4m Indian recorded music market in 2019.

Instead, it’s because the majority of the music consumed on Indian streaming services is from film soundtracks, the releases of which have largely been on hold since mid-March.

Surprisingly, the recorded music industry has been resilient. Listenership on audio streaming services grew by 40% yearon year in the first half of 2020, according to trade body the Indian Music Industry (IMI).

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Spotify survey explores music listening trends in India

by Amit Gurbaxani

In India, Spotify is in the atypical position of being the non-dominant player in a fairly over-crowded audio-streaming market. The service has yet to update its figure of over two million MAUs for the country, announced shortly after its launch in February 2019.

Since then, local leaders Gaana and JioSaavn have both claimed listenership of close to 200 million. Spotify, however, is widely regarded to have higher levels of engagement than its rival DSPs, especially among fans of Indian independent music. Now it has stats to back that up.

Well, at least stats from a nationwide survey of over 18,000 people in 24 cities Spotify commissioned Nielsen to conduct in January and February this year.

Posted inNews

We’ve tested Bytedance’s Resso app: here are our first impressions

by Amit Gurbaxani

Earlier this month, we reported on Resso, the new music-streaming app that TikTok’s parent company Bytedance is testing in India and Indonesia. We asked journalist Amit Gurbaxani, who has written regularly for Music Ally about the music industry in India, to try the app and offer his first impressions.

“The most distinct thing about Resso, TikTok owner Bytedance’s six-month-old music streaming app, is the level of interactivity. This may provide it an edge over local services such as Gaana, which already let you ‘enjoy your music with real-time lyrics’ – the feature Resso advertises prominently on the App Store.

On Resso, new users need to log in with their Facebook or Google details. As with most other platforms in India, you’ve to choose between languages rather than genres when asked, ‘What music do you like?’ Currently, the options include English, Hindi, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali and Marathi.