Spotify, the audio streaming service of Sweden, has said that India has earned the number one spot in engagement and podcast content. According to a report in Mint, Spotify has mentioned that the country is showing strong signs of growth as one of the platform’s key emerging markets.
Alex Norström, chief freemium business officer at Spotify, who was speaking during the company’s Investor Day presentation last week, said, “We are now the clear number one music streaming service in India, judging by engagement. As engagement grows, our playbook momentum continues to increase. With the explosive growth in brand awareness, we are also on our way to being the market leader in podcasts.”
The report stated that one out of every four music listeners on Spotify in India tunes in to podcasts, the company said.
“When Spotify debuted publicly, we were available in 65 markets around the world. In just four years, we’ve almost tripled that number to 183 markets and territories. And this includes some of the biggest and most exciting audio markets in the world like India and South Korea and the entire continent of Africa,” Spotify Founder and Chief Executive Officer Daniel Ek said at the investor day presentation.
According to the report, Spotify eyes to double its reach to 100 crore users globally by 2030. With its exponential growth potential seen in podcast advertising, the company has witnessed the rise in time users spend on and off the platform, along with its ability to monetise an increasing portion of that time.
Currently, Spotify monetises 14 per cent of all podcast listening hours on the platform.
Earlier, Mint had reported that Spotify is streamed in more than 7,000 cities and towns in India and had clocked double-digit growth in monthly active users last year.
The country is also one of the top 20 markets for user-created playlists on the platform. The service has 150 plus original and exclusive podcasts in Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, Telugu, Punjabi, English, Gujarati, Malayalam, and Marathi.
According to the Ficci-EY media and entertainment report 2022, the music segment in the country grew by 24 per cent to reach Rs 1,870 crore in 2021. A total of 90 per cent of the revenues were earned through digital means, though most of it was advertising-led, with only 30 lakh paying subscribers.
The report pointed out that Indians spent an average of 21.9 hours per week listening to music, which is higher than the global average of 18.4 hours per week.
A study by Kantar and audience measurement and analytics firm VTION in January 2020 reported that India’s audio streaming market is dominated by Gaana, the streaming service owned by Times Internet Ltd, with a 30 per cent share. It was followed by JioSaavn (24 per cent), Wynk Music (15 per cent), Spotify (15 per cent), Google Play Music (10 per cent), and others (7 per cent).