With an astounding number of nearly 400 million smartphone users in a country which provides the cheapest data packs, the online music streaming industry in India is witnessing a phenomenal growth like over-the-top (OTT) video streaming players all this coupled with the fact that Indian consumers spend 21.58 hours per week listening to music (surpassing the global average of 17.89 hours a week). Studies from Deloitte predict that online music market in India is expected to surpass $273 million by 2020. Gone are the days when we used to download and transfer songs into phones or iPods, people are now well aware of the various music streaming services like Wynk, jioSaavn, Spotify, Apple Music. They provide you with access to all your latest music releases and helps you to keep your old favorites sorted without eating an extra bite of your phones storage. Starting with a nominal fee of Rs 99 a month, they have made it easier for a normal smartphone user to afford his monthly music content.
Below are the statistics about Music Streaming Service users in India, provided by Statista.
Wynk: Music Badlo Mood Badlo.
Wynk Music — the over-the-top (OTT) music application from Airtel — has already crossed over 75 million app installations. Launched in 2015, the platform has a collection of over three million songs, including music in 12 Indian regional languages. Wynk was India’s first music streaming service managed by a telecom operator(airtel). The new extension of the app that was introduced earlier this year, Wynk Tube, is targeted at small-town India that will allow users to stream both audio and video within the same interface.
Product Adoption Curve for Wynk
The user base can be divided into 5 groups :
THE INNOVATORS: They are the very first few people who want access to the product as soon as it is launched. They are about 2.5% of the total user base.
THE EARLY ADOPTERS: They are the first lot to have access to the product, they follow reviews from innovators and Without further ado go for it. They make up about 13.5% of the market.
EARLY MAJORITY: They are influenced by the early adopters & innovators reviews to buy the new product, and they make up for about one-third of the total user base (34%).
LATE MAJORITY: The Late Majority are skeptical they need a little bit more than just reviews about a new product. They will only switch if they are absolutely sure about the new product and they feel it is a genuine necessity. They also make up for about one-third of the total user base (34%).
LAGGARDS: They are the one’s who buy the product years after it’s been released. They buy only in dire emergency or if it is on a end of sale kind of offer. They are generally the Older folks who don’t like to get their hands dirty with technological improvements and feel more comfortable with what they have been using all these years.
As per the recent stats from CMR, Wynk has about 14% of the total market share for online music streaming services in India, Wynk had reported a turnover of Rs 128.5 crores for the financial year ended 31st March, 2017 (FY17). Later in the year 2018, it stated that it had crossed 75 million application downloads, according to the IANS report. Currently, it lies at the Early Majority Curve as it has already crossed the curve of innovators and early adopters.
Let’s have a look on the challenges Wynk faced :
The content space is still at a very early stage. The first challenge was figuring out the kind of content that consumers want, and it is still a big area of work in a country where we have 400 million smartphone users.
The second thing that is happening is that digital content has become very different from the live TV, which is why there are now a lot of digital exclusive channels and digital-only content taking place.
“I think digital content will become far more interactive like gamification as we go forward.” stated Sameer Batra, Airtel Wynk’s chief executive officer.
The other big challenge was the monetization part of it. They tested a variety of models even provided free usage and download services to the existing Airtel users to gain popularity. Eventually, a combination of some of the models that exist today were merged to come up with the new user interface that boosted up the app popularity and downloads. In 2017 Wynk saw it’s first major breakthrough, since then it has shown progressive growth.
Growth and product adoption comparison with other music streaming services.
We have seen a clear shift in the way content is being consumed by users, in particular, the young customers. The smartphone is fast becoming the screen and device of choice for hundreds of millions of Indians to consume content, given that it allows a personalised experience — anytime, anywhere. Increasing affordability of smartphones and budget-friendly data packs with large bundles of GBs are leading to a massive boom in digital content consumption on smartphones — social media, music, videos and much more. Given the massive scale and growth upside available in India (1 billion potential smartphone users), content will become a major play. As India’s largest mobile operator and the leading smartphone network, Airtel is well positioned to leverage this opportunity.
Airtel considers Wynk Music, as a very solid OTT platform to offer a seamless and intuitive content experience to complement their exciting high speed data offerings that make the smartphone a lifestyle enabler.Building strong partnerships is a part of the Airtel’s DNA and content strategy. For Wynk Music, they are working with all the key music labels in the country — both Indian and international to bring the best of music to their users.
Airtels music streaming app Wynk Music has been rated as the “Most Entertaining app of 2018” on Google Play Store, the company announced on 17 December.
Launched in 2014 as an over-the-top (OTT) application, Wynk Music has emerged as India’s leading music app with one of the highest numbers of active users, the company said in a statement.
“Our biggest obsession is user experience and we continue to invest and innovate to keep making it better,” said Sameer Batra, CEO — Content and Apps, Bharti Airtel.
Wynk Music has partnered with leading record labels including Hungama, Universal Music, Sony Music, Saregama, Zee Music among others to offer unmatched variety and top entertainment experience to users.
The latest version of Wynk Music was released in May 2018. Currently it has the highest average monthly subscribers around 100 million, with the cheapest monthly plans starting from Rupees 29 per month and the largest collection of music tracks.
Growth hacks used by Wynk
Wink has adopted the content strategy for customer retention and to curb churn.
For the quarter ended December 31, 2017, data consumption per user on Airtel’s network grew by 450% to 5.3 GB and the overall data traffic on the network grew by 550%. This clearly demonstrates the success of their new infinity postpaid plans and prepaid packs to serve the growing appetite for data fueled by digital content.
Airtel played an crucial role in the distribution (huge scale) and availability of content to consumers across the length and breadth of the country — from large metros to deep rural. It has helped Wynk Music to emerge as an open and neutral platform with the ability to aggregate content from multiple providers on a large scale at one place.
Witness Bharti Airtel (Airtel for short), which has just launched something called Airtel Xstream. It will bundle live TV channels, a catalogue of films and TV shows to stream on-demand, and also access to the company’s Wynk Music service. This will be delivered through an Android-based ‘Airtel Xstream Stick’ that can be plugged in to TVs, which will cost 3,999 rupees ($55.39) plus an annual subscription of 999 rupees ($13.84) — although Airtel’s ‘platinum’ and ‘gold’ tier customers will get the content for free.
There’s also a set-top box (the Airtel Xstream Box) but that only provides the TV/video elements. All of this will be promoted to Bharti Airtel’s 403m customers in the coming weeks, with online retailer (and Amazon rival) Flipkart also on board as a partner. It is expected to be a boost for Wynk Music, which reached the 100m installs (note: not active users) milestone early this year.
Summary
Wynk Music, is currently on the 10th position on Overall downloads list and №7 at Google Play downloads list. Airtel’s property, Wynk was launched in 2014 crossed 1 lakh downloads in 4 days. By February 2015, the app had crossed 5 million app downloads. In January 2019, Jan 2019 Wynk crossed 100 million installs. The Chasm was crossed successfully by Wynk in between 2014 to 2015. With the growing customer base of around 100 million users, and its new extension the Wynk Tube app, Airtel aims to add the next 200 million smartphone users on Wynk Music. It is expected to give a very tough competition to its arch rivals like Gaana and JioSaavn.
