Product Adoption Life Cycle : Music Streaming services in India

Of-late the Music streaming services is booming day by day.On one hand, we have homegrown services like Gaana, Saavn and Hungama that have gained a formidable following, whereas on the other hand we have international behemoths like Google Play Music, Apple Music and the new entrants, Amazon Music,Spotify. There’s a third hand in play here as well — telecom operator backed platforms such as Jio Music and Wynk Music.

All of them have their own payment models and perks, with each trying to garner the attention of the musically inclined in its own way.

Below 2 images shows Indian and Global market share of the Music streaming services

Below shows the revenue growth in Indian Music Streaming Industry:

The trends shows increase in revenue year on year in the Indian Market

Profile of adopters :

Innovators/Super Fan : They are the ones most likely to come back and see you and spend their time and money on you. They go out and tell everyone else about how wonderful you are and that they should hop at your store or buy your product.

Early Adopters/Fan : These are evangelists who are passionate about Music Streaming services in general and wish to get their hands on any new product that launches in the industry.

Early Majority/Listener : They are listeners and are influenced by the early adopters to buy the new product, and they make up almost one-third of the total user base.

Late Majority/Non Genre : They are usually skeptical about purchasing a product and come around to it only after the average society has already adopted it.

Laggards/Non Music : They are usually slow to change and wait to see if they need the product at all

Challenges affecting rate of adoption

1. Converting freemium : Many more people are accessing music via the free streaming platforms like YouTube.To continue the rapid growth of the streaming sector the music industry needs to persuade more people to upgrade to a paid-for streaming service.This likely requires offering a wider range of services at a wider range of price-points.
2. Digital Pie: The streaming business is basically a revenue share game, every digital dollar is split between the digital service, the label or distributor, the publisher, the artist and the songwriter.The services remain adamant that they ultimately need to keep at least 30% of their revenues to be viable businesses. In the short term this means negotiating down the labels’ revenue share arrangements a little, and in the long term it means getting rid of the minimum guarantees.
3. Sustained Listening: Everyone is still working out how you achieve repeat plays in the long term. Playlists are obviously a key part of it — and getting your tracks added to users’ personal libraries.Sustained listening also requires a new approach music marketing and fan communications, and maybe even songwriting and record making. Everyone is on a learning curve here.
4. Transparency : The fact that artists and their representatives are so often in the dark about key elements of the streaming deals done between labels, distributors, publishers and the collecting societies and the streaming services. Managers say that they need this information to audit their artists’ income and to fully understand the streaming business.

Growth & Product adoption comparison

Growth Hacks :

1. The most famous growth hack in the music industry is Spotify that made it easy to share their music on Facebook. You could cross-share the music and leveraging Facebook’s audience. If you liked or listened a song on Spotify, you could share it with your network and then let them know you were using Spotify
2. Adoption of local film content in the app
3. Make available curated playlists

Sources :

ICICI Securities

Music Streaming - India | Statista Market Forecast

Customer pyramid - Who are you going to tell?

Indian Music Streaming: Saavn vs Gaana vs Wynk