Posts Tagged ‘music industry’
Why India Matters to Spotify, and Why it May Not Deliver
There are two key reasons for such weak uptake to date:
1. Music plays a different role in India:Bollywood and devotional are two of the most widely listened to music genres, neither of which are mainstays of subscription services, nor streaming music consumption in general.
2. Income levels are low:the average per capita income is $553 a month, with the luxury of a music subscription far out of reach for most Indians, other than urban elites. Spotify’s $1.80 price point in India may sound cheap, but relative to average income, it is 9.3 times more expensive than $9.99 is in the US. So, Spotify would need to be priced at $0.19 to be the same relative affordability as in the US, which coincidentally is the price for its day pass.
Warner Music and Spotify have been involved in a rather unseemly and very public spat this week over Spotify’s India launch. I’ll leave for someone else, the discussions of the potential implications of a blanket license for songwriter rights in India for an on-demand streaming service. Suffice to say, the words ‘can of worms’ come to mind. Instead, I am going to focus on why India matters so much to Spotify.
The next one billion, perhaps…
Spotify’s Daniel Ek has made much of addressing the next one billion internet users as part of Spotify’s long-term opportunity. Given the fact that China is effectively off the table for now and that sub-Saharan Africa is probably a generation away from being a major streaming market, India is the key component of that next one billion.
Europe and North America accounted for 69% of Spotify’s subscriber growth in 2018. While this…
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Soon to be the Biggest Ever YouTube Channel, T-Series May Also Be About to Reshape Global Culture
India is a problematic market for streaming monetization. It has 1.4 billion consumers but just 330 million of those have smartphones. There were 215 million free streaming users in 2018 but just 1 million paid subscribers despite leading indigenous players like Hungama and Saavn having been in market for years.
Some time over the next month or so a YouTube landmark will be passed: T-Series will pass PewDiePie as the most subscribed YouTube channel on the planet. As of time of writing T-Series had 75.4 million subscribers compared to PewDiePie’s 76.4 million. (PewDiePie’s lead was narrower but he has mobilised his fan base to delay the inevitable.) But do not mistake this milestone to be a narrow measure of the shifting sands of the YouTube economy. Indeed, it tells us more about the future of streaming as a whole (both music and video) than it does the current status of sweary Swedish gamers.
For those of you who somehow do not yet know who T-Seriesis, it is a leading Indian music label and movie studio – it in fact claims to be ‘the biggest – that is the world’s largest YouTube music channel and before long it will likely be able to drop…
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The Handshake Economy
The Japanese experience is utterly unpalatable for most artists and probably wouldn’t translate anyway in most Western countries. But the essence of understanding that the fandom itself is just as valuable to fans as the music is the essence of truth that YouTubers have already grasped and that more artists need to do. Welcome to the handshake economy.
We are in the era of the always-on fan, with artists making themselves ever more available to their fans. It is a transition that comes with no shortage of challenges, not least the extra workload it places on artists and the way it chips away at the magical aura that surrounds them. There is an inherent tension between increasing an artist’s appeal through increased accessibility and creating it by maintaining distance. Contrast this with YouTubers like Jenna Marbles, PewDiePie and Phil and Dan who share so much of their lives with their fans. Platforms like Kickstarter, Paetron and the ever excellent PledgeMusic have given artists the ability to balance artistic credibility with monetizing their super fans. But while such efforts are currently on the fringes there is a country where super fans are at the heart of recorded music revenue. Artistic credibility however is not exactly at the top of…
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Making YouTube Pay: YouTubers Versus Bands
Interesting analysis of YouTube phenomenon PewDiePie. The figures are fascinating: The figures are fascinating: Forbes has named Felix Kjellberg (aka PDP), as the top-earning YouTube star on the planet after earning $12 million in the past year (details in an Independent article).
This is the second in a series of YouTube generation posts. See the first one here.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Generation Edge – the under 16 millennials – and how they are driving an entire new subculture of YouTube stars that throw the traditional fandom rulebook out of the window. One of the intriguing paradoxes (or at least apparent paradoxes) is how a generation of native YouTube stars can create both vast audiences and revenue while for music artists YouTube is simply a place to build awareness and probably lose net revenue due to YouTube streams cannibalizing paid streams. So how can the model both be broken (for music) and yet buoyant for native YouTuber creators?
PewDiePie And Taylor Swift
Compare and contrast the biggest earner in music with the biggest earner on YouTube. Taylor Swift netted $39.7 million in 2014, compared to $7.4 million…
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The Global Implications Of The BBC’s Streaming Strategy
(…) Watch the BBC’s streaming endeavours closely because the outcomes will likely provide blueprints for thriving in the streaming era for media companies of all types and sizes right across the globe.
Yesterday the BBC’s Director General Tony Hall laid out a vision for the future of the BBC (for an excellent take on this see the blog post from MIDiA’s video analyst Tim Mulligan, and yes the name may look familiar, he’s my brother!). The BBC has long played a crucial innovation role in the digital content economy but it has yet to carve out a convincing role for itself in online music. It has built up a compelling YouTube content offering and it has pursued a streaming coexistence strategy with its innovative Playlister initiative but the bigger play has yet to be made. That looks set to change, with the announcement that the BBC is planning to launch a ‘New Music Discovery Service’, which would make the 50,000 tracks broadcast by the BBC every month available to stream for a limited period. The initiative is interesting in itself…
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