When I was born, cassettes reigned supreme in the music space! Even today, I won’t mind if someone gives me a similar identity! Most of us were born in the same era, back when we use to play 12 songs contained in a cassette via our tape recorders. Music was not personalised, skipping a track was not easy and discoverability was the biggest problem. Things changed, though, cassettes gave way to compact disks and pen drives which could store hundreds of songs. We spent most of our time accessing music of different genres, moods and occasions. In a country like India, music is very versatile and we have a different genre for every occasion, which means a rich repository of a trillion songs! Today, having a catalogue of a billion songs is a common occurrence-just wish for a track and get it instantly! Music is not just important for all of us, it is a necessity!
We spend a significant time listening to music, almost 23 per cent of people listen to music in the car, 16 per cent listen to music while working in office, 15 per cent while working at home and others during a workout. Music is independent of age and gender too, as per reports the gender ratio of music consumers is 50:50 and the youth segment (16-24 yrs) is the major consumer of music contributing to 30-35 per cent of the total music revenues. The new term “casual listeners” is also on rise. A casual listener refers to passive listeners; they appreciate recommendations and have a high proportion of female listeners. Reports say that the share of casual listeners is 65-70 per cent in operators so they are now our primary audiences.
We are in the era of 3G and 4G where data connectivity and speed is on the go, people love to stream, rather than storing or downloading tons of their favourite songs, people love to have everything available all the time.
With the rise of digital music and digital technology, mobile applications and the internet have become a very strong medium to access music. We are entering the fourth phase of digital music.
Today, the discoverability of music is really easy; there are services like Shazam that allows users to search for music anywhere. We at Mahindra Comviva are dedicated to bringing in change and creating an impact and transforming how technology and content is viewed. We feel that there is much to do around music and we have already taken a step towards creating that impact by our latest D2C initiative which has already gathered a fan following. I will talk more about it in my next posts and will talk what we have done and what are we doing. Stay tuned for more on music and entertainment!
