Spotify India MD Amarjit Singh Batra on how 'sachetisation' is fueling the music streamer's growth in India

After five years of operations in India, how is the global streaming major Spotify thinking about building on consumer and market trends to secure its future growth? How is Spotify tailoring its plans, products and marketing to suit the Indian audience? In an exclusive conversation with Storyboard18's editor Delshad Irani, Amarjit Singh Batra, managing director of Spotify India and general manager for the streamer's South Asia Middle East and Africa markets, shared what it takes to make noise in a complex media and entertainment market.

Edited excerpts

Spotify has been in India for five years. What's been the key point in your strategy for the India market? And what big shifts in user habits have you witnessed?

Spotify has been around for 16 years worldwide and in India it is just five years. So we're still very young in the market. the change in how, you know, the audio industry or the music industry has shaped up. Spotify in India has been focused on the localization piece. Spotify is in 184 countries and it has over 600 million listeners around the world. But focusing on the local market and going deeply into India has been one of the strengths that we focused on; From product localization to curation of content to launching localized programs for artists and for creators and even focusing on regionalization of the music.

People have been listening to music digitally for many years, but the real habit of listening to music and recommendations and creating playlists, it all started happening in the last four or five years. People were not used to paying for music. But that has changed today. The propensity to pay or the willingness to pay has actually gone up and many millions of people in India are now looking to pay for music which is a huge positive shift.

Indians are very price sensitive and, as you mentioned, consumers here are not used to paying for music online. So tell us about your pricing strategy and how have you customized it to get users to start paying for music?

The Indian consumer of today is not the same as she or he was 5 years back or 10 years back. We are a nation which is changing at a very rapid pace. Indians don't want to be less than anybody. They want to have the best service out there, the best product, the best quality and I think that's where we come in because we have been doing this for the last 16 years around the world. People are now willing to pay for music when they see value and quality of product and experience.

At Spotify, we are making it easy for them by working on plans and offers which suit everybody. From monthly offers to annual offers, they are priced very competitively. We have offers and products like Duo which is for two people. We have products like family plans which are for multiple people in the household. There are student plans also.

But we've gone even deeper and used the sachetisation strategy. We have this sachet culture which FMCG companies have used in the market. So if people don't want to buy full month or annual plans, we have offers for one day or one week which is a Premium Mini priced at Rs 7 per day or Rs 25 rupees per week. On top of it we have also made it very easy for people to pay because now in addition to the debit cards and the credit cards, we also have UPI Integrations, which people in India have become so habitual to use. UPI is a technological revolution.

How have these pricing innovations helped user growth?

A lot of our users are actually preferring our standard plans which are the monthly or the yearly plans. But we have also seen that there are many people looking at these family plans and Dual plans because people consume music in the household sometimes and it becomes a great way to bond and share your tastes and playlists with each other. We have features like Blend that help people experience music together.

The premium mini is a very interesting starting point for a lot of our users. Listeners who are on free service when they look at moving to Spotify main Service which is the premium service, they generally start with premium mini. It allows them to experience the benefits of the premium service which has no ads, you can download, and other features. Then once they use that service they move to the main service. The premium mini is becoming a very popular service for us in moving people from free to paid much faster.

Several such factors have led to user growth. The number of people we added last year was more than what we added in the first two years of our existence in India.

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