Please complete the following joke: A vinyl record, music cassette, and CD walk into a bar...
To their credit, Spotify's Cecilia Qvist and Akshat Harbola quietly contemplated the answer to my mindless question for a good ten odd seconds, which was more than I ever imagined they would do. Their faces revealed they were racking their brains to work the bar joke out. Until one of them raised an eyebrow.
"We give up. What's the answer," Cecilia asked. With a straight face, I shrugged my shoulders. I really had no answer, I explained. Laughter erupted, as everyone eased up. I prepared to shake hands and leave the room.
Cecilia Qvist
But not before an interesting conversation with Cecilia Qvist, Global Head of Markets at Spotify, and Akshat Harbola, Head of (India) Market Operations at Spotify. I met them during a two-day music festival in Mumbai, trying to understand where things stand with Spotify after their first six months in India and how they're looking to the future.
The online music streaming service space is fairly crowded in India, and the competition obviously gets even stiffer at a global level. In such a scenario, it's interesting to understand what differentiates a Spotify user from others in the market.?
"I'm not sure that they are different," Cecilia explained, "but maybe what I would say is that we may understand a little bit more about our core audience aged between 16 to 24 years. And that's how we build our products, knowing what's good with that type of audience, that gives you a lot of feedback all the time."
Cecilia also mentioned how feedback loops -- learning from users, listening to their signals in the form of data, and giving them what they want -- pretty much form the bedrock of Spotify's product development cycle, from UI to behind-the-scenes algorithms. And Discover, as a feature, is Spotify's pride and joy, as much as it's a key differentiator for the user.
"Discover on our platform is a little bit extraordinary, as well as our ubiquitous strategy being on any device," Cecilia explained. "So that's also something we are striving to continue, so that the discovery and the personalization experience gets better for users in India, and we are investing a lot of effort to do just that."
It's this same age group of young Spotify users that's driving artist discovery here in India as well, according to Akshat. "Young users are the most adventurous when it comes to playing new genres here in India, and experimenting with music, going beyond Bollywood to discover music in different languages."
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From the North East streaming Korean Music like there's no tomorrow, where people are streaming BTS and K-Pop more than any other part of India, to people in Gujarat streaming "romantic, mushy music" (thanks to a playlist called Bollywood Mush) like everyday's Valentine's Day; from workout music peaks in Goa to international music's popularity soaring off the charts in Kerala, there's essentially a lot of "diversity in how people are consuming music in India," Akshat emphasized.?
Whether Spotify's uncovered existing trends that are part of India's musical fabric or fundamentally accelerated the emergence of new music listening patterns is anyone's guess at this point. But one area that Spotify says they're already paying special attention towards is in the discovery of new, unknown local artists in India -- something that ties into their company's mission statement, actually.
There's a lot of scope to provide visibility and discoverability to artists in India, according to Akshat, and in typical Spotify fashion there's a playlist for that called Early Noise. "It's about looking at partners who are bubbling under, and analyzing initial user data that signals to us that users are interested in them." Spotify ensures these artists bubbling under the surface are curated and given visibility on the platform, otherwise they can get lost in the crowd of the major global and local international audiences.
When asked to assess Spotify's impact on the Indian music universe over the past six months, Akshat said that he sees themselves as "the R&D department of the music industry" when it comes to music consumption. From the product experience of the user, "I think the Indian user wasn't exposed to this level of personalization in a music app before, and we constantly learn from the data Indian users generate as well to power new experiences."
"We want to set the same benchmark in India as well, where we define what the next frontier of streaming is going to look like. And also make sure that Spotify remains the top tool for music discoverability and improving listener diversity," Akshat summed up, even as Cecilia nodded next to him.
Is that part of Spotify's secret plan to conquer India's crowded music streaming service space currently dominated by the likes of Gaana, Apple Music, Saavn & Amazon Prime Music, I asked Cecilia and Akshat. There isn't even a moment's hesitation before their response.
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"We're starting this conversation (with Spotify India), we have performed fairly well (in the past six months), we know what we're doing," Cecilia explained. "We feel very confident with what plans we have. And, I'm tremendously proud of what I've seen in terms of India's response to Spotify, everything from the net promoter score, the services used and how heavily it's used."
Cecilia further said how it's not only about having a lot of users, but also having engaged users that actually stay on the platform long enough and keep coming back, believing in the value Spotify creates for them. Akshat nodded and responded in kind.
"There's nothing secret about our India plans, as it's pretty consistent with our overall global strategy," responded Akshat. "The way we operate is pretty much out in the open. It's an audio first strategy, where we're an audio streaming service."?
When it comes to India, Akshat spelled out the three key things Spotify has learned over the past six months about the Indian market, and how it's going to influence their immediate strategy going forward. "The first is about building awareness, because music consumption time is still very, very low in India. And the biggest challenge for everyone in the industry is piracy. Third aspect is taking into account the very hyper regional nature of India. Our product experience, our content experience, and the way we engage consumers about streaming has to take into account India's vast diversity."
Somewhere in the India success story, Spotify is definitely working hard on owning podcasts as a content category -- the race is on not just in India, but globally. "Podcast" also happened to be the most used content-related word mentioned by Akshat and Cecilia during my conversation with them.
"Well, on a global scale, we have made a few acquisitions. And it's no secret that we are continuing to invest in the podcast space, and you will expect us to do the same in India. And what we have found is that we have more consumption of podcasts than we expected and people seem to associate us with also being a medium for podcast," Cecilia said.
Akshat threw more light on the podcast section. "We are seeing some interesting sort of trends here in terms of user consumption. For example, motivational is a pretty big category right now in podcasts. Mythology is pretty big, as well as crime. We're looking and learning from the data but the initial traction has been very promising," he said.
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Towards the end of my interview, I asked Cecilia whether Spotify considered itself as a tech company that delivers music or a music company powered by tech. She said it depends on the lens, your point of view.
"We are a tech company to the extent that we use technology in order to reach our users, we are also an audio company as a service, but first and foremost, we are a people company," Cecilia emphasized. "At the end of the day, it's all about getting the right people on board to do the job. And I think that's proven itself here in India as well, and that's all that matters. Technology can be copied, everything else can be copied, but the people and their innovation can never be copied."?
A bit corny and cliche, but I'll take it. Spotify doesn't want to define itself as either a technology-first or music-first company, because that's besides the point. What matters is Spotify's ambition in India and around the world, and in Cecilia's own words it is to "become the biggest audio platform in the world."
Spotify today has 232 million monthly active users globally of which 108 million are paid subscribers. It currently hosts over 50 million tracks with 40,000 new songs added daily. It offers over 3 billion editorially, algorithm and user curated playlist featuring over 200 localised playlists for India and access to over 450,000 podcasts. Sure there are problems, but they've only been in India for half a year. With more time and money, who will bet against their ambition to become the biggest audio platform?
A vinyl record, music cassette, and CD walk into a bar. "And the rest as they say is history," said the music streaming service.