Why India Matters to Spotify, and Why it May Not Deliver

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 was hugely positive for those regions and delivered high-value subscribers – declining ARPU notwithstanding, growth in those regions will slow down towards the end of this year. Next tier markets – Brazil, Mexico, Germany and ideally, though probably not, Japan – will pick up much of the slack. But to sustain the growth rates its shareholders require, Spotify needs other large markets to start building real momentum by 2020/2021. India and the Middle East represent the best options. However, the Middle East already has a strong incumbent – Anghami – and a potentially resurgent Deezer, newly empowered by its exclusive deal with leading local label Rotana. So, India is effectively the last bet on the table.

India is a very competitive but problematic market

India, however, is a problematic market. It has a host of well-backed incumbents – Jio Music, Saavn, and Tencent-backed Gaana – as well as solid performances from Apple and Google. Yet despite all this robust supply, the market heavily underperforms, registering only 1.7 million subscribers in 2018 with a monthly label ARPU of just $0.74. 1.7 million may sound like a solid enough base, but it represents just 0.1% of the total Indian population. 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.

The ARPU challenge

The realistic ambition for Spotify should be to drive five to 10 million subscribers over the next five years or so, primarily pulling from urban elites (essentially a re-run of what has been happening in Latin America). While more credible, this falls way short of denting the ‘next one billion’ opportunity. To unlock the scale opportunity, streaming has to look beyond subscriptions, and also beyond ad supported (India’s 270 million free streamers only generated a monthly ARPU of $0.006 in 2018). The scale opportunity is telco bundles. Reliance Communications’s prioritisation of Jio Music makes it the most likely player to capitalise on this in the mid-term. 

Spotify needs to find a similar scale partner and somehow convince label partners to accept an ARPU of say $0.08, which would be roughly in line with US telco bundle ARPU on a Purchasing Power Parity(PPP) basis. This would unlock scale without having to tolerate the catastrophically lower ad-supported ARPU rates. But the odds of that happening anytime soon are miniscule. When, and it is a case of when, not if, that time does come, the scale of adoption could be transformative for the global market. In fact, this is exactly where MIDiA thinks the market is heading. In our just published music forecasts, we predict that by 2026 India will have the fourth largest installed base of music subscribers, anywhere in the world. 

What matters most, revenue or scale?

The question is whether Spotify can be a major part of the ‘Indian adoption’. Even if it can, the ARPU will be so small that all the current concerns about Spotify’s falling ARPU will look like a storm in a teacup when compared.

Have no doubt, India can, and perhaps will, become a major player in the global streaming market, even helping reshape global music culture. It can also play a major role in Spotify’s future, but the rules of engagement will need to change to unlock that growth, and in doing so Spotify will be sacrificing ARPU. All of this means, Spotify’s investors and partners need to ask themselves, what do they want Spotify to deliver most: strong revenue growth or strong subscriber growth, because India cannot deliver both.