Apple Music becomes an integral part of launch strategies in India

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India’s Perspective – every month, music business journalist Amit Gurbaxani shares his experience, knowledge and analysis on key stories from the exciting and explosive Indian market.

This month: Amit looks at the impact of Apple Music in India, as the streaming platform slowly becomes a bigger part of launch and marketing strategies, in a country where freemium music streaming services have long been considered the norm.

Since its launch in India in 2015, Apple Music has been considered a niche streaming service, used primarily by international music fans in big cities. That reputation is slowly but surely changing, with the DSP now forming an integral part of the launch strategies of major and independent labels in the country.

Over the past year, Apple Music subscriptions have soared by a whopping 60% across the country and streams on the platform have increased by a staggering 30% to 40%, says an Indian music industry executive who preferred to remain anonymous.

Navjosh Singh

For Mass Appeal India, which has scored chart-topping singles and albums on the service such as Riar Saab and Abhijay Sharma’s “Obsessed,” KeynoteUSA Dhillon’s “With You” and DIVINE and Karan Aujla’s Street Dreams, Apple Music is now “number two or number three, in terms of streams on audio DSP, after Spotify,” says Navjosh Singh, the label’s head of A&R.

There are a couple of reasons for this increase: sales of the iPhone, long considered a high-end product in a country dominated by Chinese mobile phone brands, have been rising steadily due to falling prices.

In 2023, Apple’s revenue in India grew 42% to $8.7 billion (more than any other country in the European Union), while iPhone shipments rose 39% to 9.2 million units, according to a report by Morgan Stanley. That figure made India the fifth-largest smartphone market for Apple. More recently, during an earnings call in May, CEO Tim Cook announced that the company enjoyed “record March quarter revenue” in India.

Industry executives say that while it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact correlation between the surge in iPhone sales and the corresponding growth in Apple Music’s popularity, there’s no doubt the two are connected. “There’s a perception (among iPhone users) that Apple Music (is the streaming service that runs) more seamlessly on an Apple device,” Singh says.

Vivek Raina

Believe’s India managing director Vivek Raina attributes the surge to Apple Music “gaining momentum” over the past nine months due to recent “market dynamics and the push to increase paid subscriptions, with Spotify putting limitations on its free tier (in October 2023) and the closure of Resso (in January).”

As a result, Apple Music’s core listener group has expanded from international and Bollywood music to include major regional music languages such as Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu. This can be clearly seen in its charts. Over the past few years, the number of English-language songs in Apple Music’s year-end top ten in India has steadily declined from five in 2020 to just one in 2023. By 2022, all eight of the top songs were in Punjabi.

In fact, Punjabi is “one of the priority genres for Apple Music globally,” a representative for the service said. This has led to the regular inclusion of releases from stars like Aujla and Diljit Dosanjh on global playlists like New Music Daily, on whose cover they appeared in August and October 2023 respectively. As a result, Aujla and Chobar’s Making Memories and Arjan Dhillon’s Manifest have both reached No. 1 on all-genre album charts in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

“There is a perception that Apple Music works better with an Apple device”

While Punjabi and hip-hop feature prominently on the platform, they have not yet reflected a pan-Indian presence like Spotify has had over the past three years. “If you look at the smaller languages or the ones that are emerging more, Spotify plays a much bigger role,” Raina says. “For example, in the case of Bhojpuri music, which until 18 months ago was very concentrated on YouTube and significant on Resso, we have seen a transition to Spotify but not to Apple Music.”

That said, Apple Music is gaining traction not just among labels but also among artists. Raina says, “It has started to become part of their mindset. They have realised that their real fan base is not those on the free plan, but the audience that pays for music.” In the Indian market, where freemium services continue to command the largest audience share, revenue from Apple Music could be the highest, shares Singh.

The user base (which the anonymous music executive currently estimates at more than 1.5 million and expects to grow to four or five million over the next three years) may be a fraction of the total monthly active users of Spotify and local outfit Wynk Music, but Apple Music users are among the most engaged. “You’re going to get a higher number of plays from a listener who is an advocate for music — that’s the kind of audience on Apple Music,” he says.