Amazon Prime Music is the latest entrant in the online music streaming segment of India. The main attraction for users at Amazon Prime Music is that it gives localized online music experience to it’s listeners. Owing to the cheaper 4G data and discounted smartphone prices, a lot of people have been shifting to using internet for social media activities, listening to songs, learning and collecting information, downloading movies, playing games etc. Amazon is taking advantage of this period by coming up with exciting Amazon offers to felicitate shopping and is also launching its music streaming service in the country.
According to Sahas Malhotra, Director at Amazon Music India, the e-commerce platform has spent more than a year listening and analyzing their customers in order to understand how they consume music, what’s important to them, types of content, their preferences etc. Sahas also added that they have deep dived and created genres and subcategories to cater to specific customer tastes. For example in the genre of Classical music, they have classified Western classical, Hindustani and Carnatic classical subgenres making these easily accessible to customers interested in these genres.
The strategy which Amazon India has adopted is entirely based on enhancing the local music content which its customers would prefer and this has helped the company to bring Amazon Prime Music in India. The company had collated a lot of data about its users – the choice of music, popular genres and trending artists, etc based on user understandings it gathered during the invite-only phase of Amazon Prime Music launch on Echo.
“Our customers love independent music tracks, followed by music genres and artists. We have witnessed a healthy mix of international and domestic content – Indian music lovers prefer listening to music in their own languages like Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam,” says Malhotra. Amazon has given a lot of emphasis to their playlists and stations on pop, jazz, Bollywood, dance and party. Top three Indian artists on demand are Arjit Singh, Kishore Kumar and A.R. Rahman whereas Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Justin Bieber top the international playlists on Amazon Music.
Amazon has added devotional and kid’s music franchises to Prime Music and these segments have received a good response from the customers. Workout and meditation are amongst the top requested activities in the moods and activities segment.
In order to give a more personal touch, Amazon is depending on algorithms and human curators to pick the music. “Playlists and Stations are especially hand-curated by our music experts across moods, genres, activities, artists and decades especially new release and trending music,” as per Sahas Malhotra. The company feels this approach will be more personal and would be a hit with its customers.
Gaining insight into customer music preferences, Malhotra feels that Indian music lovers prefer songs in their local languages rather than international music. Because of this reason Amazon has launched its music streaming venture in more than 10 languages such as English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bhojpuri, and Punjabi etc. The company plans to keep adding and inventing its music content as per the customer preferences.
Not giving the exact number of Amazon Prime Music subscribers, Sahas Malhotra told that the response to prime music is overwhelming. As of now all Amazon Prime users are given Prime Music service clubbed in an annual membership fee of Rs. 999 which also includes customers to access early deals, fast shipping and streaming video. The music streaming on Amazon Music is free of ads and also has offline music play which can be connected to devices such as smartphones, Amazon’s Echo speakers, Macs, and PCs.
The main competition to Amazon Prime Music is from Apple Music, Google Play Music and other Indian music streaming players like Saavn and Gaana. Spotify has shown interest in the music streaming segment in India and with its onset, the level of competition is bound to increase. Spotify is a famous music streaming service which is currently operating in 65 countries in the world and has over 159 million users of which 71 million are premium subscribers.
