India insight – every month, music business journalist Amit Gurbaxani shares his expertise, insight, and analysis on key stories from the exciting, exploding market of India.
This month: Amit looks into the impact of Apple Music in India, as the streaming platform slowly becomes a more important part of release 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 mostly by international music fans in big cities. That reputation is slowly but surely changing, with the DSP now forming an integral part of the release strategies of both major and independent labels in the country.
Over the last year, Apple Music subscriptions have shot up by a whopping 60% nationwide and streams on the platform have increased by an impressive 30% to 40%, says an Indian music industry executive who preferred to remain anonymous.
For Mass Appeal India, which has scored such chart-topping singles and albums on the service as “Obsessed” by Riar Saab and Abhijay Sharma, “With You” by AP Dhillon, and Street Dreams by DIVINE and Karan Aujla, Apple Music is now “number two or number three, in terms of streams on audio DSPs, after Spotify”, says Navjosh Singh, the label’s head of A&R.
There are a couple of reasons for the upticks. Sales of the iPhone, long thought of as a super-premium product in a country dominated by Chinese handset brands, have been rising consistently, owing to a fall in prices.
In 2023, Apple’s revenues from India grew 42% to US$8.7 billion – higher than any country in the European Union – while iPhone shipments climbed 39% to 9.2 million units, as per a report from Morgan Stanley. That figure made India the fifth biggest smartphone market for Apple. Most recently, during an earnings call in May, CEO Tim Cook announced that the company enjoyed a “March quarter revenue record” in India.
Industry executives say that though it’s hard to determine the exact correlation between the jump in iPhone sales and corresponding growth in the popularity of Apple Music, there’s no doubt the two are connected. “There’s a perception [among iPhone users] that Apple Music [is the streaming service that works] most seamlessly with an Apple device,” says Singh.
Believe’s India managing director Vivek Raina attributes the spike to Apple Music “gaining momentum” over the last nine months on account of recent “market dynamics and the push to increase paid subscriptions, with Spotify putting limitations on its free tier [in October 2023] and Resso’s shutting down [in January]”.
Consequently, Apple Music’s core listenership has expanded from international and Bollywood music to include the top regional music languages of Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. This can be clearly seen on 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. For 2022, the entire top eight was in Punjabi.
In fact, Punjabi is “one of the priority genres for Apple Music globally”, said a representative for the service. This has led to the regular inclusion of releases by such stars as Aujla and Diljit Dosanjh in global playlists like New Music Daily, the cover of which they were featured on in August and October 2023 respectively. As a result, Aujla’s Making Memories and Arjan Dhillon’s Chobar and Manifest have peaked at No.1 on the all-genre album charts in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
“There’s a perception that Apple Music works most seamlessly with an Apple device”
While Punjabi and hip-hop over-index on the platform, it has yet to reflect a pan-India presence the way Spotify has in the past three years. “When you look at smaller or more upcoming languages, Spotify plays a much larger role,” says Raina. “For example, for Bhojpuri music, which up to 18 months back was highly concentrated on YouTube and was significant on Resso, we’ve seen a transition to Spotify but not on Apple Music.”
That said, Apple Music is gaining importance not only among labels but also artists. Says Raina, “It’s started becoming a part of their mind space. They realise their real fan base is not [those] on the free tier but the audience that is paying for music.” In the Indian market where freemium services continue to command the largest share of listenership, revenues from Apple Music could be the highest, shares Singh.
The user base – which the anonymous music executive currently pegs at over 1.5 million and expects to grow to four to five million in the next three years – may be a fraction of the total MAUs of the likes of Spotify and the homegrown Wynk Music, but Apple Music users are among the most engaged. “You’ll get a higher number of streams from a listener who is a music advocate, that’s the kind of audience on Apple Music” he says.
