(ETX Daily Up) – dir = “ltr”> Music streaming is storming India. While the players in the sector see it as an opportunity to conquer a promising new market, they must nevertheless adapt to the consumption patterns of local populations. One of them is betting on robots to make it happen.
They are small, fuchsia pink and ready to convert Indian children to the joys of music streaming. National industry leader Gaana recently partnered with tech start-up Miko to become an integral part of Miko 2 educational robots.
The streaming service is now included in the MikoMax subscription, which allows users to use a lot of “premium content” directly on their robots. While it is usually necessary to subscribe to a monthly or annual plan to consult the applications integrated in MikoMax, Miko has decided to make access to Gaana free for all robot owners during the pandemic. “Making this partnership freely available to all users is a small contribution from Miko to the Miko family,” Sneh Vaswani, co-founder and CEO of the Indian start-up, told the Economic Times.
While this collaboration offers Gaana the opportunity to gain a foothold in the booming robotics market, it also allows her to continue her efforts to conquer the youngest Indians. In this spirit, the music streaming service teamed up in October with the Indian studio Green Gold Animation to exclusively host its catalog of children’s content on its platform.
Growing interest in music streaming
For Gautam Sinha, the recent partnership with Miko is an additional opportunity to touch “a new market for Gaana”. “Bringing our offer to young children is a very interesting opportunity,” the CEO of the streaming service told The Economic Times. And for good reason, Indians are showing more and more interest in music streaming. They are said to be more than 200 million listening to music on platforms like Gaana and JioSaavn, as Blaise Fernandes, director of the Indian Music Industry, told TheNextWeb.
This promising market is arousing the interest of industry giants including Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music, which have stepped up initiatives over the past two years to conquer it. But a major problem remains. While Indians are music lovers, few of them are willing to pay a subscription to listen to music online. Music piracy is still extremely prevalent in the country, where 67% of the population engaged in it in 2019 according to a recent report of the Indian Music Industry organization. Raising awareness among Indians about music streaming, and its paid business model, from an early age could prove essential for players in the field, such as Gaana.
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