There is no doubt in the fact that music consumption has moved almost in entirety towards the digital space. It is slowly moving away from downloads and turning towards streaming. For no other reason, that streaming opens up a larger catalog for discovery and consumption.

This one streaming platform;  Wynk Music, took me by surprise and it's time to look into all the great work.

The beginning

In September 2014, Airtel released its music streaming app into the Indian market. While music streaming already had established players;  Saavn and Gaana had the first-mover advantage and within a few months, Apple Music also entered the Indian market; it soon took over the competition, becoming India’s No.1 music streaming app.  

Factors that shaped its success

Wynk Music had a large telco backbone that allowed it to understand the telecom needs and gaps of consumers and match them. This is what inspired the introduction of features such as Data Save Mode, low-speed network compatibility with auto bitrate swap, offline mode among others. A robust and highly stable product that gave users a superior experience helped Wynk Music clock highest streams per user on the app compared to the competition within a short span of time. Wynk Music also had a unique approach to music discovery and curation, with a deep focus on quality content across Hindi, English and regional content. Further, despite being ingested within an established organization, Wynk Ltd. also consciously focused on creating a start-up culture driven by a young yet brilliant team. The lean, flat and closely knit work environment helped create an innovation-driven organization, which many believe is the reason it grew at the pace it did.

The story in Numbers

Today, Wynk Music has become music lovers’ favorite on-the-go music destination. It crossed 75 million downloads in 2017 and boasts a daily install count of over 100,000. On average, close to 1.5BN songs are played every month while an average user spends upwards of 75 minutes per day listening to music on the app.  Wynk music commands a highly engaged user base across India with its strong content library. In 2017, it registered 100% Growth in Regional markets driven by doubling up of streams for regional music content.

Wynk Music app owned by Bharati Airtel reported a turnover of Rs 128.5 crores for the financial year 2017 and reported a profit of Rs 4.1 crores.

This is a significant jump from Rs 49 crores reported by the company in FY16, up by over 2.5 times. It doesn’t just stop there, profit for Wynk Music increased to Rs 4.1 crores, up 2.5 times from Rs 1.6 crores in FY16. As per Wynk Music’s annual report, its content costs were Rs 84.1 crores for the year – around 65% of turnover and 74% of total expenses – up 167% from Rs 31.15 crores last financial year. In its FY17 Annual Report, Airtel said that:

• Wynk Music plays close to billion songs per month.
• Average daily time spent on the app by users has grown by 25% over the previous year.
• Daily streams grew 200% over the last year.
• Wynk crossed 50 million app installs during the year.

Wynk Music app was the #1 music app in India on the Google Playlist. Looks like we have a rising winner.

The Competition

Like we discussed earlier, Wynk Music had a fair share of competition from the inauguration of the app. Lets take a closer look at the competition,

1. Gaana claimed in 2016 that they had 50 million app downloads, along with a catalog of 15 million songs.
2. Saavn, on the other hand, has 22 million active users and a 36 million song catalog in 15 different languages. The are currently present in over 200 countries.
3. Apple Music, the world’s second most popular music streaming application has about 20 million paid active users worldwide in 2016.
4. Hungama claims to have crossed 50 million monthly active users worldwide with 2.5 million pieces of music content.

Here's what Mr.Sameer Batra, CEO, Wynk Ltd. had to share with Loudest.in on this note,

Wynk Music is one of the most successful OTT products launched by a Telco. Our focus on delivering the right content for the right audience has paid off with higher user retention as compared to other apps. Today, our strong regional content kitty coupled with Airtel’s unmatched network reach has helped generate 100% growth for Wynk Music across regional markets and we plan to sustain this with an ever-expanding yet carefully curated songs library. 2018 will see Wynk Music drive its penetration even further with attractive bundling and strategic tie-ups with content creators. Also, we recently relaunched our website to facilitate discovery and consumption across platforms with multiple product innovations underway already. - Sameer Batra, CEO,  Wynk

Wynk is on an exponential rise. We at Loudest are very excited to see what the company accomplishes this financial year. Even more so with Airtel slowly stabilizing their 4G network with the largest penetration and highest speed in the country.