Airtel floats Wynk Studio to monetize indie music

India’s second largest telecom service provider which has been focusing on generating revenue from its digital properties–Airtel Xstream, Airtel Ads, Airtel IQ among others–will scale up and monetise the Wynk music platform with the initiative.

The carrier will get a share of the revenue share from the number of streams of each song on any platform, through either subscription, ad-free mode or from content sharing with other streaming services such as Spotify and YouTube.

“It’s a win-win for all, the artistes get paid 70% of each stream on any platform, customers get to listen to new, independent music and we as platforms get revenue from revenue share,” said Airtel Digital’s chief executive officer Adarsh Nair.

Indie music, or music by independent artistes, is becoming popular with some finding their way to marquee Bollywood movies, take for instance the title track for Deepika Padukone starrer film Gehrayiyaan, which has been among the top songs on several music platforms.

Nair said Airtel has been exploring this monetisation stream since Indians on average spend about 21 hours per week listening to music as against a global average of 18 hours. Almost 30% of the top performing songs across any music platform in India are today from independent artists and these independent artists are all set to drive the growth of the industry by 50% from roughly ₹2,000 crore to ₹3,000 crore industry by 2025.

Wynk Studio plans to launch 5,000 independent artistes by next year on the platform and has earmarked ₹100 crore to promote local talent, with over 130 artistes already signed and streaming on the platform. The platform aims to increase its listener base to 100 million within a year from present 75 million.

Nair added that artistes with the Wynk Studio platform will also get international exposure as the content will get distributed globally through the Wynk music app and other streaming platforms, and hence their per-stream revenue will be in local currency where the music is played.

“The artistes can earn their livelihood from music, as the platform takes care of challenges of discovery and monetisation that are typically faced by independent artists. The creator economy for music is at a nascent stage but poised to grow significantly,” he said.

The music will be made discoverable through recommendations on the Wynk app using neural networks and machine learning algorithms, he added.

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