Digital Music Industry To Swell To $ 450Mn: Mahindra Comviva And Ovum Consulting

The digital distribution of music content will only get bigger this year, indicated a new report compiled by Mahindra Comviva and Ovum Consulting.

Emerging markets like that of Asia–Pacific, including India will propel digital distribution of Music and the digital music industry is expected to swell beyond US$ 450 Million in this alone, suggests the report. Notable regions that will fuel the growth are Philippines, Indonesia, China and Malaysia. Globally, the industry grew by just 9% within the last year, but in terms of Dollars, it is expected to exceed US$ 9 Billion.

It is quite apparent that the growing adoption of smartphones with the ability to stream high bitrate musical content, coupled with the relatively cheaper tariffs, has had a positive impact on the digital music industry. Till now, for the last couple of years, the industry was clocking a Compounded Annual Growth rate (CAGR) of 20%, but this was altered dramatically in the last year. The reason behind the sudden acceleration is the diversity observed in the hardware used to access the content.

Until 2012, majority of music content was accessed over the internet on desktops or laptops connected to wired broadband or WiFi. But in 2013, the list of devices suddenly included smartphones, phablets and tablets. Moreover, it is interesting to note that the same users now accessed similar content on multiple devices, indicating aspects like location and content specificity.

Today Mobiles and Tablets are increasingly becoming the most preferred devices to listen and consume such content. People accessing music from these devices grew by 15%, whereas consumption from computers has dropped 14%. In developing regions and emerging markets like India, consumption from portable internet enabled devices witnessed a surge of 49%.

Despite the rise in consumption, companies are finding it difficult to justifiably monetize the content and the platform. Quite recently Dhingana was a victim of the circumstances. Fortunately, in a country where consumers are routinely wary of forking out money to consume content, companies are experimenting with better ways of monetization.

Source | Mahindra Comviva

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