How Spotify curates content for its multi-lingual user base in India

TRANSCRIPT

Nandagopal Rajan: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Our Own Devices with Nandagopal Rajan. And as you guess, right, this is Nandagopal Rajan bringing you another guest. And this time we have a guest from Stockholm, and I’m in sunny, very hot, very sultry Kerala. And our guest is in the beautiful weather of Scandinavia, but he’d rather swap places with me. Welcome to the show, Mr. Gustav Gyllenhammar.

Gustav Gyllenhammar: Well, thank you so much. It’s such a delight to join your podcast today. And yes, as you said, it’s icy and snowy here in Stockholm. I’m dreaming of sunny Kerala. But next time we’ll try to do this in person.

Nandagopal Rajan: So Gustav is Spotify’s VP for markets and subscriber growth. And he is the guy who knows all about podcasts and the entire audio space. So Gustav, let’s start by asking you what is Spotify ‘s strategy for India? And where is Spotify placed in this fast evolving space of audio streaming?

Gustav Gyllenhammar: Yeah, listen, India, for us, is a hugely important market. It’s obviously, and this is not a surprise to you or your listeners in India, but it’s the biggest opportunity market there is in the world. Nowhere in the world is the audience opportunity larger than India. And we’re just crossing our third year in the market. And for us, it’s been a hugely rewarding experience being in India, where we’re seeing strong growth, we’re seeing customer delight, consumers are really happy with the experience we’re able to deliver to them. And also creators, both on the music and on the podcast side are telling us that they’re really happy we are in market and are helping them grow their audiences.

Nandagopal Rajan: So, Gustav I had a very interesting experience this weekend. And I was driving to this place called Wayanad which is a couple of hours from where I am. But it’s a very beautiful drive. And I was on Spotify all through and I let Spotify decide the songs for me. And I was really blown away by the selection. Like I absolutely didn’t have to skip even one song. Everything was what I would like to listen. And I have a very eclectic choice of music, and I listen to a lot, all sorts of things from all over the world. And it was actually throwing me those kinds of songs. How does that technology work? And that’s something really fascinated me always.

Gustav Gyllenhammar: Yes, I’m really happy to hear about your delightful drive. It’s similar for me. I drive up to my parents are up in the North of Sweden. And often you know, I can just turn on Spotify. And it brings me songs, sometimes familiar ones, sometimes really new discoveries. And it’s really exciting to let the service pick for you. And technology as you may understand is really the heart and soul of both the Spotify product and the user experience. It’s what drives our ability to deliver a unique experience to consumers. And quite frankly, for the more than 400 million consumers we have, every one of them have a unique Spotify experience. And it’s because discovery and personalisation are really the two key pillars that we built our service on. Each user has a unique experience. And we build up a taste profile for every single user and then use machine learning technology to deliver personalised content for users. And based on the signals that you then send back: do you like a song? Do you skip a song? Which artists do you follow and so on, we can continuously evolve and deliver a richer and richer and more personalised experience for you as the user. And that also means that we can enable a true engagement with both music and podcast for you and cultivate those connections between you and the creators that you are interested in.

Nandagopal Rajan: So is that tougher to do in a country like India, which is so complex, which is so layered, it has so many regions, so many languages, and people have very different preferences from what you would get in a Europe where maybe a maximum you have two languages, but like, you know, I am comfortable in six languages, for instance, like I would listen to songs, and maybe more. So how do you manage something like that? Because it gets complex, you know, as you go every 10-15 kilometres?

Gustav Gyllenhammar: Yes, you’re absolutely right about that. Spotify was founded in Sweden back in 2006. And we launched the service here in 2008. And most of our early years were focused on Western European markets. And we went to the US and even to Latin America. And as you say, most of those markets have a culture and a language setup and ethnicity setup, which means that one market is typically one culture, one music culture. So we really had to change our mindset and the way we build technology, when we ventured into markets, which have a way more exciting and multicultural setup. The way we architect top lists, the way we think about what songs are really popular for you as users. And I must honestly say that we haven’t solved all of that just yet, but it’s a key priority and a focus area for the company to better serve consumers in multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-language markets. And we’re learning things every day and trying to make our service better like that.

Nandagopal Rajan: So, you know, I heard from a lot of software companies especially, you know the kind of learnings that you get in a market like India, it also opens up your mind on how products can be created for other markets because it is so complex here. If you solve even a small problem here, it’s maybe solving something very major for a completely different market. Have you also had experience like that from India? 

Gustav Gyllenhammar: Yes, it’s absolutely true. When it comes to internationalisation and localisation of our product, India, for us is the most important market to solve for. If we can solve for India, almost everything else gets easy. But also we had a head start by having been now in India for just over three years. And the fact that we have built such a large audience with such large consumption in India, it helps us as we venture out to other markets in South Asia like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, as we venture out into markets in the Middle East and Africa, which have also been a big focus for us. India really can serve as the front runner and the forerunner for what we do in those markets. So it has helped us tremendously.

Nandagopal Rajan: And another thing that you have done very differently in the Indian market is how you have strategized the pricing. Your pricing is very different for the Indian market, right? Is that something that, again, has opened up your thinking on how to approach this problem?

Gustav Gyllenhammar: Yes, it’s true that pricing for us has been something we’ve had to look at on a market by market basis because even the comparison products that consumers would look at when they think about subscribing to a streaming service cost very differently in markets like Western Europe, compared to emerging Asia, and Africa, and so on. So we’ve had to look at sort of the base price point of our premium service differently. But even more important for a market like India, we’ve had to do product adaptation to our premium portfolio. So in one way, we’ve looked at what we call snackable products, which are less of a commitment and subscribing to a monthly recurring product, and developing daily and weekly premium products. In our case, it’s called premium mini as a way for consumers in India to get a taste of premium. And we see consumers really leaning into that they’re using that for when they go on a road trip they might use that when they study and cram for an exam and so on, they might be throwing a dinner party at their home and so on. And that’s when these daily and weekly products really come in handy. Also, the fact that most of our premium customer base in India is on prepaid products rather than subscription products, also very different from what we’ve seen in other markets around the world. So payment methods is another thing we have to localise significantly. In Western Europe, it’s been very much a credit card based story of growing the premium based whilst in India, we have to rely on locally preferred payment methods to succeed with our paid portfolio.

Nandagopal Rajan: The other thing that is important maybe from engagement and retention of your subscriber base is to maybe have these playlists that sort of, you know, connect to them so well, right. And I’ve heard from other players like Amazon, for instance, that you don’t have a use case of having a playlist of a star in other markets like you know, Shah Rukh Khan, a Shah Rukh Khan playlist, or a Salman Khan playlist. So how much of human intervention did you need to figure out a market like India from that perspective, purely from a content curation, an editorial perspective?

Gustav Gyllenhammar: Yeah, exactly. We have invested a lot into truly understanding music culture in India. And I’m really proud to say that we’ve been able to hire and engage some of the best editors in the space for our company in India, and really investing more and more into additional languages. Even though we might have started primarily in the Hindi market, we’ve really grown into Tamil and Telugu and Punjabi and sort of really going into all the major languages in India, because as you say, I think the sweet spot is when you can combine machine learning with editorial and we have a cheeky term that we call “algotorial” where we combine algorithmic experiences with editorial experiences. And that’s when we think we can really hit the sweet spot of delivering something that feels human and personalised at scale.

Nandagopal Rajan: The other thing Gustav which has intrigued me is, you know as we discussed in India is also multi-layered, but are the listening preferences different in different parts of the country? Do you have like, you know, people who spend more time maybe in a certain region? Are there any insights like that?

Gustav Gyllenhammar: Yeah, it’s true that there’s definitely differences and regional variations. And I can’t claim to myself be an expert of exactly how that plays out. But the pattern that we’re seeing in most markets around the world is that in the major cities, where commutes are typically very, very long, we see a lot of listening primarily using mobile phones and so on, whilst in other places they might be listening more at home. So that’s definitely a case. When it comes to the content and what genres people listen to, obviously, they’re tightly connected to what typical, for instance, typical movies in a region. So there’s Bollywood music being listened to primarily obviously in the Hindi speaking markets, but there’s sort of a very vibrant Southern Indian movie culture that is being listened to in the South. But then when it comes to sort of layering in both Western music and indie music that really happens all across the Indian subcontinent.

Nandagopal Rajan. You’re talking about commute, you know, people across the world to associate podcasts also with commute. And India seems to be relatively new market in this space. But Spotify has done a lot in this space. And you have, are offering a huge bouquet of different types of content and also creating new types of content, which maybe they are not traditionally used to, you know, how do you go about deciding what kind of podcasts work in a certain market?

Gustav Gyllenhammar: Yes, exactly. I think podcasts has been a major investment for us. Overall, when we ventured out from music into podcasts, we saw a lot of opportunity to take what we had learned in music and bring that to podcast. Before we entered podcasts, there were really no proper personalisation in the category. Finding a podcast to listen to could be very frustrating and you really had to rely on browsing through sort of a generic top list or relying on friends recommendations, and so on. But we’ve revolutionised that, from a discovery point of view, we’ve taken the recommendation engine that we used to have on the music side, and ported that over to podcast. So we’re able to predict what you as a listener could really, which podcast could appeal to you. Initially based actually on your music listening profile but the more signals we get from your podcast behaviour, the more we can dial and tune that to be also be very accurate and specific for podcast. And as you say, in addition to, podcast is a fairly new market in India, and we’re really eager to be part of growing and developing that market. So in addition to supporting all the independent and aspiring podcasters in the market, for instance, with our anchor tools, and our anchor product, we’ve also invested a fair bit into our originals and exclusives business in India. And what we’re doing there is where we’re looking at what formats and what creators are being successful and growing in the market. And trying to sort of lean more into that, whether it’s fiction stories, whether it’s talk shows and personalities. And it’s really something that we feel strongly about having to be a part of.

Nandagopal Rajan: So globally, you know, how important is the podcast strategy when it comes to, you know, user retention? And also, I guess a podcast listener has a much more higher frequency of coming back to the app because a lot of these are serialised, maybe you listen to something every day. So how does that work in your entire subscription strategy?

Gustav Gyllenhammar: Yes, what we’ve seen is that when a user picks up their phone and puts on their headphones, they really want to sort of navigate and move from between music and podcast quite seamlessly. And that’s also why we’ve chosen to develop the podcast experience inside the same user experience and app. And although music because of its just sheer size and popularity in the world is still the majority of our consumption, we see that podcast is growing very, very rapidly. And it’s primarily growing among users who already prefer us for music, they also put their trust that they can rely on Spotify for their podcast experience. So it’s a pattern where we’re seeing all across the world. And there are some markets where podcasts are exceptionally developed and mature, such as the US and the UK, and maybe Germany. And then we have all these newer podcast markets where the creator growth is skyrocketing, and the consumption is really growing fast. And and we also see more and more monetisation for podcasters being sort of put on top of that experience so that as an aspiring podcaster, you can earn money from advertising in addition to sort of really getting support from your fan base.

Nandagopal Rajan: And in the two years of the pandemic, we are almost exactly into the second year of the pandemic, in the case of Spotify also, has there been a COVID bump, which we have seen in most of the in online businesses across the world? Have people been spending more time listening to music, podcasts? And has that behaviour been different from what you have experienced before then?

Gustav Gyllenhammar: Yes, well, I think COVID has, and the pandemic has impacted Spotify just as it has impacted every single business on the planet. And when it comes to streaming and consumption, maybe less so than maybe what the video services experienced because that’s when people were sort of locked into their homes, streaming consumption on video went up very, very high. But what happened on Spotify is that commute has always been a big use case for Spotify overall. And when people temporarily stopped commuting, we saw shifts in behaviour. We saw, for instance, that we used to have very clear weekday patterns of strong consumptions in the mornings from consumptions in the evening, and different consumption patterns on weekend versus workdays. But suddenly, every day started looking the same across the seven days of a week. And we also saw in many markets that other platforms than mobile started picking up a larger share of consumption, whether it’s people consuming on computers, or it could have been game consoles and tablets and so on, which typically were sort of reserved to some consumption hours in the weekend. So that changed but when it comes to sort of overall consumption, both on the free service side as well as on the subscription side, it has actually been a reasonably steady ride throughout the pandemic. because we have this sort of ubiquity of platforms, which means that consumers substitute consumptions on one Spotify platform for consumption or another and they may be used to consume when they were sitting in a traffic jam. And instead, they consume in between sort of work and chores at home. But just as everyone else, we are so delighted and happy that we’re starting to see sort of the the end of this and the consumers coming back to more normal rhythms and patterns. And we think it is good for consumption on our platform, as well as how creators can connect with consumers.

Nandagopal Rajan: So Gustav, before we end, one last question, if you’re looking at the future, what are you most excited about?

Gustav Gyllenhammar: Yeah, there are many things that I’m excited about. When it comes to India, in particular, I’m really excited about how we can continue to grow our footprint and sort of get into more parts of Indian culture and society, increase our investment across all the major languages and cultures and support creators there. So that’s a big priority for us as we look at 2022. And India, for us clearly is the market the more we put in in terms of investment, the more we get back in love and engagement from creators and consumers so that I’m really excited about to continue to see what we’ve achieved in the first three years in India continue that for the many, many years I had. That’s something I’m really excited about.

Nandagopal Rajan: Thank you Gustvav for your time. It was really great understanding how Spotify is looking at the Indian market and how it customises the entire playlist and everything for all the listeners. Thanks for being on the show.

Gustav Gyllenhammar: Well, thank you so much. It was a true pleasure. And hopefully next time I can see you in person in warm and sunny Kerala.

Nandagopal Rajan: Absolutely. I’m looking forward to hosting you here. 

Gustav Gyllenhammar: Thank you. 

Nandagopal Rajan: So that’s all from our episode of Our Own Devices. We’ll be back again with another guest and we are everywhere you listen to your podcasts, including on Spotify.

Snigdha Sharma: You were listening to our own devices with Nandagopal Rajan by The Indian Express. This week’s show was edited and mixed by Suresh Pawar and produced by Anant Nath Sharma and me, Snigdha Sharma. If you liked the show, do share it on your social media handles and do not forget to tag us we go by @Expressaudio. You can find us on Twitter and on Instagram. Also, if you have any feedback, please do write to us at podcasts@indianexpress.com