Riding on a strong demand for local content, Bharti Airtel’s music-streaming service Wynk Music has crossed 75 million app downloads, since its launch nearly four years ago. While Bollywood music continued to rule, Indian regional music streams on Wynk grew more than 100 per cent.
Music in Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi and Kannada accounted for the bulk of the growth in regional content. About 13 per cent of its active users came in from rural India, contributing nearly 10 per cent to the overall daily streams, the company said in a statement.
“Affordable smartphones and increasing penetration of high-speed data services will continue to add to the uptake of music and other content on smartphones,” said Wynk CEO Sameer Batra.
Wynk has a collection of over 3 million songs, including popular music in 12 Indian regional languages.
The remixed versions of Bollywood classics to the latest hits continue to grow in popularity and made up for 13 of last year’s top 50 tracks on Wynk. This contributed more than 3 per cent to the overall streams in the year, the company added.
In a new trend, songs featured in popular ad campaigns — such as Levi’s Let’s Live How We Dance and iPhone X campaign for Best Friend — went viral on the app.
User interest in international music continued to grow, and it was users from tier II and III cities who drove streaming. For example, Shape of You by Ed Sheeran crossed 100 million streams, while Spanglish single Despacito by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, and featuring Justin Beiber, crossed 75 million.