Ahmedabad Loves K-Pop & Other Listening Behaviours, Revealed By Spotify India

While Spotify has celebrated multiple anniversaries across the globe, it’s now celebrating its first anniversary in India. While the streaming service hasn’t shared numbers that would help us quantify its journey in terms of subscribers, they’ve shed light on some really interesting stats and listening habits.

For starters, India ranks the highest in the number of 18-24-year-old users on Spotify in the world. Considering that it’s been only here for a year, this is quite remarkable. Although a distinct number could’ve helped with more perspective on just how much this fact means.

Another interesting revelation is the popularity of K-pop in India. For six of India’s 7 sisters - Arunachal, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura – Korean features in the top 3 languages of music consumption. But if we talk about the top 10 cities that consume K-pop, Jaipur and Ahmedabad also make it to the Top 10 list.

Spotify says that it’s received a lot of interest from users aged 55 and above too. I’m not sure if these guys confused the song for the Senorita that features in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, but Señorita by Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello is the most streamed track across the country in this age group. Dissecting this audience by gender, Spotify says that while females are listening to tracks from artists like EXO, BLACKPINK and Kill This Love, the males are tuning in to Selena Gomez’s and Eli Sostre’s songs.

Although, what unites India is their love for love songs. The affinity for such tracks is even stronger in eastern states like West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Assam, Bihar,

While a report from Bloomberg that came out in December last year stated that the service wasn't growing as fast as YouTube's offering, Spotify’s latest earning report claimed that it has 124 million premium subscribers around the world, which is more than twice of what Apple Music last reported.

While Spotify has shown considerable growth in its first year in India, it’s limited music library still poses as a roadblock for many users. Not to forget that YouTube Music and local players like Gaana and Saavn are also showing no signs of stopping. And if all that wasn’t enough, ByteDance – the company that owns TikTok – has also launched a beta of its own music streaming service, Resso. Given how much TikTok has impacted the Indian market, it’d be wise to not underestimate what Resso could do.

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