Why BookMyShow is venturing into audio entertainment space

BookMyShow today announced its foray in the audio entertainment space with the launch of JukeBox. Apart from downloading songs, JukeBox offers a wide variety of original and curated music content across languages.

Since BookMyShow raised the fourth round of funding from Stripes Group last year, the company has forayed into different verticals, with music being the latest, taking it deeper into the entertainment segment. The music content will be curated as per customer needs, and requirements across languages.

Over the past few months, BookMyShow has partnered with artists like Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, and The Chainsmokers. With JukeBox, this partnership will only strengthen.

From a playlist of songs that users can download and listen to, and lyrics and a customised playlist, JukeBox provides users a wide variety of musical content. Citing an example, Ashish Hemrajani, Co-founder and CEO, BookMyShow adds,

“As the JukeBox business scales and grows over time, we will get rich data and analytics on users and behaviour patterns, which will give us further insights on the tracks they listen to, movies they watch and the languages they prefer. Basis this, the data will make it easier to customise the content and give recommendations.”

The music streaming market in India is growing steadily, thanks to higher smartphone usage and declining data costs. A report by KPMG pegs India among the top 10 music markets in the world.

An article in Forbes adds that music users in India are likely to touch 273 million by 2020. The market currently has several players like Saavn, Gaana and Airtel Wynk. In April this year, Google also launched its music subscription service.

Apple music has been hankering for a slice of this pie for a while, and Amazon Prime Music may be launched in 2018. The market is believed to be high-growth and is marked with intense competition.

“We put the customer and the user in the centre of our existence and the customer needs are always diverse. Their means for entertainment may differ, but it is the same customer at the end of the day,” explains Ashish.

He adds there are a lot of reasons why a customer now visits BookMyShow- show timings, user generated content, to book tickets, filmography, longtail content about films, trailers and videos. And now, the team now wants people to visit the platform for music.

A report by Kalagato suggests BookMyShow commands 78 percent of the market share in its segment and said the company had a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 0.52 and average order value of Rs 446.90 between January and March 2017. Paytm, however, had a higher order value of Rs 468.40.

Aditya Kuber, AVP-Audio Entertainment, BookMyShow, adds that JukeBox has already tied up with top music companies and experts who will curate content.

“On the podcast front, we are putting on a lot of talent like Suresh Menon, Rohit Barker and several others will be creating JukeBox original shows. This will be across genres, categories, age-groups and languages,” explains Aditya.

Last month, BookMyShow had acquired Sharjah-based Nfusion, an HD video-on-demand platform that allowed users to stream videos online. Nfusion has now been integrated with the BookMyShow platform to launch Jukebox, where users can download music.

However, the team wanted to build everything in-house and not seek acquisitions or tie-ups. It believes that the internal insights on customers and teams make it easier to create original content and even curate content.

Though piracy is a big concern in India, with allegedly less than 10 percent of the music being legally purchased, there seems to be a growing shift towards cheap music online. It just isn't BookMyShow that is looking to create original content, but also Saavn with Saavn Original Content and non-music content, for its users. Interestingly, BookMyShow will be competing with Saavn apart from Paytm.