For western music lovers, India’s desi apps are going to disappoint. why over here

JioSaavn was the only home service that scored more than 8 out of 10 on the index we came up with on our coverage of Western music. Global services ruled the top four, with Spotify and Apple Music sharing the top slot (9.3/10) – a sign of the resource-rich global app signing deals with more music companies to offer more Western albums.

Each app’s rating is an average of its ratings on 10 different genres, which is in turn based on how successful we were at finding critically acclaimed albums in each genre across the various music apps’ libraries.

The poor performance of Indian apps is at odds with the growing interest in international music, which has been attributed to fewer domestic film releases during the pandemic, in a 2021 report by trade body Indian music industry. For some Indian providers, it is important to offer more than just Western music. Siddharth Roy, CEO, Hungama Digital Media said that the company’s focus is on small towns and it has been designed according to the preferences of the Indian audience. “While Western music is a part of our audience’s consumption, it is not a major sub-genre for the large consumer we cater to,” Roy said.

global-domestic difference

It’s not all doom and gloom for home services though. If you’re insisting on subscribing to a local provider, you might still be happy with JioSaavn, which scores close to 9 across genres like pop, rock, metal and hip-hop.

But if you’re a fan of electronic dance music (EDM) or jazz or western classical music, all home services score less than 8 out of 10, so it’s best to go for the global service.

Of course, this is not to say that global services are also perfect. For example, YouTube Music doesn’t have the same rock basics as The Eagles’ 1976 album Hotel California. Spotify is also missing biggies like 1970s music icons Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Both artists pulled their music from the service to protest the spread of alleged COVID misinformation by podcaster Joe Rogan on Spotify.

music majors

Some services may offer more Western music than others due to deals with music companies. There are three groups that drive the music scene: Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music. A fourth entity, Merlin, works for independent record labels operating outside the Big Three. If a service makes a deal with these four groups, it could give its users access to most of the music under the sun.

An interesting exercise would be to see how much music is contributed by each group to our dataset. Information about the group that owns the copyright is usually on an album’s performance page. Having collected this information for all the albums, we see that Universal contributes the most, followed by Sony. If we treat the dataset as a sample of critically acclaimed music, each group’s contribution to the dataset may, in a way, be its contribution to all ‘good’ music.

missed deals

Copyright information also lets us determine how many albums from each group are available on each service. The song hosts only 2.4% of Universal’s albums in the dataset, with The Beatles, Nirvana and Kanye West missing. Despite Marilyn’s website describing JioSaavn as a partner, it has hosted only 66% of her albums. A closer look reveals that albums from the major music company Beggar Group, otherwise a Merlin member, are missing from JioSaavn, including albums from the band Radiohead and older albums by singer Adele.

Chart 4:

It is possible that Gaana may not have a deal with Universal, and that the JioSaavn-Merlin deal may have initially left out the Beggars group. Queries sent to Gaana and JioSaavn did not elicit any response. But the key difference between promise and reality shows that India is still at a point where music lovers first need to find out which service has their favorite international albums.

Shijith Kunhiti is a freelance journalist.

Methodology Note:

The analysis relies on various best-album lists in each of the 10 chosen genres of Western music, curated by respected books, magazines and websites. There were two types of lists: the best of all time (‘canon’), and the best of recent times (contemporary).

For example, for EDM (electronic dance music), Cannon was taken from the list of most influential albums by dance music publication Mixmag, and best contemporary albums from dance publication Resident Advisor’s annual ‘Best Albums of 20XX’ list. went. From last 10 years.

The final list contained 317 critically acclaimed albums: 50 canonical and 267 contemporary. These albums were searched programmatically and sometimes manually in the libraries of each of the music apps listed in the analysis. A rating out of 10 is given to each service based on availability, after weighting canonical and contemporary albums equally.

For example, Spotify had 46/50 EDM albums in the canonical list and 236/267 in Contemporary. This translates to an overall rating of 4.6/5 points for Canon and 4.4/5 for Contemporary, 9/10 for EDM.

Individual ratings for 10 styles were averaged to arrive at an overall rating for each service.