Specialist
Former Managing Director at Spotify Technology SA
Agenda
- Geographical music streaming market fundamentals outlook
- Comparison of Joox and KKBox
- Music label partnership agreements and operations
- Ad pricing, ad load and subscription opportunities
Questions
1.
How big is the music streaming market in Southeast Asia and which country do you think has the highest growth potential?
2.
Which countries in Southeast Asia do you think are most promising? Is it the ones with the highest population, such as the Philippines, Indonesia, or Thailand?
3.
How do the key characteristics of the Southeast Asian market differ with the mature markets, such as the US, China or Europe?
4.
You mentioned a local product, meaning Southeast Asia should have regional content. Does this imply that it does have local content on the platforms? Is it about the route-to-market strategies or the content?
5.
What penetration growth do you think there is in Southeast Asia? Do Indonesia, the Philippines or Singapore have a higher penetration than others?
6.
What do you think is the biggest challenge for platforms to penetrate in Southeast Asian countries? Do you think it is language or the localisation?
7.
I think Southeast Asia has a population of nearly 650 million. How much user viewership do you think people will have on the platform?
8.
Do you think the customers are still reluctant to pay for the music-streaming services on Spotify? What stage would you say music-streaming platforms are at, a gaining-user stage, or conversion?
9.
You mentioned that only Malaysia has a half-and-half split, but other countries still have a free-user dominance. What are the challenges in converting to paid? Is there still the perception that music is free and do you view the perception changing?
10.
Spotify is a leader in the competitive landscape. Could you highlight the other players in the market? Could you outline the local players, such as Joox, in their key countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines?
11.
What is the key theme or reason, in your opinion, that KKBox has experienced a failure in Southeast Asia? What factors make Joox successful in maintaining its position in the market?
12.
What customer preferences are behind the success of offline events in Southeast Asia?
13.
Would you say that offline events are the most-successful route-to-market strategy for an online music platform to penetrate the mass market?
14.
How frequently do music platforms organise offline events on an annual basis and what are the trends for the mass public? What resources, efforts or costs do the platforms put in offline events?
15.
Do you view any preferences for universal content in Southeast Asia, or are the key countries such as the Philippines or Indonesia utilising their unique content as well?
16.
If platforms are changing their content, or putting a different focus on different content, what partnerships do they have with the music labels?
17.
Platforms have four types of content. You mentioned the large label market is a market-by-market contract, but is it a long-term agreement? Are there any specific terms and conditions that also require any change from the content?
18.
How would platforms deal with the dynamic content changes? Do they need to acquire as many content types as possible to fit all the customer’s preferences?
19.
Given that the platform needs to acquire all of the songs, and editors will choose which ones are the hottest and which ones are the most popular, do you view most of these songs as acquired content from a specific label?
20.
Do you think it is also a burden for the platforms that they may not utilise all the value from the songs that they acquire from the labels, because they purchase the whole catalogue?
21.
Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia have special local content or preferences. Do you view the additional costs associated with the local content as worth the money for acquiring more users to the platform? Are they not focused on the monetisation yet?
22.
How about the indie labels? The indie labels are classed as unique local content which caters to a specific audience or country. Do you think the music platforms have a greater bargaining power to the catalogue itself? Music catalogues need the music platforms for distribution, while the platforms need the catalogues to build up their libraries. What dynamics are there in bargaining power?
23.
Do you expect any potential for Southeast Asia’s local content from indie labels in Indonesia or the Philippines to be as big as K-pop?
24.
Do any markets in Southeast Asia prefer the international content, such as American, European, K-pop, etc, so they would need to get less localising strategies to tap into the market?
25.
Do you think the bargaining powers of Joox compared to other platforms is lower in other markets?
26.
The bigger platforms in some regions are trying to make the platforms the sole distribution channel for publishing their own songs. Have the local or regional players, such as Joox, tried to attract the labels with catalogues? Do they have this kind of power for being a sole distributor?
27.
How much higher are costs when the label is exclusive, in Southeast Asia?
28.
How is advertisement pricing trending?
29.
Do you think the music platforms are trying to encourage more direct advertising? What are the challenges or opportunities with direct advertising? Do you think it is possible to reverse the trend?
30.
Given that platforms are trying to encourage more direct or customised advertising towards the customers, is the reach to customers satisfactory?
31.
Do you think Joox and the other players can cover the content costs? Do you think that Joox is suffering, given the monetisation strategies and the underlying content costs?
32.
The key thing for platforms is payment. Do you think that, market- or education-wise, there is more for platforms to do to encourage a higher subscription rate?
