Airtel plans to monetise offerings under Wynk app
Airtel, India’s second largest telco, is looking to monetise offerings under its music streaming app Wynk by leveraging the creator economy it has built in addition to subscription and advertising, a senior executive said.
It will also look to scale up and monetise features of Wynk like the digital concert feature by introducing aspects of interactivity, which will also make it a compelling consumer 5G use case, thus helping push data consumption in the long run, Adarsh Nair, chief executive-digital services and chief product officer at Airtel, told ET.
“We have over 1,000 artists on the Wynk for Artists programme and six of them have been signed by music labels. When this happens, we charge a ‘finder’s fee’—similar to the A&R (artists and repertoire) representative in the traditional sense,” Nair said.
A&R representatives are essentially music scouts that look for new talent for record labels and music publishers to sign.
The Wynk for Artists programme was launched a year back and it allows new artists to put their music on the Wynk platform.
The artists get paid for every stream heard by users, thus helping them monetise their work.
Wynk is now extending this feature to new/smaller scale movie-makers who may not have the budgets to sign a larger label for music distribution. The first such movie title for music distribution is Love All.
In terms of the overall content strategy too, Nair said that music will play an important role, especially as Wynk scales up features like the Wynk Stage, which allows music artists to host virtual concerts for their community.
“It is pretty well understood by now that there are no immediate consumer 5G use cases because the live video requirement is also met by a good 4G connection.
