Universal Music Group

Music in India isn’t a category.

It’s a behaviour – aspirational, emotional, and woven into daily life in ways that standard usage metrics consistently miss.

Universal Music Group came to us as part of their regional strategy across South East Asia. India was the market they needed to understand properly, not at the surface level of platform data or subscription numbers, but at the level of why people pay, why they don’t, and what it actually takes to build a sustained, paid relationship between a listener and an artist in a market historically shaped by free consumption.

The research needed us to go beyond a survey. We hosted immersive community conversations with a curated cohort of music listeners across metro and non-metro India, spanning active subscribers and non-subscribers alike. Rather than following rigid scripts, discussion flows were adapted in real time by local hosts, letting unprompted truths emerge organically.

We mapped how discovery journeys differ across market maturity, how listeners move between platforms, and crucially, how proximity to an artist, the sense of intimacy and access, is what actually converts a passive listener into someone willing to pay. What came back was a consumer-led framework that positioned India’s music landscape clearly within the wider South East Asia narrative.

The intelligence directly informed UMG’s regional decisions, across pricing strategy, platform partnerships, and audience engagement, giving the global team not just data, but a genuine understanding of the market they were trying to unlock.