iWorld
IPRS marks 54th anniversary with launch of “IPRS Learn & Earn – Indie Edition”
Mumbai: The Indian Performing Right Society (IPRS) is delighted to announce the launch of the IPRS Learn & Earn – the Indie Edition on 23 August. Building upon the success of the previous IPRS knowledge series ‘Learn And Earn,’ which gained remarkable momentum among IPRS members nationwide last year, this year’s initiative aims to take the program to new heights. Designed to engage budding creators and independent artists, the event’s launch on IPRS’s anniversary day holds special significance.
Expanding from its role as a copyright society, IPRS is dedicated to nurturing and promoting fresh talent. The objective of the IPRS Learn & Earn – the Indie Edition is to empower budding musicians by offering them an exclusive avenue to interact with industry experts and established creators. Through this event, IPRS reaffirms its commitment to fostering emerging talent, facilitating the growth of music creators, and advocating for essential causes within the music community.
The initiative is not just about copyright protection; it’s also about shaping the future of music. The event is a testament to IPRS’s pivotal role in uniting music creators, industry pioneers, and stakeholders. This dynamic platform strengthens the music community while highlighting IPRS’s contribution to promoting creativity, growth, and positive transformation.
The event’s diverse line-up includes knowledge sessions tailored for independent artists, covering the Art of Songwriting, Establishing a Career as an Independent Artist, and Managing Rights as a Creator. Moreover, the event will feature a Creators Showcase & Music Listening session, providing emerging talents the opportunity to present their original works directly to influential A&R representatives and industry experts.
Event Details
Learn & Earn – Connecting New Age Creators
Date: 23rd August
Time: 3 pm – 7 pm
Location: Versova SOCIAL, Mumbai
This event offers an unparalleled chance for creators at all stages of their journey to be part of something truly extraordinary. Whether an aspiring musician eager to forge a successful music career or an experienced creator seeking fresh insights, this event is tailor-made to elevate their musical journey and equip them with invaluable knowledge.
Event Highlight
Crafting Melodies and Words – The Art of Songwriting: Led by singer-songwriter producer Shashaa Tirupati and renowned lyricist and screenwriter Mayur Puri, this workshop is a deep dive into the heart of songwriting. Participants will explore the intricate interplay between melodies and lyrics, mastering the art of music production that resonates with the audiences.
Mastering The Indie Music Scene by Leslie Lewis: New-age creators get an opportunity to join music maestro Leslie Lewis to unlock the secrets of thriving as an independent musician and gain invaluable advice, proven strategies, collaboration insights, and a dose of inspiration to flourish in the competitive music landscape.
Managing rights as a creator: The session is designed to arm the artists and songwriters with the knowledge needed to safeguard their creations, ensuring they receive the recognition, credit, and value they deserve.
Creator showcase & networking: The event will offer a platform for budding talent to present their original compositions to influential A&R representatives and forge connections with fellow musicians, leading creators, and industry experts, laying the foundation for future collaborations and opportunities.
IPRS CEO Rakesh Nigam commented on the event stating, “As we assemble under one roof on August 23rd, we’re not only commemorating a milestone; we’re celebrating the spirit of innovation and transformation that defines IPRS. As the music industry evolves, IPRS continues to lead this change, steadfast in creating a dynamic and inclusive community for music creators. With a focus on education, collaboration, and empowerment, IPRS reaffirms its role as a driving force behind the success of creators in the ever-evolving landscape of the Indian music industry. I take this opportunity to thank all distinguished guests, mentors, and our panel of experts, without whose wholehearted support this event wouldn’t have been possible.”
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
