iWorld
ZAMNA music festival debuts in India this September
Mumbai: Making its highly anticipated debut in India, Zamna is all set to transform the country into a pulsing epicentre of electronic music. The globally acclaimed festival is bringing together a motley of international acts from across diverse geographies to deliver the finest techno beats amidst breathtaking natural settings for its pilot India edition. Presented by Bacardi Experiences and curated by Paytm Insider, Paradox & WMS Entertainment, Zamna India will enthral audiences at NESCO, Mumbai, on 28 September and head to Gymkhana Club, Gurugram, on 29 September.
The Indian edition of the festival will unite thousands of electronic music aficionados with their favourite artists. So, get ready for the most heart-thumping party of the year as the exciting line-up brings the house down with a pulsating mix of subgenres for an all-encompassing sonic experience from around the world.
Setting the pace will be Mind Against, an Italian-born Berlin-based duo with a slick, moving take on techno, house and IDM. Their sound draws inspiration from the psychedelic hooks of the 1980s soundtracks and modern dance music. The duo is no stranger to Zamna, having delivered an unforgettable performance at the “Afterlife” event in Tulum earlier this year.
Indo Warehouse’s Kahani aka Armaan Gupta and Kunal Merchant will up the ante with their signature blend of South Asian culture, rhythms and sounds fused with global house and techno in their set, ‘Kahani vs Kunal Merchant.’
Italy-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Giorgia Anguili will bring an energetic groove with her versatile set seamlessly moving between pop, techno and house. Her performance will feature vocals, samples and loops enhanced by a range of toy instruments.
Known for his innovative approach to music, Shall Ocin will elevate his sound to new and unexplored heights with a mesmerising blend of cutting-edge soundscapes, beats and custom-made effects. The Crash Into My Love artist promises to create an unforgettable experience for every attendee.
No party would be complete without Animal Picnic, the Spanish powerhouses Iñigo and Daniel. Renowned for captivating audiences worldwide – from Ibiza to Moscow and beyond – with their blend of house, techno, progressive and Afro rhythms, they are known for their standout tracks like Sinopsia and Kapote. The duo will take attendees on a cathartic music journey, making it one of the must-see performances of the festival.
Festival-goers can expect a phenomenal experience with captivating performances, custom lighting, state-of-the-art sound design, and spectacular visuals, promising a multisensory delight. Embodying the life, music, and beautiful spirit of Tulum, Zamna has grown into a global epicentre of cutting-edge sounds, natural beauty, and cultural significance. It connects people and nurtures a community, making its Indian edition a landmark event in the country’s techno music scene. Don’t miss this adrenaline-pumping bash! Book your tickets now at Paytm and Paytm Insider!
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.
