iWorld
Facebook teams up with Indian music labels
MUMBAI: Facebook today, announced partnerships with top music labels including T-Series Music, Zee Music Company and Yash Raj Films, licensing their music for use in social experiences such as videos, messages, stories and other creative content on Facebook and Instagram.
Music has always occupied a central place in the imagination of Indians and also, an incredible vehicle to express emotion. At Facebook, we have been partnering with the music community around the world to bring music into the ways people can share moments and express themselves on Facebook.
Starting today, people in India can include hundreds of thousands of licensed Indian music in the videos and posts they share on Facebook, making their moments more meaningful and personal. Through these partnerships, users can include their favorite tracks from popular films including the latest hits like Apna Time Aayega from Gully Boy, Aankh Marey from Simmba, Swag Se Swagat from Tiger Zinda Hai, as well as regional hits like Lahore by Guru Randhawa, Zingaat from Sairat plus old classics like Bas Ek Sanam Chaahiye from Aashiqui.
Commenting on the development, Bhushan Kumar, T- Series chairman and managing director said, “We're living at a time when we're talking to one another from across the globe using audio-visual language. One video with music and lyrics connects with billions across India and the planet. There's nothing more to be said. And where do they connect? Social Media. So, the idea to officially make available rights of Bollywood songs, which can be heard in every corner of the globe, to Facebook users so they can express their feelings through their posts, memes and messages with added masala and tadka, is an inevitable stroke of genius. Now, just say it with a Bollywood song. Even better, make it a T-Series song!”
Neeraj Kalyan, T-Series President and Digital head of the music major added, “When Facebook came to us with this idea of users adding licensed music to their videos and photos, it was music to our ears. We knew this is the next logical step in the T-Series growth story. Bollywood music is loved by all, so why not use it to communicate your thoughts and feelings? We have one of the largest catalog of songs and T-Series, today, is India's leading music label, digitally. Today's digitally savvy consumers are ultra-creative and it will be interesting to see how they re-purpose our music and videos to say what they want the world to hear."
Commenting on the association, Anurag Bedi, Business Head, Zee Music Company said “We are excited to partner with Facebook to introduce newer ways for users to express themselves with music. By such associations, it is our endeavor to bring innovative musical experiences from across the globe to our social media savvy audiences.”
Anand Gurnani, Vice President – Digital, Yash Raj Films said, “For a nation that has music and cinema firmly ingrained in its soul, our association with Facebook offers a chance for audiences to experiment and express themselves through music and share the same with their friends. This further strengthens our approach of community building using music as an enable.”
Manish Chopra, Director and Head of Partnerships, Facebook India said “Music has always been a powerful medium of expression. We are excited about partnering with the music industry in India and the idea that people here will be now be able to include music in their videos on Facebook and Instagram, opening up more options for more ways to express and sharing memories with friends and family.”
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.
