iWorld
Sunburn Arena brings Deadmau5 to Mumbai for 25th-anniversary performance
Mumbai- Sunburn Arena, premier electronic dance music (EDM) IP (Intellectual Property), announced its first-ever arena show of the season featuring the iconic Canadian music producer and DJ deadmau5 A.K.A. Joel Thomas Zimmerman! This highly anticipated event marks the return of deadmau5 to India, promising an unforgettable night of groundbreaking music on July 12th, 2024, at NESCO Centre in Mumbai.
Tickets for Sunburn Arena ft. deadmau5 will go live at 12 PM on 30 May 2024, exclusively on BookMyShow. Ticket prices start at Rs. 1200/-.
With a career spanning over two decades, deadmau5 has consistently pushed the boundaries of electronic music, earning six Grammy Award nominations in the process. Deadmau5’s influence on the EDM landscape is undeniable from headlining major festivals to dominating the charts. His chart-topping success is matched by multiple prestigious awards, including Best Electronic Artist, Album of the Year and Best Live Performance. His groundbreaking contributions to the EDM genre have earned him the respect and admiration of his peers, cementing his status as a true visionary in electronic music. Celebrated for their immersive experience, deadmau5’s performances combine cutting-edge technology, stunning visuals and pulsating beats that captivate audiences worldwide.
Globally, deadmau5 is known for his work in progressive house and electro-house, as well as other electronic music genres like techno. His repertoire includes some of the most beloved and trending tracks in EDM, such as ‘Glowing Nights’, ‘Echoes of Euphoria’ and ‘Rhythm Revolution’, each amassing millions of streams and rave reviews. After a decade, deadmau5 is set to return with an immersive audio-visual spectacle that showcases his signature sound and unparalleled stage presence, promising to captivate audiences once again.
Commenting on coming back to India, deadmau5 said, “I am thrilled to be back in India after a decade and perform for my Indian fans after such a long time. The energy and love of the Indian crowd are truly unmatched and I cannot wait to share this special moment with all of you!”
Adding to this, Sunburn CEO Karan Singh said, “Sunburn Arena has always aimed to bring the most electrifying and memorable experiences to our audiences, and this exclusive show featuring deadmau5 will be nothing short of epic. We are thrilled to welcome deadmau5 back to India after a decade and we look forward to an unforgettable night filled with cutting-edge music, stunning visuals and an immersive atmosphere that fans will cherish!”
Known for his signature stage helmet, also known as his mau5head, fans of the EDM DJ eagerly await his next big-stage spectacle and earth-shattering productions. Deadmau5 arose at a time when EDM was becoming one of the most popular genres in the west, growing into one of the defining superstars of the late 2000s and early 2010s EDM boom. He has now embarked on his ‘retro5pective: 25yrs of Deadmau5’ tour celebrating 25 years of innovation, collaboration and unforgettable memories.
Sunburn Arena, known for bringing top-tier international artists to India, is committed to providing an unparalleled live music experience, as it continues to set the bar high with an electrifying lineup of arena shows. The deadmau5 show will feature state-of-the-art production, ensuring that fans can enjoy his performance in a setting that enhances the overall sensory experience. Sunburn has previously hosted some of the biggest names in the global music scene, including the iconic Martin Garrix India Tour, Armin Van Buuren, Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, Black Coffee and the unforgettable Marshmello Holi Weekend Tour.
Sunburn Arena ft. deadmau5 is presented by Absolut Mixers, driven by Hyundai and styled by Jack & Jones.
Don’t miss your chance to be part of history as Sunburn Arena kicks off its season with an unforgettable night of music, energy and euphoria!
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.
