iWorld
Twitter and Rolling Stone India partners live Twitter music gigs called #RollingWith
MUMBAI: Twitter India and music monthly Rolling Stone India has teamed up to kickstart a new bi-monthly partnership. Called #RollingWith, this curated partnership will see Indian indie musicians and visiting global acts perform live at the Twitter India #BlueRoom, and the performance will be broadcasted live on Periscope via @RollingStoneIN to reach fans across the country and the world on Twitter. Prior to and during the performance, the artists will also engage with fans on Twitter via exclusive video Q&As and more.
Taking fan engagement from online to offline, a small set of fans, selected via Twitter, will also be invited to watch the gig live at the #BlueRoom.
These ‘music-and-conversation’ video sessions will give music fans a new way of enjoying live music – with a side of social media infused banter. The series will aim to discover new artists, and offer a space where musicians and fans meet, talk music, and enjoy a nonchalant listening session. To make it a more inclusive experience for fans, artists will crowdsources lyrics, take a Twitter poll of their favourite tracks, make new album announcements, new tour announcements, share gig travel stories, or chat with fans live on Periscope while performing.
The #RollingWith partnership kickstarted today with British pop sensation, The Vamps (@TheVampsband) that took place live on Twitter on Monday morning. The September and October line-up also includes artists such as Urdu rapper Naezy (@NaezytheBAa), Sandunes (@sandunesmusic), and Mumbai rapper Divine (@VivianDivine), Nucleya (@NUCLEYA) and Dualist Inquiry (@DualistInquiry).
“Twitter is your live connection to culture, and fans flock to Twitter to share and connect with their favourite artists and other fans. We are thrilled to bring new experiences for music fans exclusively on Twitter with #RollingWith in partnership with Rolling Stone India. Through this initiative, we will be hosting curated performances from Indian indie artists and visiting global acts both on Twitter and live at the #BlueRoom, and will also give fans an opportunity to engage with their favourite musicians in new and unique ways. #RollingWith will feature both known and emerging artists to support the growing local music industry,” says Twitter head of media Partnerships, Southeast Asia Pratiksha Rao,
Rolling Stone editor & publisher Radhakrishnan Nair, India says, “Rolling Stone India is committed to the cause of supporting artists as well as providing them with a platform to interact with their fans directly. We are happy to join hands with Twitter India for #RollingWith, which is a unique and exciting project in today’s social media-driven industry. We hope #RollingWith will go a long way in building and fostering an interactive community of musicians and fans.”
The gigs will go live on @RollingStoneIndia on Twitter and Periscope, and will reach audiences across the country and the world via Twitter. For regular updates on artist line-up, follow @TwitterIndia and @RollingStoneIN. Follow the conversation with #RollingWith.
The Vamps (@TheVampsband) at the first #RollingWith Twitter gig
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.
