iWorld
The sixth edition of All About Music will facilitate growth and spark discourse
Mumbai: After two years of the pandemic, India’s biggest music conference is back in person for its sixth edition with its primary partner, Youtube Shorts, which is all set to take place from 20th to 22nd September at Taj Lands End, Mumbai.
Since its first edition in 2017, All About Music has grown to become one of the country’s premier B2B networking events, with five sold-out editions. The annual event brings more than 6,000 stakeholders and experts from key areas of the entertainment industry.
This year’s edition is packed with three whole days of curated keynotes, panels, workshops, artist showcases, masterclasses, and success stories, along with opportunities to network and pitch ideas. This year, All About Music focuses on the creator economy’s impact on Indian and global music and the world’s economy at large, whether it’s branded content, sync deals, monetisation or music distribution. Understand how music makes the Indian creator economy louder than ever before.
With web3 on the cusp of a revolution, All About Music is excited to feature speakers like illustrator Santanu Hazarika, offering a creator’s perspective on grasping NFTs and the metaverse.
This edition of India’s biggest music conference includes talks on global music publishing by Warner Chappell Music co-chair & chief executive officer Guy Moot and the potential of music education in India from Global Music Institute director-strategy & development Megha Balanim. The event will also see RadioOne’s national brand head Hrishikesh Kannan talk about his journey from music jockey to helming a radio channel.
Plus, some of the biggest and brightest names in Indian and global music will be present under one roof. They include OML Entertainment chief executive officer Gunjan Arya, Universal Music Group (India & South Asia) vice president, new business and brand partnerships, Preeti Nayyar, Bigtree Entertainment founder and chief executive officer Ashish Hemrajani, superstar singers Armaan Malik and Prateek Kuhad, and many more.
Speaking about this year’s power packed edition, create and collab business head Ashish Jose said, “The purpose of All About Music is to create space for conversations and interactions that amplify the voices of key stakeholders who are bright spots within the music industry. We do this because we believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and that when we invest the time to listen, ask, share, and learn, we grow together.”
One of the most important events in India’s musical calendar, All About Music bridges the chasm between the aspiring and the established while addressing the lacunae of the music industry. This year, engage in one-on-one discussions with the industry’s movers and shakers through connect corner, a unique 60-minute networking opportunity to meet, greet and turn ideas into reality.
For the first time, All About Music will also showcase the talents of a few selected artists who get to perform in front of a live audience that’s packed with all the stakeholders of the music business.
Last but not the least, the conference will continue with its endeavour to empower artistes to present their work directly to filmmakers, showrunners, and record labels, allowing for immediate feedback and reviews.
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.
