Paytm Insider betting big on live events

With global superstars coming to India and a bevy of musicians gearing up to showcase their talent, Paytm Insider is banking on the buzz surrounding these events.

While the live events market remains a small segment in India, it is gaining traction with Paytm Insider selling over 7.5 million tickets in the past 12 months.

Talking to Moneycontrol, Paytm Insider CEO Shreyas Srinivasan threw some light on the company's growth story.

"Overall, we see a 50 percent growth in our business. We have grown the number of events that we have ticketed by 25 percent and the value of ticket sold has grown by 50 percent this year," he said.

Sports, music and comedy keeping the segment lively

In the past 12 months, Paytm Insider welcomed fans to over 20,000 events across various categories in India.

"If you look at our top five categories, the number one category is sports. Second category is music. And then comedy has been our bread and butter. Now, comedy has gone beyond the top five cities. Comedy happens in places like Bilaspur, Patna. We just finished a Zakir Khan show in Patna which had 3,000 people," he said.

Even for Paytm Insider, tier-II and III markets are growth areas where the aspirations and the buying power is no different than tier I cities, believes Srinivasan.

However, when it comes to ticket prices, they tend to be 25-30 percent lesser than metros, he said.

It is these markets that saw slowdown impact to some extent this year.

"We saw some impact especially on the lower end of tickets. We saw slowdown impact in tier II cities and in the sports category which is a wide category and the impact was felt in ticket sizes ranging from Rs 300 to Rs 400," he added.

Yet, Srinivasan remains confident about live events segment and has on offer more out of home entertainment options.

"On January 15, we are doing the first TikTok and Likee creators focused event called Epic Fam Jam, which is India's first creator and community meet up," he said.

Along with this, the other upcoming events in January include Arijit Singh live concert and music directors Salim-Sulaiman will bring the Umrao Jaan movie in a form of a musical.

Paytm Insider striking the right chord

Just like comedy and sports, sports being half of Paytm Insider's business, music is an important genre. And along with Indian artists, there is a lot of focus on bringing international artists. But the platform has a two-way approach for this.

"One aspect is getting artists that everyone knows like Katy Perry, U2, Ed Sheeran. But here there is not much science as everyone knows who are top artists people are listening to. These are high profile, tentpole events that are sponsored. There is another category of events which are data led. These are artists who you wouldn’t know but they have a core subset of 3,000 to 4,000 fans in India who are happy to spend money to watch them live," he said.

The organised live events segment grew 16 percent in 2018, according to an EY 2019 report and this indicates that there is a community consuming entertainment out of home despite being spoiled for choice to stay home and keep themselves entertained.