The Succession of Noice and Its Ambition to Become the Best Local Audio Content Platform

After securing seed funding in the first quarter of 2021, the audio content platform Noice officially welcomes two new officers to its board of directors. They are Rado Ardian as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Niken Sasmaya as Chief Business Officer (CBO).

The involvement of the two Google veterans is in line with Noice's efforts to become the best local audio platform in Indonesia. Moreover, the growth of audio content, such as podcast, is currently being loved by the public.

In an interview with DailySocial, President Director of Mahaka Radio, Adrian Syarkawie, who at that time was still directly handling Noice, said that his party had difficulty developing this platform business. The reason is, since the beginning, Mahaka Radio's parent company was not a technology company, so there must be limitations in its development.

"We are aware that in the future we cannot develop only content, but also technology. Therefore, we are trying to find investors who can provide support in terms of technology," said Ardian at the time to DailySocial.id.

In his recent official statement, Ardian admitted that he would continue to play an active role in supporting the future development of Noice under the captains of Rado and Niken.

Noice was originally developed as a platform streaming radio. However, according to him, this service is considered insufficient to meet the needs of a growing market. While content on-demand growing rapidly in a number of countries, including Indonesia.

Redesigned as a platform streaming radio, Noice began to widen its service segment by venturing into audio content on-demand. Noice was established under the auspices of PT Mahaka Radio Digital in 2018, which is a joint venture company owned by PT Mahaka Radio Integra Tbk (IDX: MARI) and PT Quatro Kreasi Indonesia. Quatro is the result of a consortium of record companies in Indonesia, including Musica, Aquarius, My Music, and Trinity.

Based on the latest data, Noice has pocketed as much as 800 thousand registered listeners all over Indonesia with more than 3.100 episodes podcast, and 200 catalogs podcast, both original and exclusive content. Noice has also worked with more than 100 podcasts.

The gait of former Google executives

Prior to the appointment of Rado and Niken, Noice had actually begun to make a number of efforts to address this limitation. First, Noice started looking for investors who could provide guidance, both in terms of technology and business collaboration. Until finally, Noice also got investors from a number of well-known VCs who have strong portfolios in technology. They are Capital Memories, Alpha JWC Ventures, and Kinesys Group.

Second, the company also began to multiply talent new platform from India that is specially placed for the development of the Noice technology and platform going forward. This explains enough The roadmap company in the first half of 2021, Noice launched beta version with UI/UX which continues on version 2.X with excellent features personalized content.

In his official statement, Rado and Niken have worked for almost ten years at Google and YouTube for the Asia Pacific region. Rado has a wide range of experience at Google from developing the Google Ads business in the FMCG industry to handling strategy customer experience for Google Maps and Google Store with the team product and engineering in India, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore and Australia.

While Niken has held a number of important positions on Google and YouTube. Among them sales, partnershipsand Program Development in Singapore and Japan and serves as Global Program Manager at YouTube, which focuses on developing its creator ecosystem globally. Niken became the first person to assume the responsibility of this position in Southeast Asia/Australia and New Zealand.

"Learning from our experience at Google and YouTube, we want to build Noice so that it can support audio content creators in Indonesia and build their own community through the technology and features we launch. We also facilitate creators to produce original and exclusive content in recording studio facilities by Noice's production team," said Niken.

Roadmap Noice

According to Rado, his party will still continue the Noice development plan that has been set from the start in order to realize its vision as the best local audio platform and build an audio content ecosystem in Indonesia. Apart from platform development and content localization, there are three main areas of focus for Rado and Niken

First, Noice will focus on prioritizing features that enable creators/podcasts for two-way interaction with the audience. As previously stated by Niken, Noice has also built a recording studio and production team to facilitate the production of original and exclusive content on Noice. Currently, Noice delivers a number of audio content, ranging from podcasts, live audio, streaming radio, audiobooks, and music.

Second, Noice will strengthen the ecosystem of audio content creators in Indonesia. According to Rado, although there are many successful content creators in Indonesia, most of them still play on video platforms. Meanwhile, the choice of audio-based platforms that focus on the local market is still limited.

"Therefore, we want to create an ecosystem of audio content creators in Indonesia so that they can be successful, perform, and connect with their listeners. We also want to provide variety of content and acquire big creators by opening the Noice platform for non-original content. In addition, we want to facilitate brands to be able to build and find their community on our platform," he explained.

Lastly, Noice continues to recruit to fill the required positions. Currently, Noice's product and engineering teams are still based in India. Meanwhile, the team in Indonesia is dedicated to business development, such as content, production, marketing, partnership & sales, and PR.

"We will start focusing on monetization when user base, Monthly Active Users (MAU), and time spend on our platform increased quite large. We have prepared several monetization schemes that we plan to test for selected creators before fully rolling out to other creators," he added.

Audio content market growth

Currently, Indonesia is enjoying the sweet growth of increasing audio-based digital content. Based on Spotify data, Indonesia dominates consumption podcast the most in Southeast Asia in 2020. As much as 20% of the total Spotify users in Indonesia listen to podcasts every month, and this number is higher than the global average percentage.

It is undeniable that the Covid-19 pandemic is one of the big factors behind the consumption of content podcast. This content is being hunted by digital consumers, especially when faced with work and school situations from home.

In Indonesia, the average user spends 8 hours online. However, as many as 56% dominated by Gen Z and millennials complained about screen fatigue result of too much exposure to visual content. Therefore, the audio content is rated as nice escape for Indonesian internet users.