Three Years of JOOX in Indonesia, Lessons from the "Failure" of WeChat Launch

Three years ago Tencent started JOOX's presence in Indonesia as its second attempt to enter the country's market, after previously "failing" with WeChat. Now you can say JOOX is the leading entertainment service, not just music. DailySocial Survey himself mentioned JOOX as an application streaming the most popular music in Indonesia chosen by the respondents.

We had the opportunity to talk with Poshu Yeung, Vice President of the International Business Group of Tencent, about the current state of JOOX, experiences drawn from the failure of launching WeChat in Indonesia, and the potential for development JOOX going forward.

Local team

According to Poshu, currently the only competitor for JOOX in Indonesia in the music sector is Spotify, because Apple Music is limited to use by users of the Apple platform. In a larger scope, JOOX's competitor is YouTube as an entertainment platform. Compared to Spotify, JOOX has the advantage of having a local team. Spotify itself only has a regional office in Singapore.

Poshu emphasized that JOOX is not just a music streaming platform, but an entertainment platform. In it there is karaoke content, videos, even peer-to-peer. Currently the number of paid users is very small when compared to users of free services. According to Poshu, the conversion of payments for digital goods in Indonesia is generally less than three percent. Nevertheless the potential is very interesting. It is stated that the average Indonesian listener listens to 72 minutes of music per day.

Music is a tough business model

Poshu admits the music segment is a difficult business model, because of the structure of the business model that has been built by the record company. He said that his party will continue to encourage customers to become paid customers, because they are more active in using the service. However, according to him, there is still much that can be done.

[See also:Online Music Streaming Survey in Indonesia - 2018]

"We think there's still a lot we can do on the side streaming free in the form of trials of various business models. The business model here does not mean just advertising. Advertising is only one way to earn money. After three years, we are lucky to still survive [as a service]."

Lessons from WeChat's failure

Prior to JOOX, Tencent had failed when entering WeChat into Indonesia. According to Poshu, who was also involved in fostering WeChat's entry into Indonesia, the most important thing is localization.

"We localize a lot of things for international products. JOOX is the first for us to really have a lot of local partners, local content, and that's what makes the difference."

However, not only about local issues, Poshu also emphasizes understanding about the market. The Indonesian market is not only about Jakarta. They also want to reach big markets outside Jakarta.