“Genie” Music Streaming Service Mentioned by KT Chairman as Model Case

According to Nielsen KoreanClick, the unique mobile visitor numbers of Genie in July was 2.52 million, up 291 percent from the same month last year. (image:KT Music)

SEOUL, Sep. 16 (Korea Bizwire) – KT chairman Hwang Chang-gyu mentioned its digital music service “Genie” in an email message sent to all employees on September 1 as a success case of paying attention to improving customer service.

Indeed, Genie has been growing at the fastest clip recently among all digital music services in Korea. According to Nielsen KoreanClick, the unique mobile visitor numbers of Genie in July was 2.52 million, up 291 percent from the same month last year. In terms of total mobile time spent, it was 2.5 million hours in the first week of June, up 200 percent from the first week of January.

Genie’s explosive growth began last year when it overhauled the service in June. It began offering a service to listen to high-quality sound without an expensive earphone. It was then followed by the industry-first “free lossless audio codec” streaming service in January this year, which attracted more than 100,000 users within three weeks after service launch.

As the customer-oriented services gained popularity, the service posted operating profit of 3.7 billion won in the first half of this year, turning to the black. An analyst commented, “It seems KT’s chairman is trying to elicit lessons from the experience of Genie for other units within the group as the model case of customer-oriented business strategy making.”

By Sean Chung (schung10@koreabizwire.com)