Swedish music streaming company Spotify is considered as the global market leader among the streaming apps. Spotify’s curating algorithm is arguably one of the best in the world right now. Spotify has been making several attempts to bring their service to India but couldn’t materialize because of the record labels who held rights to most of the Indian music content.
Spotify’s deal with Indian Music Labels
But all this seems to be a news of the past as Spotify appears to have struck deals with most of the right holders over the last few months, clearing the path for their official launch into the country. According to Bloomberg, Spotify has already come to an arrangement with T-series, the country’s largest content holder of music which makes the way for Spotify’s entry into the country a cake walk. Spotify is also said to have closed deals with the rest of the top music labels which ensures the imminent advent of the streaming app into the country.
India is a difficult market to tap into considering the vast number of languages and fragmented ownership of music labels in each language. It is a known fact that music tracks featuring in movies constitute the major chunk of audio content to be streamed online unlike in other countries, where individual artists garner most of the attention. Spotify will have to deal with content ownership from different regional music industries as each language has three to four major players. This is what made Spotify delay the India launch for so long. But with all the new content that is going to enter the Spotify library, its suggestion algorithm is expected to fare well even with the Indian audience as well.
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Will India solve the Spotifys’ Global setbacks
Spotify’s’ investor base has been unhappy with the growth of the company in the past year and the fact that Spotify’s share value has crashed by around 30% since its peak value in July this year. Moreover, Spotify’s subscriber count has been stagnant for quite some time now and this meant that Spotify needs to quickly move its cards to expand into new territories. India can be the answer to Spotify’s vows as the country has turned out to be the major mobile data consumer in the world with millions of user base – Thanks to Reliance Jio. Launching Spotify in India will definitely swell the subscriber count within a short span of time and that should help Spotify find respite from its hurdles.
Spotify is expected to provide a free trial period to its Indian users with access to ad-free streaming. But it is imminent that most of the user base will stick to the free membership with ads upon the expiry of the paid subscription. So Spotify will have to start making deals with the music makers to ensure that they attain profits in long run.
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Spotify Music is expected to debut as early as the first quarter of 2019 in India. When launched, Spotify will take against the local players like JioSaavn, Gaana, Wynk, and Amazon Prime Music.
