After a year long wait, Swedish music streaming major, Spotify finally launched in India, amid a legal tussle with music label Warner Music Group, in a competitive domestic market.
India can emerge as a key test market for several of Spotify’s upcoming features which may then be exported to other markets, the company’s India managing director Amarjit Singh Batra told ET. “India is an important market for Spotify because this is where you will be able to test some of the learnings we have had in other markets,” Batra said. Spotify introduced several new India-first features on Wednesday when it debuted the service in the country.
Spotify’s India planned entry has been mired in controversies from the time it set up an office in Mumbai, last year. Spotify’s co-founder Ek had first announced the plans to enter the country in February last year, however, since then it has faced issues locking down licensing deals with major record labels like Universal, Sony and Warner Music.
In November last year, Ek had mentioned during the company’s earnings conference call that India is a fragmented marketplace, with a lot of different local labels and local publishers, which is making it difficult to predict when Spotify will launch in the country.
For now, Spotify will have to fight out existing rivals like Reliance’s JioSaavn, Gaana, which is owned by Times Internet, a part of the Times Group which publishes this paper, Amazon Prime Music, Apple Music, and Google Play Music. Gaana is currently the market leader in India with over 80 million monthly users as of December 2018, as per industry estimates.
As reported earlier, Spotify’s India January 31 launch was stalled because of a legal dispute with Warner Music which had sued the music streaming app after failed negotiations to prevent them from offering songs from the label’s roster of songwriters in the country.
Spotify is currently not offering songs from the Warner Music label in the country but has made available songs from Warner’s music publishing unit Warner/Chappell Music after the Bombay High Court denied the injunction, the company said.
Batra did not talk about Spotify’s legal tussle with Warner and downplayed its late entry into the India market. “In terms of entry, Spotify is coming at the perfect time because we believe the market is ready from an infrastructure perspective, especially in terms of data access and payments. India is a very strategic and long term market for us,” he said.
India’s online music listening market is expected to surpass 273 million by March 2020, according to estimates from consulting firm Deloitte.
India-specific features
Among the India-specific features include enabling users on its free ad-supported plan to play any song on-demand on its mobile apps, launching city-specific algorithmic multilingual playlists that aim to provide unique sounds of that city and introducing a series of actor-centric playlists that provide film songs featuring actors from different languages like Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, and Punjabi.
“Language onboarding was something we built uniquely for India since people speak a lot of languages in this country and we have now taken that to other countries. Because we have put so much effort and focus on tailoring Spotify for India, we faced a bunch of problems that we had not recognized in other countries ” said Owen Smith, Director of Product- Growth, Spotify.
While Spotify had previously tested prepaid plans in the South East Asia region, India is the first market where the music streaming service is offering it to consumers at launch.
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