Spotify, the Swedish music streaming giant, was launched in India amid great fanfare. It has been discussed that India could well emerge as the key test market for the new features of the music label. Amarjit Singh Batra, the head of the company, believes that India is a crucial market for Spotify as there will be a chance to test learnings from other markets.
Controversies surrounded the advent of the Swedish major. Co-founder of Spotify, Ek had announced the launch in February 2018, but issues with Warner Music, Sony and Universal held the matters up for nearly a year.
The Bombay High court granted the company a reprieve by allowing them to stream music from Warner/Chappell Music from the Warner music publishing unit. This was the culmination of the bitter fight with rights over music with Warner Music that delayed the launch. Spotify will have to contend with market leaders like Gaana, which is the current market leader and others like JioSaavn, Google Play music, Apple Music, and Amazon prime Music which have already earned sizeable market shares.
India specific features would include enabling users on the free advertisement supported plan that will allow the user to play songs on demand on the mobile app. Spotify has plans to launch city-specific algorithmic multi-lingual playlists to incorporate the local sounds and will also include actor-specific playlists with film songs from regional cinema. The language preferred would be Hindi, Punjabi, Telugu, and Malayalam.
Language onboarding was India specific as the country is multi-lingual and rich regional content can be used to gain acceptance. This created many problems that did not arise in other countries, according to Director of Product Growth, Spotify.
India is the first market in the South East Asia region where music streaming has been launched. Deloitte has predicted that the music listening market will surpass 273 million by 2020 March.
