World’s largest music streaming app, Spotify has been planning to expand to Asia Pacific region for pretty long now, however, the company wasn’t able to finalise anything. Now after years of rumours, Spotify is finally entering the region starting with Thailand and Vietnam.
The second most populous country in the world, India, might see the arrival of Spotify by the end of this year or early next year. However, Vietnam and Thailand are a priority for the company now, with a combined population of 160 million.
According to a report by TechCrunch, the company is hiring for ‘music editor’ in Singapore for these two locations, which means that a grand launch is imminent. Spotify is ideally expected to launch the service in these two nations in the next six months.
Spotify is still not very sure about the plans to launch its service in India, because of the existing competition in the market from local apps like Gaana, Saavn and Wynk and international apps like Google Play Music and Apple Music that launched only a year or so back.
These applications themselves have been fighting to get the maximum users on their platform. If Spotify joins them now, it knows it will be quite late for the company to make a splash. This will have to be followed by attractive offers which might not be the company’s priority at the moment.
Amazon Prime Music is expected to enter by late 2017
If there is one company that is taking it aggressively in India, it is Amazon. Amazon’s prime services have become quite popular in India, especially Amazon Prime Video. However, the company wants to bring the complete suite of Prime products in India, with Prime Music being the next launch. Amazon Echo is also expected to be launched soon, which will pave way for Prime Music in India.
The online song streaming industry in India is flourishing, as more and more individuals opt for these over traditional song storage. Thanks to the recent competition amongst telcos, 4G has become very reliable and cheap for customers to stream songs and videos directly from their smartphone, without worrying about data running out.
In fact, if Amazon Prime Music is included with Amazon Prime, then more and more customers will flock to this platform because the price of Amazon Prime in India is just Rs. 999 a year, that includes access to Prime services, Prime Video and now Prime Music. No other company offers such inexpensive rates for so many services.
We hope Spotify takes India seriously and launches the app soon as many customers have been waiting for the launch, especially those returning to India from foreign countries.