Paid Music Apps in India – Score Short Reads

Moving from records to cassettes, to CD’s, MP3’s, iPods and now finally digital streaming apps, how we listen to music has surely evolved over the years. With the large number of apps available, companies were scrambling to secure their market share and offered free trials for their apps followed by subscription plans.

Not only are the prices of these plans varied, but there are various tiers to the subscription plans as well. There are monthly, quarterly, half-yearly as well as annual plans. Some apps also have tiers like ad-free, HD quality and unlimited downloads, language packs according to your usability.

This customisation allows a larger audience to subscribe as per their needs and budgets. These are the most popular apps on the Indian market these days:

Spotify: Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming  service founded in 2006 and is the world’s largest music streaming service provider, with over 365 million monthly active users. It launched in India in 2019 and has proved to be a tough competitor to our home grown apps. Spotify Premium has individual as well as family plans and has plans for as less as Rs.7/day. You can even take weekly plans or annual plans for yourself and your family as well.

Apple Music: Launched in 2015, Apple Music has a user-friendly interface. It offers a three month free trial and Rs.99/month thereafter. It also offers family plans along with CarPlay a unique app which seamlessly connects your music to your car speaker.

Amazon Prime Music: Amazon Music is a music streaming platform and online music store operated by Amazon. It is part of the annual Rs.999 plan which also offers Prime Video, Prime Reading as well as Prime Delivery so all in all a great plan for the budget conscious with multiple offerings on the table.

Airtel Wynk Music: With over a 100 Million app installations, this music app from Airtel is extremely popular in India and is available for free to Airtel users. It also offers subscription plans at Rs.49/month.

Jio Saavn: From the house of Reliance comes Jio Saavn-with music from over fifteen languages as well as original podcasts from India. It offers unlimited downloads and ad-free music for just Rs.399/year.

Gaana: Gaana is the one-stop solution for all your music needs and offers you free, unlimited access to over 30 million Hindi, English as well as regional songs. To go ad-free, it offers the Gaana Plus subscription plans which can be paid for monthly, quarterly or annually and it also has a special student plan for only Rs.199.

Hungama Music: It is a digital entertainment company in India, providing services across music, video, entertainment news and gaming. It offers an annual plan of Rs.1,399 for music, videos, movies and even original TV shows. They have smaller duration plans as well.

YouTube Music: YouTube Music replaced Google Play Music and its recommendations are fabulous once you get into listening mode. It offers a one-month free trial following which you may renew your subscription at Rs.108 per month or Rs.309 for three months.

Music companies want consumers to pay for their services so even artists know what audiences want to listen to instead of just playing the top charts every week. This can be achieved by limiting the quantity of free music available to listeners as well as smaller free trial periods.

Though there is a debate about the pricing of these apps, no consensus has been reached for the same, hence we see the differential pricing for different apps. Some are of the opinion that keeping a low, affordable monthly cost will attract larger numbers and that is primarily how the Indian market works-value for money.

Another point of view is that from yesteryear wherein customers would pay anything between Rs.100 and Rs.300 for a music CD which had very few songs and they would buy multiple CD’s, so for unlimited songs, charging a higher price will not be a problem for customers. Lot of consumers are paying for video OTT services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime as well, so music companies don’t want to lose out on the spending of India’s public, hence the high pricing strategy for some companies

Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/

Apple Music – https://music.apple.com/us/browse

Amazon music – https://music.amazon.in/

Airtel wynk – https://wynk.in/corporate/music.html

Jio saavn – https://www.jiosaavn.com/

Gaana – https://gaana.com/

Hungama Music – https://www.hungama.com/