Spotify Launching In India On January 31

Spotify could be finally launching in India at the end of this month, January 31st, to be precise. A rumor last month claimed the company will be hosting a launch party in Mumbai. The music streaming service has already made deals with several big Indian labels. In March last year, Spotify had opened its office in Mumbai and had hired around 300 people. Fast forward to the present, and the company is still poaching people from competitors such as JioSaavn.

The service has faced several problems in India, as it couldn’t tie knots with groups such as Sony, Universal etc. Now, sources have confirmed to Variety that Spotify was able to partner with leading Indian label, T-Series. T-Series has a huge follower base in the country, which means that Spotify will already have plenty of content when it launches. Spotify and T-Series announced their global content deal earlier this week. The Indian music and film company will provide Spotify access to its entire catalog, which consists of both Bollywood and regional music. The streaming giant will also have access to non-film music and content from emerging artists. This deal will make Spotify more appealing to Indian users.

According to the report, the music streaming service is still finalizing some more deals with local record labels. Spotify is aiming to get as much regional music as possible before its India launch. The app will be available in English, but the company plans on adding support for more languages soon. It wants to have access to dominating regional music in Punjabi, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam and Tamil. All of this is supposed to happen before the launch on January 31st. Users can expect music in up to five different languages when Spotify goes live in India.

Spotify also plans on launching the app with an extended free trial offer, which should help gain more users. The streaming service faces tough competition from popular Indian streaming services such as JioSaavn, Gaana and Airtel’s Wynk. That means it may have trouble converting the free users to premium users in the beginning. ―91Mobiles