The popular music streaming service Spotify will reportedly make its India debut in the next six months. The company says that they will offer an extended free trial period when it launches in the country.
Spotify currently offers a 30 day trial to all its new customers across the world. This development comes after the Swedish company entered 13 Arab markets, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt earlier this month.
The service is currently available in 78 markets across the world and has 83 million paying subscribers as of June this year.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek had first announced plans to enter the India market in March, just prior to its direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Also, Spotify had disclosed in its public offering filing that it has leased office space in Mumbai last year and has 308 employees in aggregate in India and 20 other countries.
“I think the truth of the matter is when you deal with licensing and in our case not just one company, but you deal with local publishers, local record companies, global record companies, global publishers, it is you know, always a complicated maneuver” Ek said “As much as I would like to see that we can accurately and timely estimate on the day when we’re going to launch a market, there is always local considerations that gets added. This has been true not just in India, but it has been true I think pretty much every market that we’ve ever entered into as well”
Former OLX India CEO Amarjit Singh Batra had joined as the Spotify’s India country head earlier this year. Ek downplayed these licensing problems during the company’s earnings conference call earlier this month, saying that launch delays due to licensing is “commonplace in this industry and nothing related to our overall strategy”.
He also said that India is a fragmented marketplace, with a lot of different local labels and local publishers, due to which it is difficult to predict as to when they will enter the world’s second-largest Internet market.