India insight – every month, music business journalist Amit Gurbaxani shares his expertise, insight, and analysis on key stories from the exciting, exploding market of India.
The last 12 months of activity in the Indian DSPs space has been, let’s say, busy, so we asked our Indian correspondent Amit Gurbaxani to summarise what’s been going on – and what might happen next.
There’s scarcely a dull moment in the Indian DSP-scape. While Spotify has never publicly shared figures for the number of users it has in India, Comscore – in its ‘India Year in Review 2024’ report – placed it near the top of the audio-streaming service pile, with 91 million unique visitors in December across desktop and mobile.
It was another winning moment for the platform, which recently completed six years’ presence in the country. When Spotify launched in February 2019, seven other audio-streaming services were operational in India – where three homegrown offerings, Gaana, JioSaavn and Wynk Music were widely regarded as the market leaders. Each claimed over 100 million MAUs at the time.
Shut-downs, roll-ups, and pivots
Today, the scenario is very different, and India has gone from a territory once dominated by local players into one where, much like other parts of the world, international behemoths such as Spotify and YouTube have cornered the market.
If the ByteDance-owned Resso, which arrived in March 2020 and whose growth once rivalled Spotify’s, hadn’t borne the brunt of the Indian government’s crackdown on Chinese apps, it too may have been among that list. Resso stopped its free tier in May 2023, which led to its eventual exit in January 2024.
Shortly after talks for an acquisition by Wynk Music’s parent company, telecom Bharti Airtel, fell through, Gaana – owned by media conglomerate the Times Group and Tencent, which reportedly has a 35% stake – pivoted to a subscription-only service in September 2022. Gaana was then acquired by Times Group subsidiary Entertainment Network India, which operates its Radio Mirchi network of FM channels, in December 2023. The service, which had once announced it had over 180 million MAUs, now, says this report, has a subscriber base of over a million.
In November 2024, Wynk Music itself shut down after partnering with Apple Music to offer free trial subscriptions of that DSP to Airtel users. During his Q3 FY25 earnings call, Vikram Mehra, the managing director of legacy Indian label Saregama and chairman of recorded music trade body the Indian Music Industry (IMI), said “audio-streaming moved another step closer to the goal of going fully behind a paid subscription wall” after Wynk Music’s closure left “only two players in the market now with free offerings”.
We’re presuming Mehra was referring to Spotify and JioSaavn but forgetting YouTube Music, which started in March 2019.
Meanwhile, JioSaavn – which itself was created by the 2018 merger of Reliance Industries’ Jio Music and the US-based Saavn founded by a trio of Indian-origin Americans – has scaled back. After its co-founders stepped down in November 2021, it closed its live events and artist management divisions and in-house label Artist Originals in the first half of 2022. In August 2024, it ceased operations in some regions outside of India where it says it’s the “leading audio streaming service with over 100 million MAUs”.
In the interim, Spotify gradually edged out the other incumbents by replicating some of their strategies such as selling mini subscription plans, accepting country-specific modes of payments such as UPI, and focusing on regional Indian language music – and combining this with huge marketing and advertising spends. It also spotlighted India’s independent music scene, a segment given less prominence by its film music-focused domestic rivals. This was all on top of its superior algorithm-based listening recommendations.
A quick way to gauge how times have changed is to watch a couple of music videos on Saregama’s YouTube channel and see the order in which the DSPs where viewers are encouraged to stream the songs are listed. In the video for “Mungda” from the Hindi film Total Dhamaal, which was uploaded in March 2019, Gaana is placed first followed by Wynk Music, JioSaavn, Amazon Prime Music and Apple Music. But in the clip of “Tu Hain Toh Main Hoon”, from the Bollywood movie Sky Force, which was released in January 2025, it’s Spotify that fronts the names, before JioSaavn, Amazon Prime Music, Apple Music, Gaana, Hungama and YouTube Music.
Spotify still relatively small compared to YouTube
In India’s notoriously price-sensitive market where subscription-only services such as Apple Music and Amazon Music have always remained niche players, even Spotify has felt some heat. Industry insiders say it lost some users in October 2023, after it implemented a series of restrictions on its free tier. Despite recovering the lost ground, Spotify looks relatively small in comparison to YouTube, which according to the aforementioned Comscore report, had 411 million unique visitors in December 2024.
Neither platform has confirmed these numbers, but looking at the plays on their weekly charts corroborates this somewhat. For the first ten weeks of 2025, the streams of the No.1 on Spotify’s Weekly Top Songs India chart averaged over 7.2 million, while the corresponding figure for the topper on the equivalent list on YouTube was more than 32 million.
That Indians prefer to ‘watch’ music rather than just listen to it is among the reasons for YouTube’s popularity here, and its pan-Indian presence runs deeper and wider than Spotify, which is making concerted efforts to bring listeners of regional language music to adopt its service.
On the flip side, Apple Music is said to have recently benefited from record sales of iPhones in India, which have continued to grow at a steady clip. Like Spotify, it has doubled down on local content, making Punjabi one of its “priority” languages globally.
Encouraging subscriptions – and the room for growth
Indeed, when DSPs here talk of growth, they often speak of the next Indian regional language to break through, which will add to the trillion-plus streams that we already generate, making us the second-largest market by volume after the US.
Yet India’s per capita revenue from recorded music is among the lowest in the world. Almost 88% of that money comes from streaming, but only 18% of it is attributed to subscriptions. In an 2023 interview with Music Ally, Spotify India managing director Amarjit Singh Batra said the company has no plans to increase prices. Its Rs119 ($1.37) per month tag is the same as that of Apple Music and YouTube Music, but higher than that of Gaana and JioSaavn (Rs99, $1.14); all of them regularly offer discounts and free trials.
Instead, said Batra, the Swedish operator’s India offices will further its endeavours to boost ad revenues and lure free users to buy subscriptions by sweetening the deal through incentives like exclusive “fan experiences”. Though Spotify has said its conversation rate is above the national industry average, its revenue from subscriptions grew at a slower pace (90%) than those from advertising (114%) in FY24, during which its net loss decreased 58% compared to the previous year.
As per the EY report on India’s Media and Entertainment sector published in March 2024, only 7.5 million or 4% of India’s 185 million audio streamers were paying to listen. Around the same time we spoke to Batra, Believe founder and CEO Denis Ladegaillerie told us that the rate of growth of subscriptions was following the pattern seen in most developing markets.
Per his calculations, India was at 0.6% of the population in 2023, which would double to 1.2% in 2024, to 2.5% in 2025, and to 5% in 2026. “Then afterwards, for five-six-seven years, it’s going to grow 3 to 4% per year towards 25 to 30% of the population.”
Given that 42% of the nation’s 1.5 billion people are still to get online, according to Kantar and the Internet and Mobile Association of India’s ‘Internet In India Report 2024’, there’s plenty of scope left.
