Amazon India Inks Three New Partnerships For Amazon Prime Music Catalogue

Strengthening its Prime music catalogue further, Amazon India has signed three content deals for Amazon Prime Music with Lahari Music, Muzik 247 and the Indian Performing Right Society.

The Indian Performing Right Society (IPRS) will provide Amazon India with an access to the IPRS repertoire of more than a million titles across multiple languages, eras and genres of Indian music. The IPRS claims that it represents more than 4,000 Indian authors, composers and music publishers.

Muzik 247, on the other hand, will add Tamil and Malayalam music to Amazon Prime’s streaming app. Muzik 247 claims to have a catalogue that has some of the hottest, latest and most trending Malayalam soundtracks. It boasts of some immensely popular albums like Bangalore Days, Premam, Oru Vadakkan Selfie, Charlie, Maheshinte Prathikaram etc.

With these deals, Amazon Prime Music also added South Indian music label Lahari Music to add more than 25K film and non-film music Telugu, Kannada and Tamil tracks.

Amazon Prime Music was officially launched in India in February this year as an ad-free music streaming service exclusively for Prime members with music available in more than 10 languages.

Prior to the official launch, Amazon India had already partnered with T-Series, Saregama, Zee Music and more to build localised content for the Indian users.

Booming Music Streaming Industry In India

As space bolsters with increasing music and streaming options, recently, two Indian music streaming majors – Reliance Jio Music and Saavn – merged their synergies to jointly strengthen the foothold in the Indian music streaming market with a combined valuation standing at $1 Bn.

Amid this, Sweden-headquartered music streaming giant Spotify also announced its strategic focus on India. Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek said at an event,

“We are working on launching in some of the biggest markets in the world, including India, Russia and Africa which has a very rich musical culture.”

Another music streaming player, Times Internet’s Gaana recently announced that the company is raising $115 Mn from Tencent and Times Internet in order to boost the user experience on its platform and strengthen its tech.

Further, last year, BookMyShow (BMS) also announced the acquisition of nFusion, an IT consultancy and infrastructure company to strengthen BookMyShow’s music streaming service offering, JukeBox. As of August 2017, Jukebox claimed to offer over 1.5 Mn songs to choose from and a 300% growth M-o-M in the number of downloads.

In India, the downloads and streams of the digital music industry  – is estimated to be generating more than 70% of the $191.2 Mn (INR 12.2 Bn) music industry’s overall revenue, according to the Indian Media And Entertainment Industry Report published in 2017 by KPMG India and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI).

Amazon has been increasing its portfolio in the country with various verticals ranging from ecommerce to grocery delivery. Amazon also became the first foreign venture to enter Indian food retail market and has also been actively pursuing a share in digital payments space with Amazon Pay. The company has also buckled up its logistics services with 52 fulfilment centres present across India.

Recently, it was also reported that Amazon India is testing barcode scan and image-based search on its marketplace. At present, the feature is available to a small group of users on Android devices.

As the companies continue to strengthen and maximise their reach to the expected 500 Mn Indian internet users by mid 2018, what new partnerships Amazon India signs for Amazon Prime Music in the coming period would be interesting to watch.