India Embracing Digital Downloads? Flyte Surpasses 600K Downloads In 6 Months

Back in February, India’s largest web retailer Flipkart announced its entry into the world of digital music sales with Flyte. In less than six months, the service has already seen more than 600,000 cumulative downloads, and according to the company, is seeing nearly 5,000 downloads each day – accounting for 1% of Flipkart’s overall revenue.

Flyte currently offers over two million tracks from 55 languages and 700 genres, and is seeing positive response from Indian users. Flyte has also launched applications for both iOS and Android devices and says that Windows 8 and BlackBerry apps are in the works.

“We are actively working on expanding our catalogue and adding newer features to make the purchase process smoother and easier,” said Flipkarts’s VP of Digital Business, Sameer Nigam said to PluggedIn. “We are also working extensively with record labels to expand the catalogue and have recently added entire catalogue from Magnasound besides labels such as EMI, Warner and Yash Raj Music.”

Click image to enlarge:

Flyte is also looking at ideas around Flipkart’s existing platform, including a wallet function that would allow music lovers to purchase tracks without having to enter creit card information, as well as bundling tracks to induce discovery and encourage impulse buying.

“Albums are doing better than singles on Flyte and this is a very exciting early trend,” added Nigam. “The top three selling genres at Flyte are Bollywood, Pop and Devotional including Hindi, English, Tamil, Sanskrit and Telugu emerged as top download languages.”

With 1.2 billion people, 75% of digital sales (2010) consisting of ringbacks, and a huge piracy problem, India could be on its way to leveraging Flyte as its go-to destination for digital downloads; something that could prevent the media and entertainment sectors from missing out on a great deal of yearly revenue moving forward.

—