YouTube music has been growing faster than it’s rival paid music apps like Spotify, Gaana and JioSaavn. However, Apple Music is also competing in the race but no data is available about its subscriber figures. YouTube Music was launched in March this year and since it’s launch it has signed up for more than 800,000 subscribers in India.
Gaana is owned by Times Internet & It has more than 1 million paid subscribers for almost a decade. It has more than 125 million monthly users, most of which use the free version of the app.
YouTube has faced a quite long struggle to gain its paid users. It is a great achievement as the company’s main role is to deliver free videos to the users. However, Google division has started to gain traction, it has particular success in the world’s second-most populous country.
YouTube Music Premium and YouTube Premium are the two paid services by YouTube in India.
- The Music service offers a library of songs and the feature to download tracks as well. It also facilitates to listen to music without ads and play songs while using other apps.
- YouTube Premium offers YouTube videos without ads along with the ability to play clips offline.
In China, online media services are controlled by the government. However, in India, online music services competes with each other to sign up users with more than 1.3 billion people. About the western companies such as Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube — they are all set to compete with Resso, a service by ByteDance (Chinese tech giant). ByteDance’s short-form video app TikTok has more than 200 million users in India, enough to be a real challenger to YouTube and Instagram. ByteDance is testing Resso in India and Indonesia before rolling out a paid version of the app next year.
YouTube has a big market in India as more than 265 million people are the users of the free YouTube service in the country. India is also home to the channel with the most subscribers, T-Series, the country’s largest record label.
The growth is also notable because India isn’t typically hospitable to paid services. The country is one of the poorer major economies, making its average citizen very sensitive to price. The leading free music services, Gaana and JioSaavn, have tens of millions of users, but few paying subscribers.
India isn’t genial to paid services as country is one of the poorer major economies. Hence the growth of paid services is worth notable.
Again, Netflix has to cut its price to compete in the country introducing a cheaper mobile-only plan in India earlier this year and said this week it’s testing other pricing models.
YouTube has started it’s services at a lower price, approximately less than $2/month. A popular feature is known as ‘background listening’ has been introduced for which users need to pay.