Indian e-commerce leader Flipkart has today launched its licensed music store, Flyte. It immediately becomes India’s largest legal MP3 source, in a major challenge to both Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) music offerings, as well as Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iTunes store.
Flipkart’s Flyte is now live with more than one million DRM-free songs from 150,000 albums. Individual tracks can be snagged for between six and 25 rupees (US 12 to 50 cents) depending on your choice of MP3 quality-level, with the higher 320kbps encoded songs costing the most. The most popular album so far today is the soundtrack to the Bollywood version of the Bodyguard, with a Whitney Houston greatest hits collection in third place as music fans mourn her untimely death last week.
Although the songs are DRM-free, downloading is only possible, says Flipkart, within India. There’s no streaming option; at least not yet. To help customers juggle their downloads, Flipkart is making available a ‘download manager’ app for both Mac and Windows.
Indian music fans can pay for songs on Flyte using credit cards, debit cards, gift vouchers, and the Flipkart Wallet service – essentially just as people can buy other items on Flipkart itself. The company is advising potential customers that its songs are of a higher quality than on pirated sites (which is not necessarily true), and it’ll be interesting to see India – as China is now doing too – making the leap to paying for digital music.
Flipkart co-founder and CEO Sachin Bansal hinted to Indian media that there might be more to come from Flyte:
We had maintained that making digital content available was one of our focus areas and this launch marks our first step in that direction. An online music store made sense given the wide appeal this category enjoys in the country. Needless to say, all the features that delight Flipkart customers – selection, convenience and customer service will also be intrinsic to Flyte.
The new music service was made possible by Flipkart’s acquisition of Mime360 last October, as well as its scooping up of Bollywood licensed content from Chakpak. The company is aiming to hit $1 billion in sold items by 2015.
[Hat-tip to TheNextWeb for spotting this]