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Flipkart Flyte supports original music and its creators

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Abhigna
New Update

BANGALORE, INDIA: Music piracy, according to Wikipedia, is copying and distributing of copies of a piece of music without the consent of the composer, recording artist, or copyright-holding record company.

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In a country like India, piracy is one of the biggest threats not just for digital music industry but also for software industry. Online users are so used to free music from pirated websites that they never see the need to buy the genuine one.

According to IFPI/Nielsen, globally, one in four internet users (28 percent) regularly access unlicensed services and piracy remains an enormous barrier to sustainable growth in digital music.

Keeping all this in mind, here comes a desi website, which aims to offer quality music at affordable cost. Yes, we are talking about - Flipkart Flyte - the online digital store, launched in February 2012, which allows user to download favorite music or songs at an affordable cost.

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In an Interaction with Abhigna N G from CIOL, Sameer Nigam, vice president, digital at Flipkart, shared his views on Indian music industry and how Indian online users are embracing the digital music store. Excerpts:

CIOL: What was your key focus area when you started Flyte, the digital store at Flipkart?

Sameer Nigam: We had always maintained that making digital content available would be one of our focus areas. A digital music store made sense given the wide appeal this category enjoys in the country.

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Till date there have been few platforms available in the country for legal music downloads and this has contributed to rampant piracy. With Flyte, music becames legal and affordable to everyone who has Internet access in India. We hope such a move will go a long way in supporting original music and its creators.

CIOL: What has Flyte to offer online music lovers?

SN: Now, Flyte offers one million songs and 150,000 albums. We have more than doubled our collection since launch. Today, Flyte boasts of a catalogue of more than 2 million tracks. By the end of the year we expect to add almost 3 million tracks on our platform.

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CIOL: How many languages does Flyte has on its offer and do you have any collaboration with any other organizations?

SN: With music available across 55 languages and 700 genres and sub-genres - this is a service that should appeal to all age groups and music lovers. We are constantly trying to come up with offers that will appeal to people.

Listing popular tracks/albums on the day of their release and tying up with Indie-music organizations like NH7 are the initiatives that are paying off with our user base growing steadily.

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CIOL: How many downloads happens (songs) per day? And which language (regional language) gets the maximum?

SN: We recently crossed 1 million downloads on Flyte. In fact, the testament to the growing popularity of this platform is that the time taken for the last 500,000 downloads was half of that taken to reach the first half a million. Hindi music sees the most traffic, followed by English and Tamil. Devotional music (in Sanskrit and other regional languages), as a genre, is also a huge chunk.

CIOL: Appreciate if you can share how much revenue Flyte is generating at Flipkart?

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SN: While we cannot comment on the revenues, as mentioned we have already seen over 1,000,000 downloads on Flyte to date and are continuing to see steady growth in the category. The Mp3 sales will only grow in leaps and bounds as we expand our offering.

CIOL: How can a customer benefit by visiting Flyte? Do you have any plans to woo customers?

SN: From a customer benefit point of view, we have started a weekly property called Tunesday - where we offer popular albums across specific genres at a significant discount for 24 - 48 hours.

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We have also launched a property called Flyte5. Every weekend, a major record label has its entire catalogue available for just Rs 5 per track.

We recently tied up with NH7 to bring independent Indian music to our repertoire. The artist allowed content should also be available on Flyte shortly.

CIOL: Future plans for Flyte?

SN: We have launched mobile apps on most major platforms including Android, iOS and Windows. Our Windows 8 app was launched last week, in time for the Windows 8 worldwide launch. In fact, Flyte is one of the earliest Windows 8 apps out of India and the first for music downloads.

We are looking at many innovative ideas around the existing platform, including the existing Flyte Wallet that lets people purchase music without having to enter card details as well as bundling tracks innovatively to induce discovery and impulse purchase.

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