Spotify, a Swedish audio streaming platform service provider, launched in India on Wednesday to get a pie of Rs 832 crore digital music industry.
In a statement, the company said, “One Plus, Anheuser-Busch InBev and GoUSA will be Spotify’s exclusive advertising launch partners in India.” OnePlus is a smartphone brand, Anheuser-Busch InBev is a brewing company based in Belgium and GoUSA is USA’s official travel & tourism site.
When The mobile Indian contacted Spotify for elaborating on the tie-up with OnePlus our questions went unanswered.
We followed up with OnePlus as well to get their side of the story, and they said the onus is on Spotify to provide the answer but said there is no agreement to pre-load the App on OnePlus smartphones.
We have learnt from sources familiar with the development that partnership between the two companies is a batter deal where OnePlus will promote Spotify on their social media channel and vice versa. The partnership doesn’t have monetary value. We learnt that it would be a mutually beneficial advertising campaign partnership on each other’s platform.
The marketing tie-up may help Spotify to get noticed because OnePlus has a strong recall value in India and per market reports, it has around 40 percent market share in the premium smartphone segment.
Spotify has introduced two models in India – ad-supported free subscription tier and a premium model. In the paid model, users can avail a 30-day free trial and post that they can opt daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and yearly subscription plans.
The daily plan is for Rs 13, weekly plan is for Rs 39, monthly plan costs Rs 119 (but there is has a catch if a user plans to use the app for a month only charges will be Rs 129), 3 months plan is priced at Rs 389, 6 months plan costs for Rs 719 and the yearly plan is priced at Rs 1189. The company is also offering up to 50percentdiscount for students.
If we look at Spotify’s competitors in India and compare the monthly charges, Gaana, Jio Saavan and Google Play Music are available for Rs 99 per month as compared to Rs 119 monthly plan of Spotify. Amazon Prime Music with a fee of Rs129 per month is a bit on the higher side but has one get the goodness of Amazon Prime with it at the same price.