India’s largest consumer e-commerce firm, Flipkart, is shutting down its Flyte MP3 store.
Flyte is basically an online digital music store where you can download MP3 tracks at reduced prices and need not purchase entire albums. The company first launched the Flyte store in February last year and at that time, it claimed to be India’s largest legal online music store with over a million tracks from 150,000 albums, available across 55 languages and 700 genres and sub-genres. Later, mobile apps were also launched and the collection grew to over 5 million tracks.
Now, Flipkart has decided to shut down Flyte. Those who want to purchase music from the store, must do so by June 17 this year after which the company will refund the remaining balance (if any) to one’s Flyte wallet. Also, all the MP3 files that one has purchased from Flyte on or before June 17, will be available for download till August 18. But after that, buyers won’t be able to download those afresh.
“We set up Flyte MP3 a year back in what was an extremely nascent industry. The aim was to bring legal digital content to consumers in India. In a short span of time, we built a massive digital music catalogue at very affordable prices, along with a loyal base of nearly one lakh customers. However, we have realised that the music downloads business in India will not reach scale unless several problem areas such as music piracy and easy micro-payments, etc., are solved in great depth,” said Mekin Maheshwari, head of digital media and payments at Flipkart.
“It makes sense to take a step back from Flyte MP3 at present and revisit the digital music market opportunity at a later stage,” he added.
Well, it was, no doubt a bold move when Flipkart entered this business. India is in a nascent stage to recognize the importance of such a service. Of course micro payments are a major setback. Well, we do hope more development to happen in the days to come.
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Its really sad to hear this, The reality is , in India people are used to downloading music for free, nobody wants to pay, and the trend will continue for years to come.