Bharti Airtel’s carrier agnostic music streaming service Wynk has crossed 30 million downloads, largely in India, since its launch two years ago. The app, which is also available in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, hit half-a-billion song plays last month.

Wynk, which was launched in September 2014, now sees about 70,000-90,000 downloads per day, with about 60 per cent of these coming in from other networks.

“This was started as an initiative to stimulate data consumption, which was not growing, and in that aspect, I think, we have succeeded. For the last many months, we have seen that Wynk has consistently been the most downloaded app on Google Play Store,” Kartik Sheth, Chief Executive Officer at Wynk, told BusinessLine .

“Wynk and similar music download applications have helped reduce music piracy, which has been the biggest bane of the industry. If the industry continues to grow at this pace, in the next 4-5 years piracy will become non-existent, and the legal sector (the mainstream) will overtake,” he added.

It sees a “bit of a city bias” with most downloads from Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai.

With an increase in data penetration, the app is also being downloaded across rural and urban markets.

Regional music

On the music front, Hindi songs are the most downloaded followed by Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Bojpuri, Kannada and Malayalam. With a lot of cross-over artistes in Punjabi, such as Honey Singh (who sings in Hindi and Punjabi), it is downloaded across the country.

Airtel has not yet started monetising the service, which is free as of now. In certain cases it is bundled with subscription packages.

“We are look at monetising after we reach a certain scale,” Sheth said, adding that the company is now looking at moving the over-the-top app to TV-based platforms.

For Wynk, piracy is still its biggest competitor. The industry is slowly moving from piracy to free services and later to paid services or advertisement-supported services.

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