Digital music company Saavn is launching a pro version of their service on March 1st. The subscription based product will be sold on Apple’s app store from March and will bring ad free as well as offline music.
Most of the songs on Saavn catalog will be available on the pro version. The company says that about 10,000 people have already signed up in the first 48 hours through pro.saavn.com. The company will be launching the Saavn Pro platform on iOS first, with Android and feature phone premium services to follow.
There’s a 30 day free trial after which you’d have to pay $3.99 (~ Rs 215) per month through the Apple ID.
Saavn Pro Features
- Offline Listening: Available on up to 5 devices per account.
- Ad-Free Listening
- Sync multiple devices over cellular or wi-fi data connection
- Pro Audio at 320 kbps (will be added later).
Saavn Pro will be a bit of a music store inside a music store (iTunes) and we aren’t very sure how good its going to be since the major differentiator would be content and the subscription model. You could buy music on iTunes and own it, sync with your iDevices as well. So the only compelling reason to subscribe to Saavn would perhaps be to access content that’s otherwise not available on iTunes and if its priced lower than songs on iTunes.
Given Saavn’s catalogue, this might be a big hit with the Desi crowd abroad, who take great pains to hoard music and movies on their infrequent trips to India.
Digital Music Industry: What’s NextBigWhat
Rival music streaming site Dhingana is also figuring out ways to monetize music. At present, the only way the site makes money is through advertisements. The day isn’t far when Dhingaana comes up subscription service and paid downloads of its own.
Other players trying to own a share of the market include Gaana, Hungama and Flipkart’s Flyte.
Recently Gaana also released a suite of mobile apps (review). Rival site Hungama, launched music cloud- a syncing service which allows users to access their music anywhere on any device. Hungama had earlier launched its HTML5 site that allows users to stream free music as well as buy Indian and International content.
As physical music sales declines, record labels are also jumping online to sell music in India. Digital music sales overtook physical music sales in 2010.
