India's Streaming Market Continues to Heat Up

Gaana's premium-only competitor, Apple Music, is also making a push in the country, though not with as significant a deal, perhaps. Apple's new streaming service has announced its first India-based curator: MTV India. Even a short perusal of Apple Music makes the service's editorial focus abundantly clear, with recommended playlists and its popular Beats 1 digital radio station taking center stage. Apple has local curators placed in most of the 100+ markets Apple Music has launched in, a massively important feature for streaming services in countries like India -- and Germany, and Japan (two of the world's biggest music markets).

As Rdio recognized when it acquired Dinghana last year before relaunching it under the flagship this past January, India is one of the world's most-promising emerging markets. Rdio CEO Anthony Bay called it "the fastest-growing Internet market in the world, with one of the most vibrant cultures for music." The country is promising for technology companies precisely because adoption is so low, with less than one-in-five people having access to the Internet. Despite that it ranks as No. 3 on the list of countries (behind China and the U.S.) with the most web users according to Internet Live Stats, making the growth potential enormous. That services such as Rdio have to charge so much less pales in comparison to the potential of scale; if India had the same level of web access as the U.S., it would have over a billion people online.

That's a lot.