Indian telco Bharti Airtel is reportedly planning to shut down its Wynk Music streaming service in favour of a partnership with Apple Music as part of a broader exclusive content deal involving Apple TV+.
Airtel announced on Monday that it has signed a deal with Apple to launch exclusive offers for Apple TV+ and Apple Music. Under the deal, Apple TV+ will come bundled with premium Airtel WiFi for Airtel Xstream fiber customers.
Meanwhile, Airtel users will have access to Apple Music. Wynk's premium users will receive exclusive offers from Airtel to subscribe to Apple Music at prices lower than if they signed on with Apple directly.
However, according to various media reports on Monday, Airtel also plans to close the Wynk platform within the next couple of months.
"We can confirm that we will sunset Wynk Music and all Wynk music employees will be absorbed within the Airtel ecosystem," an Airtel spokesperson said in a statement.
Airtel launched the platform in September 2014, and reported 100 million installs by the start of 2019. In the past few years Wynk had branched out into independent music promotion and film music distribution. Its Wynk Studio platform – which provides a launch platform for new independent artists seeking a larger audience – crossed 1.7 billion streams in June.
Music streaming is extremely popular in India. According to a report from market analyst Luminate, India saw just over 1 trillion total on-demand video and audio music streams in 2023, which makes it the second biggest music streaming market in the world. (The US remains king of the hill for now 1.45 trillion streams.)
However, it’s also a highly competitive market, with local services like Wynk, Gaana and Reliance Jio’s JioSaavn pitted against international players like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and Amazon Prime Music. A report by Redseer last year found that Spotify is the dominant player in India’s streaming music space with a 26% market share in FY2023.
Also, the popularity of music streaming doesn’t mean it’s easy money. A March 2024 report from EY-FICCI noted that while music streaming apps in India had 185 million active users in 2023, only 7.5 million (around 4%) were paying users.
Finance website Moneycontrol, citing anonymous sources at Airtel, said the telco has decided to close Wynk because “music streaming monetization is already low” in India, and it makes more strategic sense to partner with a more established player.
Apple also benefits from the tie-up because it gets access to more subscribers in India. Apple and Airtel are also planning to set up a carrier billing arrangement as part of the partnership, the report said.
