What is the logic behind having a separate product?
Amazon Music exists as an offering within the Prime bundle — members get the entire catalogue without ads. We realised that over the last eight years, the market has evolved significantly. Music streaming adoption has grown significantly; customers’ needs and our product have also evolved. This is the right time to pivot our business and not be committed to just Prime members.
Why now? YouTube and Spotify dominate the India market. Does Amazon Music hope to become the third force by delinking the music from Prime?
In other markets, we have been live in this three-tier structure for quite a long time now. In India, less than three years back, there were double-digit streaming platforms. Today it is down to four and five. India is at the tipping point of when it is going to start witnessing a hockey stick growth in terms of music streaming and paid music streaming. (The Indian music business generated ₹5,900 crore in revenues in 2025. Only 14 million Indians subscribe to a music streaming service – the global total is 837 million subscribers).
What impact do you expect from this tiering?
It is going to increase our metrics across the board, whether you measure it by MAUs (monthly active users), engagement, or number of streams.
What are the big changes the India market has seen?
There are three pillars that form the basis of the entire music industry — consumers, supply side (or music labels), and streaming. These have evolved significantly in the last three years. The consumer is changing in the way s/he is discovering music or what they are consuming or their paying capacity. On the supply side, the influence of South has come into the traditional Hindi-speaking markets and vice versa. At the same time, we have seen non-film music in the form of hip hop, Punjabi, Haryanvi, and Bhojpuri grow. In streaming, we have moved from having 10 to 12 of services three years back to only about four or five today. If you see the growth of other regions like Latin America and Southeast Asia, they were at the stage India is at. And they significantly improved. We are very bullish about how the music industry is going to shape up in the next 5-10 years. Paid penetration is going to improve significantly from what it is today.
The catalogues for all music streaming services are the same. What does Amazon Music’s new offerings mean for Amazon as a whole in India?
The market is going to grow so big that it’s actually not about how differentiated one platform is versus the other. There will be a fair share for everybody. Having said that, when you come to Amazon Music, you also get access to 15 million podcast episodes, a lot of them exclusive. There is video content, if you want to know more about artists and their backstory, or what the story about a song is. Also, we do a bunch of live streaming across the globe for major customers.
Amazon touches almost every Indian in some way or the other, every single day. Whether it’s in the form of shopping or Alexa or a Fire TV device or Prime Video or whatever. For us, music works very seamlessly across the entire Amazon network.
One of the big roles that Amazon Music will play with this expansion is how it gives a leg up to the whole Indian music industry globally. Because Amazon is present in almost every country and Amazon Music is present in 50-plus markets, we have a large diaspora audience. We’re not just treating it as a business that we’re launching in India to serve the needs of India. We want those artists or creators to be celebrated across the globe as well.
For instance, there is a Tamil artist called Vengayo. We shot an Amazon Music original with him earlier in the year and took him to Times Square.
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