ShArk Food: Flyte

A very common explanation for piracy in India is that things are too expensive. Movies, songs software everything. Aside from being expensive things are also rather painful to buy. Especially any digital content. Flipkart, the Indian e-tail giant launched Flyte, it's i-tunes like store some time ago. I've used i-tunes sparingly but not any other form of digital content except for games ( with the excellent steam).

Flipkart requires you to sign in with a Flipkart account or it gives you the option to sign in with a Google or Facebook ID, the minimum one would expect from a decent website. Buying tracks one by one is rather cumbersome. Flipkart suggests buying a prepaid wallet. You essentially top up this wallet using a Credit/Debid card or netbanking and use it for one click shopping ( it actually is rather one click shopping )

There is a Flyte app available for Android and iPhone. It's kind of like a music player + content manager. Not bad but not great either. It's reasonably smooth and usable but most people are going to prefer using their stock music players.

Interface

You can grab your songs off the website or through the the Flyte app on your smartphone. Browsing through the smartphone app can be a bit underwhelming. There is hardly any way to see a larger catalog of songs. The website though much better still lags the i-tunes setup by some distance. Right now Flipkart offers a rather spartan view of songs by album. The biggest drawback with their interface is that it doesn't show songs that you already own. Not an issue when you are starting out, but after some time when you have a reasonable collection, it's very easy to accidentally buy a song again. Not cool. Also offered is a Flyte download manager that is quite useless.

The Quality of the the songs

The quality of the tracks themselves is good. I downloaded tracks encoded at 320Kbps. Other options include 64Kbps and 128Kbps. IMHO 64Kbps bit rates are kind of crap and I can't imagine anybody downloading them unless they are desperately stuck on a mobile connection for some reason. Encoding was good, album art was appropriate and none of the mp3 tags were screwed up. I know this is trivial stuff but nobody usually manages to do this correctly. Usually 5 min songs take anywhere between 12 and 15 MB. Pretty neat stuff. Here is where my second major gripe with Flipkart comes in. You can download a song a maximum of 4 times. Now I don't know what prompted this. Perhaps high hosting bills ? I could understand this limit if these were songs encoded in 120MB FLAC files but 10MB a song hardly puts a dent in your hosting bills. The only time somebody might bother re-syncing their phones is when they move to a new device, but anybody with even a reasonably large collection would rather do a manual sync than download everything. File hosting is not that expensive. Just Flipkart being lazy.

Pricing

While I'm not unhappy with the pricing, I think a trick Flipkart has missed is to price everything at a uniform rate. One of the most unnoticed but stand out features is the simplicity with which iTunes prices its songs. $0.99 a song. I think if Flipkart took a leaf out of that book and priced every song at Rs.10 instead of it's strange pricing of Rs.6, Rs.9 and Rs.15, it would be much better. From the pricing it's clearly visible that newer and more popular songs tend to be priced at Rs.15, older and popular stuff at Rs.9 and the rest at Rs.6. That wreaks of opportunism and leaves a bad taste. The fact that songs within an album are priced differently is also not cool. Uniform prices would be much better for them in terms of maintaining stuff, sales and also user perception.

Competing with iTunes ?

Flipkart has done well enough in the Indian e-tail space to make Amazon think twice about Indian operations. Their growth has been impressive too. However despite what I feel is a huge amount of effort they have missed a lot of things that they need to do to put iTunes in the same position as Amazon.

First off Flipkart have completely neglected the fact that people tend to sync music to phones, tablets, MP3 players and even other computers. An iTunes type software that manages a music library, syncs across devices, displays content and plays music is a must have. Providing a platform independent Media content manager would go a long way in solidifying Flipkarts position.

Secondly they have to get the whole pricing bit right. 15 for good songs and 9 and 6 for the older stuff seems like a rip off.

Third they have to get the marketing of it right. That means handing out Flyte credit with any phones or tabs or any other media devices they sell. The hardest step with anything like this is getting people to use the whole ecosystem for the first time. Like Amazon eventually found out, selling content only doesnt always cute it. They made the Kindle and now with the whole Kindle fire series they've built up a whole ecosystem for content delivery. That's perhaps a step too far for Flipkart. But eventually they do need to get there. Move up or move out.

The only thing going for them right now is that nobody in India is doing this stuff. their first mover advantage is massive and if they do this right, they could win India, the worlds next big market.