Airtel Wynk Music Streaming Service Hits 50 Million App Installs; Introduces Ads

Wynk Music has announced that it now has 50 million app installs, with 100,000 people installing the app daily. The company cited app analytics firm App Annie as the source of its data. Wynk is a music streaming service that’s owned by Airtel, India’s biggest telecom operator.

App Annie’s data says that Wynk has the largest share of category time. This means that Wynk is the most-used app of its category if the data is to be believed. Wynk CEO Kartik Sheth says the average Wynk user listens to music on the app for 75 minutes every day, and that this number is growing. Gadgets 360 asked Wynk about numbers such as the number of active users and the total number of paid subscribers on the service, but the company refused to share these numbers.

Wynk is still largely an app-only service for Android and iOS, with a beta version available on the Web. Sheth told Gadgets 360, “Most of Wynk’s users are coming in through word of mouth. You won’t see large banner ads for Wynk plastered anywhere.” This, he says, is one of the reasons for people using the app for over an hour every day.

As Wynk goes from being a startup to one of the leading music streaming services in India, the company has a big challenge ahead - making money. On that front, Sheth says, “We’re introducing ads on Wynk. These ads are non-invasive for customers and we’ve told advertisers that it’s preferable to keep ad length to under 15 seconds.”

Wynk had a simple payment model for iPhone users, however the bulk of its user base is in India and that means Android is the dominant platform for Wynk. Until now, Wynk offered easy ways to subscribe and pay to Airtel users but the non-Airtel crowd (nearly 45 percent of Wynk’s user base) has now been offered simple subscription models via Google Play.

Sheth says the company will continue to focus on its apps with the browser being a secondary way for people to access Wynk. He mentions the company’s experiment with a Windows app and says that it didn’t attract many users.