This a big development for the sale of digital goods in India: Google owned YouTube has integrated purchase of digital goods from Flipkart and iTunes, we noticed while going through EMI’s music catalog on YouTube. However, this appears to be a limited rollout, or a pilot, since not all of EMI’s music has purchase options integrated. We weren’t able to locate purchase options for other labels, so if you come across any others, do let us know. You can tip up off anonymously. We’ve written to YouTube and Flipkart for a confirmation of the same, and plans going forward.
Update: We discovered this independently, but it appears that @krazyfrog had tweeted about this a couple of days ago. Credit, where it’s due. He also informs us that the iTunes link has been there for a while. We’re clearly not spending enough time on YouTube
See the integration for yourself:
- Purchase Options:
What This Means
This addresses a key issue of discovery of music, and addresses that impulse to purchase: the propensity for a user to go an online store to purchase music would be significantly low. It’s more likely that they’ll go to an online store to purchase music upon hearing a song via another discovery mechanism, and integration of purchase options would help increase sales for stores.
We don’t know what is stopping them, but we would like to see online music streaming sites like Gaana*, Saavn* and Dhingana integrate click-to-buy options with the streams. The only question is – are they open to partnering for music sales, or are they looking to set up their own music stores? Another possible integration for iTunes and Flyte (Flipkart’s music store) is an integration with TV and Radio. If we can have short codes for setting up CRBT, then why not for buying music?
Another option is the integration with Shazam for India, the way Amazon has done. We’re not sure of whether Shazam’s Airtel experiment was a one-off, but it is an option.
From a music label perspective, the decline in CRBT should push them towards licensing music to online streaming sites, and allowing legitimate purchase of music.
Disclosure: Saavn and Times Internet (which owns Gaana) are advertisers with MediaNama