Flipkart to shut Flyte digital music store

The e-commerce company started its digital music store in Feb last year; allows users to download music as individual songs or entire albums

India's leading e-commerce Flipkart is planning to shut its online music store Flyte. The e-commerce company started its digital music store in February last year. The Flyte store allow users to download music in the form of individual songs or entire albums from a collection.

Mekin Maheshwari, Head -- Digital Media and Payments, in an email statement informed Business Standard: “We have realised that the music downloads business in India will not reach scale unless several problem areas such as music piracy and easy micro-payments etc. are solved in great depth. Which is why, we feel that at present, it makes sense to take a step back from Flyte MP3s and revisit the digital music market opportunity at a later stage.”

Flyte started with a catalog of a million tracks from 150,000 unique albums. It provides DRM (Digital Rights Management) free MP3 files at prices starting from Rs 6 a song and Rs 25 for an album.

“We set up Flyte MP3s a year back in what was an extremely nascent industry. The aim was to bring legal digital content to consumers in India. In a short span of time we built a massive digital music catalog at very affordable prices along with a loyal base of nearly 100,000 customers,” Maheshwari added.

In November last year Flyte, the digital store forayed into the eBooks category by making available more than 100,000 books with an option for readers to buy and read books instantly on their android mobile devices.