India to have it's first proper Digital Music Store in Flyte

India has been a silent bystander in the digital era. 

Apple, which neglected India for a very long time, finally launched the iPhone at ridiculous prices, clearly sending out a message that Indian customers didn't matter to them and that the launch was a mere act of paying lip service to the cries of potential users across the country. Such was the sloppiness of the iPhone launch, that the much hyped iTunes Music Store, considered to be an important part of the Apple experience was completely blacked out for Indian users. Why users in this country continue to patronise a company so brutally careless and callous about the user experience (there being no official Apple Stores in this country, being another example of the indifference of Apple towards Indian customers) is beyond me.

Apple however is not the only offender when it comes to neglecting users. Amazon, one of the largest online retailers, is definitely not the holy cow. However since none of Amazon's services are officially available in India and there being no local Amazon India store (Junglee.com is a laughable attempt at creating an online marketplace, my own experience with Junglee.com has been an absolute nightmare), one can forgive them for not caring about Indian customers.

What this means is that Indians, are currently having no all inclusive online music store in the country. Not one, zero, zilch, naught!

Of course, one might argue about the presence of one hungama.com, about which I have my own reservations (humgama.com sells 128kbps MP3 files for Re. 1/song. Which year is this? 2001?). In short, after desperately trying to buy digital music, my experience has been horrendous. No wonder then,  that Indians, even the ones who can afford to pay for music and more importantly who want to pay for music, are forced to resort to blatant piracy.

Flipkart which has obviously done quite a lot (well, if there is a online market revolution in India happening at present, Flipkart can take the entire credit for it) in terms of making online purchases extremely smooth, is all set to launch Flyte, it's own digital music store. One can only hope that Flipkart addresses the issues Indian users have complained about regarding the current batch of (laughable) music stores such as hungama.com.