International musical service Spotify will enter the Russian market and a similar service planned by the Mail.ru Group will appear, investment banking firm Sberbank CIB said on Tuesday in its report on the forecast of revenues to be received by the Russian Internet company Yandex from musical services, RIA FAN reports.
“We expect that Yandex revenues from subscriptions to musical services will grow by approximately 50% per year on average in 2018-2021 on account of the increasing share of paying users. Key drivers for that will be a potential entry of Spotify on the Russian market and an entity of the ecosystem planned for creation by Mail.ru Group,” Sberbank CIB said in the review.
Spotify is the first streaming service making possible to listen to the music online without downloading it to the computer. The service is available in the United States, the majority of European countries, and certain Asian nations.
In March 2018, Daniel Eck, head of Spotify, announced that the company is working on launching in India, Russia, and Africa. During the past year, the service began to work in several African countries, in February of this year – in India. The official launch date in Russia was not called, but in early March, it was reported that the Spotify application for Android partially switched to Russian.
“In the past six months, Spotify is indeed in an active stage of negotiations with leading Russian music labels,” a source in the music market told RBC. “Without a contract with the right holders, legal service work in Russia is impossible.”
According to a representative of one of the Russian music services, Spotify is likely to enter the market on its own, without choosing one of the cellular operators as a partner, as planned several years ago.
According to the source, the service planned to go to Russia in the spring, tentatively in May, but the dates may move due to a conflict with the rights holders in India. Warner Music Group has filed a lawsuit against the service and demanded to impose a court ban on the music of their authors in India.
