Wynk — English Music Catalogue
Disclaimer: This and the articles that follow are an attempt at understanding the music tech industry from a Product perspective. We do not claim to be experts in the field. All we claim is to be students of music tech. We hope this series will help others understand music tech and hopefully appreciate the industry.
I am an Airtel loyal user. (For those of you who don’t really know what Airtel is, it is a phone service provider similar to your AT&T. They also provide other services like broadband) I love Airtel’s customer service and even though they are usually a little more expensive than their competitors, I don’t mind paying that extra for their service.
Wynk, is an Airtel product. Wynk gives special pricing for Airtel users which makes it really cheap. Since we’re talking about pricing, I thought it would be important to mention that Wynk lets Airtel and Idea users pay the fee with their next bill. Non-Airtel/Idea users who have an iPhone can only pay using their iTunes wallet. At least thats what I understood from “ iOS payment available only through iTunes wallet.” I don’t understand the reasons for this but I feel like they have probably lost a few paid users because of this.
The music available on Wynk is really depressing if you listen to English music. The first four names I had searched were not available. I agree I searched for the 4 artists most likely to not be there, but every other platform has at least 2 of these and Spotify had all 4. What was disappointing was that I couldn’t find a lot of Indian artists either.
The biggest drawback for me has to be the fact that there is no working language filter. At least in my first 5 minutes, I used the filter that they had provided and did not notice any changes. Deal breaker alert. There were two problems that I initially faced. First, I unchecked Hindi and click outside and noticed nothing had changed. Then I opened it again, unchecked Hindi and clicked on save. At this point the playlists in the centre refreshed but the queued songs on the right didn’t. And I was just going to play the list on the right.
Again on the left side, in “Browse” they suggested “Wynk top 100” which again had Hindi music and this was getting annoying to me at this point. I feel like Wynk doesn’t really provide me with enough options to select things from. They have one middle section of playlists and that is it. I found it very hard to find something I wanted. Also, when I do find a song I like, it plays it for me and then gets back to the list on the right which has Hindi music which really annoyed me.
It is so evident that Gaana and Wynk are a mile away from being relevant to a User around the globe. They really need to up their game if the plan to be a real threat to them. The real question is, are they looking to just stay in India? Check our the Hindi music review for Wynk written by Mittul in same publication.
Note: This is the eighth article among a series of articles that I will be writing related to the music tech industry under a publication called “Uncovering Music Tech”. Do let me know what you think. You can get in touch with me via LinkedIn Here, Instagram Here and my Twitter Here.
