The Spotify app will soon be available in 12 Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kannada, Bhojpuri, Malayalam, and Odia. At its online-only Stream On event on Monday, Spotify announced that Hindi is part of a wave of 36 new languages coming soon to Spotify, alongside the likes of Romanian and Swahili. Together with the existing languages, the Spotify UI will be available in more than 60 languages in total. Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil will be the last major languages — among the top 20 globally, in terms of total speakers — to join the fray. Spotify already supports the likes of English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Indonesian, and Japanese
Spotify’s Indian localisation has taken roughly two years, much quicker than its video streaming counterpart Netflix which took four and a half years after its launch in India to provide a local UI — that too in Hindi only. Spotify is set to surpass all its competition in India, including Reliance Industries’ JioSaavn, its primary international competitor Apple Music, and current leader Times Internet-owned Gaana (it supports 10 languages in Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Bhojpuri, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, and Gujarati).
While local-language music has been available on Spotify since launch, lyrics aren’t available in Hindi or any of the other 11 Indian languages. That’s despite the fact that Spotify’s lyrics partner — streaming services are not directly responsible for lyrics — the lyrics app Musixmatch offers a catalogue of song lyrics with translations in Hindi (available on JioSaavn reportedly). Maybe once the Spotify app is localised in 12 Indian languages, it can start working to include song lyrics in some of them too. Of course, despite the localisation, most song titles will continue to be in English.
Spotify will soon be available in Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kannada, Bhojpuri, Malayalam, and Odia.
Update (23/02 5:30pm): Spotify told Gadgets 360 that Hindi is one of 12 Indian languages that will soon be supported in the Spotify app. This report has been updated to reflect that. At the event on Monday, Spotify had only mentioned Hindi.
