Spotify's Long, Winding Road To India

By Stacey Vanek Smith,

Pamela Boykoff

Published March 25, 2019 at 2:49 PM CDT

India is a big, alluring market. It has a population of 1.3 billion people who are spending more time on their smartphones. That makes it attractive to a lot of global technology companies, but breaking into India is no easy task. The country's a crowded, competitive and complicated place to do business.

Spotify's recent expansion there has been an example of that. Today on The Indicator, Spotify's long and winding road to India, and why expanding to India is a tricky business.

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Stacey Vanek Smith

Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.

See stories by Stacey Vanek Smith

Pamela Boykoff