Facebook has new licensing deals with top music rightsholders in India

Facebook has new licensing deals with top music rightsholders in India

Social media giant Facebook just inked deals with some of the leading music rightsholders in India, including Zee Music Company, Yash Raj Films and T-Series Music (India’s largest record company). They licensed their music to Facebook to be used in the likes of videos, messages and stories on the platform as well on as Facebook-owned Instagram. From, Facebook users in India can legally share hundreds of thousands of licensed tracks on the platform – a move referred to by T- Series Chairman and Managing Director Bhushan Kumar as a “stroke of genius”.

At the moment of the news, the T-Series YouTube channel has 89.3 million subscribers, more than 64.5bn views and continues to battle it out with PewDiePie for the world’s biggest YouTube presence.

Facebook also inked licensing deals with rightsholders in Thailand, with the labels GMM Grammy and RS, according to "Billboard". The addition of Thailand and India brings the total number of countries where Facebook has music licences in place to 40.

There’s been a lot of music industry focus on India recently; indeed there are different estimates about the number of active internet users in the country, but it’s safe to say that there are currently between 400-500 million and, the number of smartphone users is expected to reach close to 500m by 2022.