E-commerce major Flipkart is pulling the plug on its digital music store Flyte Music on June 17, 2013. While the store is live at the time of writing this article, we noticed that Flipkart has removed links to the music store from its homepage. The online store offered DRM free music tracks across various genres like devotional and spiritual, Hindustani, Carnatic, Pop, Rock, Film/OST, Indipop and others. Some of the labels that were on-board include T-Series, Saregama, Universal, Sony Music International, and Sony Music India among others. The shut down was first reported by NextBigWhat. Flipkart has also sent emails to Flyte users (a copy below), asking users to exhaust their Flyte wallet balance by June 17, or else the company will refund the balance amount to the user. It also notes that all the MP3 files purchased on before June 17, 2013, will continue to be available for download till August 18, 2013, following which the company will be shutting down the music library. We contacted Flipkart for more details on this unexpected move, and it appears they don't want to discuss Flyte's shut down. We've received a statement, attributable to Mekin Maheshwari, Head - Digital Media and Payments: "We set up Flyte MP3s a year back in what was an extremely nascent industry. The aim was to bring legal digital content to consumers in India. In a short span of time we built a massive digital music catalog at very affordable prices along with a loyal base of nearly 100,000 customers. However, we have realized that the music…
