Will the Apple iTunes Store magic work on India?

iTunes, Apple's popular music store, has finally opened its doors to India, allowing iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac and PC users to legally discover, purchase and download music online.

With iTunes going live in India on Tuesday morning - along with Russia, Turkey and South Africa - Apple's music store is now available in 119 countries.

The India store has local as well as India audio and video content .  

An Apple release said iTunes has content from major studios including 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, The Walt Disney Studios and Warner Bros Pictures, as well as leading local distributors.


Around 70 Hindi movies were visible on the store soon after it was launched.

An average Bollywood movie is priced around Rs 490 for HD purchase and Rs 120 for rental. A rental movie has a validity of one month and 48 hours after a user has started viewing it.

On the other hand, songs are selling starting Rs 7.

All music on the iTunes Store comes in iTunes Plus, Apple's DRM-free format with high-quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings.

"iTunes in the Cloud lets you download your previously purchased iTunes music to all your iOS devices at no additional cost, and new music purchases can be downloaded automatically to all your devices," the release said.

In addition, music not purchased from the iTunes Store can gain the same benefits by using iTunes Match - a service that stores your entire music library in iCloud for access at any time - from any iOS device. iTunes Match is available for purchase in the new countries added today.

Access to the iTunes Store has been one of the long standing demands of Apple users in the country. The music store is now termed as one of the world's top media companies with $8 billion revenues last financial year.