For Spotify, which has already planted its flag across the Middle East, North Africa and South East Asia, it's been a long road to India.
With nearly 200 million active users, the 13 year-old company is now worth £19.7 billion ($38.2b) - that's more than British Airways and Sainsbury's - making it one of Europe's most successful technology start-ups.
At the helm of this sprawling music streaming empire sits Daniel Ek, a shy 36-year-old Swede who was turned down from a job at Google aged 16.
Ek, who founded the company with 49-year-old partner Martin Lorentzon in 2006, last year added to his fortune by selling more than US$132 million ($194.2m) worth of shares.
Today, Ek is worth US$2.3b, according to Forbes. But he almost lost it all several times during the early years of the company when it was negotiating deals with record labels, according to Pär-Jörgen Pärson, an early investor in Spotify.
"Daniel and Martin personally guaranteed things during that time period," he says. "So if it had failed they would have never financially recovered." This was a major pull for the board to back them at the time.
"They really believed in it, and it showed."
Ek might shun the media limelight now, but it was former Silicon Valley executive Lorentzon who had the business know-how and led the discussions with music labels.
The origins of Spotify started with two colleagues trying to find a solution to the music market's crisis in Sweden. Piracy sites such as The Pirate Bay had fuelled illegal downloading and razed the music market to the ground, Pärson explains.
"Daniel [then 23] and Martin came to me with a proposition that was basically this: 'We think we can beat piracy by having a superior product'."
Their initial business model relied on advertising rather than subscriptions, Pärson says - "They thought it would take off".
"As we discussed investment it became the big problem. There were content owners really worried that offering music for free in an ad model would not be a stable business for them, it would undermine the CD and download industry. It was largely the industry that forced the subscription strategy on Spotify," he says.
Because Spotify was the first to market, it was able to "capture the imagination of the young market which was just getting into music streaming," says Kim Bayley, chief executive of the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA).
It quickly launched in Europe in 2009, the US in 2011 and listed last year on the New York Stock Exchange.
"A bit like iTunes was synonymous with downloads, Spotify is now synonymous with streaming," she says.
"Customers today don't need to own product any more, they just want to access product and 'rent it', and Spotify was a forerunner in the music sector for that."
Johan Billgren, one of the founders of Swedish podcast company Acast, and now its chief product officer, says Spotify also benefited from the fact it came from such a small country.
"Since Sweden is so small you can't really create a company or a product or service that aims to just be Swedish," he says.
Plus, he says, the country has "pretty widespread computer literacy", thanks to a government policy in the late Nineties which allowed everyone to buy computers at a "really cheap price".
"Early on, computer literacy grew fast in Sweden and that created of course a lot of IT specialists," Billgren says.
Having first launched in Sweden in 2008, Spotify's user numbers have since ballooned.
Globally, Spotify's monthly active users reached 191 million last year and 87 million premium subscribers, according to data from Statista.
But the company isn't resting on its laurels. Now Spotify is looking to eat up more of the market in an attempt to appease investors who have been pushing it to expand its reach.
Spotify has become somewhat of a music industry kingmaker, building a track record for discovering talented artists and bringing them to the attention of its millions of users.
Like YouTube before, Spotify has helped put artists such as Anne-Marie or Glass Animals on the map.
"It is really very beneficial for the wider music industry in terms of breaking new acts," says the ERA's Bayley.
Actually, "all of the data that we get from music streaming services generally, and not just Spotify, show that by giving customers a wide variety of music to consume from, it does introduce people to not just those bigger artists," she says.
The pool of streaming services Bayley is referring to has certainly grown in recent years.
According to data from research company Midia, Spotify now has 36 per cent of the market for music subscribers. But, it faces growing competition from Apple and Amazon, that have started to encroach in the music streaming segment - Apple now holds a 19 per cent share and Amazon 12 per cent.
Zach Fuller, from Midia, says these companies' motives are "very distinct" from Spotify.
"With the tech giants, they see music as fitting in to a larger ecosystem for them, because they have other business interests. So for Apple, it's their hardware. In a similar strategy to what they employed with the iTunes store, they use music as a way to embellish their hardware offerings, and thus influence their core offering.
"When it comes to Amazon, it's about embellishing commerce within the Amazon platform, so the longer you can keep a user within the Amazon ecosystem, the more likely they are to spend."
Spotify, meanwhile, "actually has to make the economics of streaming add up as a business in itself", rather than serving as a loss-leader. It is because of this, and its hefty price tag, that Fuller says the tech giants probably won't be swooping on Spotify any time soon, as has been rumoured in recent years.
