India is a fragmented marketplace, with a lot of different local labels and local publishers, making it difficult to predict when Spotify will launch in the country, CEO Daniel Ek said in a post-earnings conference call on Thursday."Whenever we deal with licensing situations, it's very hard for us to predict accurate timelines on the basis of multiple partnerships - just the sheer scale of number of partnerships makes it very hard to predict that, but there's nothing that we see that prevents us from launching in India" Ek said.Ek had first announced plans to enter the India market in March, during the company's investor day presentation, just prior to its direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange.Spotify had also disclosed in its public offering filing that it has leased office space in Mumbai last year and has 308 employees in aggregate in India and 20 other countries. Former OLX India CEO Amarjit Singh Batra had also joined as the Spotify's India country head earlier this year.However, a Music Business Worldwide report in June had suggested that major US labels including Universal, Sony and Warner had held up Spotify's India launch by not providing music licenses for the market. This was after Spotify had started directly licensing music from artists, bypassing the labels.During the company's earnings call in July, Ek had said that launch delays due to licensing is "commonplace in this industry and nothing related to our overall strategy""I think the truth of the matter is when you deal with licensing and in our case not just one company, but you deal with local publishers, local record companies, global record companies, global publishers, it is you know, always a complicated maneuver" Ek said "As much as I would like to see that we can accurately and timely estimate on the day when we're going to launch a market, there is always local considerations that gets added. This has been true not just in India, but it has been true I think pretty much every market that we've ever entered into as well"In India, Spotify will compete with Gaana*, Amazon Prime Music, Saavn, Apple Music, Google Play Music, and Hungama.*Disclosure: Gaana was incubated by Times Internet that owns ETtech