Indian music streaming service Gaana has published its annual trends report, with several talking points emerging so far. The first is a familiar topic: the growth of regional music (i.e. from outside India’s main cities). This music generated more than 1bn streams in December 2019 alone according to the Economic Times, which also notes the report’s claim that it now accounts for more than 35% of overall consumption.
“The meteoric rise in regional music consumption across the nation marks one of the biggest cultural shifts in perception of music in the past decade. As established and emerging musical artists across the country realised the growing importance of music streaming apps to reach their fans at scale in their own language, our primarily young music streaming population are embracing their respective cultures and are going back to their roots,” said Gaana CEO Prashan Agarwal.
Gaana also says that its Gaana Originals program, which focuses on non-film music, is now generating more than 100m streams a month on the service. Meanwhile, the report also predicts that there will be 600 million people streaming music in India in the next three years, although that’s not a new forecast from Gaana. In April 2019, Agarwal said in an interview with The Business Standard that “The penetration of music streaming is only 10% in the Indian market with around 150 million users. The market needs to grow to 600 million in the next 2-3 years”.
Gaana had already updated its own public figures last month: it now has more than 125 million monthly active users who stream more than 3.2bn tracks a month. Having passed the 100m milestone in April, this suggested that Gaana had been adding around 3.1 million net new listeners a month.
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