Big changes are afoot at Indian music streaming service Gaana, and the shift does not appear to be coming from a position of strength
Tag: Gaana
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How many users do Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming services have?
Sometimes the statistics around how many people are streaming music – and how many are paying for it – can lead to confusion and misinterpretation.
Recently, for example, we’ve seen one story suggesting that Amazon was “on course to overtake Apple Music” based on comparing an Amazon figure from January 2020 with one from Apple that hadn’t been updated since June 2019.
Another story claimed that “Pandora has overtaken Apple for second spot” in subscriber rankings, which mistakenly compared the former’s number of active listeners (most of whom don’t pay) to the latter’s paid subscriber count.
So, we’re trying something that will hopefully be useful: a post that we’ll update whenever a major streaming service updates its public numbers.
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Indian DSP Gaana publishes some end-of-year stats for 2021
Consumption of podcasts grew over 40% over the last year, with ‘music’, ‘motivation’, ‘stories’ and ‘devotional’ being the top categories.
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Gaana narrows losses, but its revenue growth has slowed down
As one of the biggest streaming services in India, Gaana is a useful bellwether for the market as a whole.
New figures show that in its last financial year, which ended in March 2021, the company’s operating revenue grew by just 2.6% to 1.23bn rupees (around $16.7m) while its losses fell by 7% – but were still 3.27bn rupees ($44.4m).
The figures come from Billboard’s profile of the Indian market, honing in on its continued struggle to persuade people to pay for music subscriptions.
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India’s Wynk Music wants 300m active users in next three years
The prediction comes from the unusual source (news-wise) of the Amazon Web Services website. Wynk Music is one of Amazon’s cloud customers, and now a case study.
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Spotlight on India: Western DSPs still have work to do gaining a foothold
Each day in this week’s Music Ally Bulletin email, journalist Amit Gurbaxani shone a spotlight on some of the most interesting stories in the Indian music business. We’ve reported frequently […]
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Indian streaming service Gaana raises $40m from Tencent
Gaana, one of India’s biggest music streaming services, is turning to existing investor Tencent for a new round of debt funding. According to news site Entrackr, the amount is $40m from Tencent’s European subsidiary Tencent Cloud Europe.
This comes nearly 10 months after Gaana’s last round of debt funding: just over $50m from investors including Tencent Cloud Europe. Tencent, meanwhile, led a $115m funding round in Gaana in February 2018. Entrackr estimated that the latest round values Gaana at $570m-$580m, up from $530m last September, when the company also said that it had 185 million monthly active users.
This week’s news is a reminder of the fact that India is one of the few countries (see also: South Africa and various countries in south east Asia) where Tencent has an ownership or investment interest in rival streaming services to Spotify, with which it swapped shares in late 2017.
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Gaana’s next music streaming frontier is… a robot
Smartphones, smart speakers, connected cars… and now robots are the new frontier for music streaming. In India at least, courtesy of a partnership between educational robotics company Miko and streaming […]
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Indian streaming service Gaana raises $50 million in debt
The largest Indian streaming platform, Gaana, has raised the equivalent of just over $50 million in debt from Tencent Cloud Europe and Time Internet, reports Indian startup news site Inc42. Tencent’s involvement […]
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Indian streaming service Gaana grows to 185m listeners
At the start of February this year, Indian music streaming Gaana announced that it had 150 million monthly active users. Now the company has updated that figure to 185 million, having added 35 million listeners in the last six months.
That’s more than 5.8 million a month, which is all the more impressive when you consider that Gaana’s main market is a single country, India. Yet it’s been averaging more new users a month than Spotify, which grew from 271 million to 299 million in the first half of 2020, averaging 4.7 million new users a month.
Gaana’s new milestone was reported by The Economic Times, which is part of the same Times Internet corporate family as the streaming service, and by other Indian media. The reports added that Gaana is currently generating “more than 3.3 billion streams” (no period was given: assuming it’s a month, that’s an average of 17.8 streams per user per month) with 35% of them being of regional music.
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Gaana hopes to reach 500m users in next three years
Indian streaming service Gaana currently has more than 150 million monthly active users, but its CEO has reiterated ambitious plans for future growth. “As music streaming marketing continues to grow, […]
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Gaana launches TikTok-style short-video feature HotShots
Music streaming service Gaana is the latest company hoping to capitalise on the recent ban on TikTok (along with 58 other apps of Chinese origin) in India.
This morning, Gaana announced a new feature for its app called HotShots, describing it as “a platform that allows Indian content enthusiasts an intuitive, seamless and snappy tools to create & share short viral videos and stories”.
The company added that HotShots “offers emerging and established Influencers an opportunity to migrate to a robust Indian platform and build their own success stories” – note the ‘robust Indian platform’ which is a clear reference to TikTok’s current troubles.