Gaana bets on regional music to grow user base

Music streaming app Gaana recently achieved 100 million active subscribers. While this may sound like a reason to celebrate, the Times Group-owned company has other things to worry about.

The entry of the world’s largest music streaming player Spotify in India along with YouTube launching its music streaming app is heating up the competitive music streaming market in the country, which is currently led by Gaana but has other major competitors, including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Google Play Music and Jio Saavn.

While it is easy for the global players to licence music from major Indian music labels, Gaana is actively looking beyond what can be easily licensed — good independent artists and smaller music labels, along withpotentially good regional music. “Music streaming is still at its nascent stage in India. As the market grows to a billion users, regional music will play a big role,” Prashan Agarwal, CEO - Gaana, told BusinessLine .

“Regional content will become a key component for the growth of our platform.We are going after non-film music in Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Bhojpuri.”

Gaana’s original song Tera Ghata by Gajendra Verma highlighted that the strategy is working for the company. The platform put its marketing might behind the artist to make the song one of top hits across India.

“Movie songs come with heavy marketing budgets. The same doesn’t hold true with independent artists working with small music labels. We will give the marketing and promotion muscle to these independent artists to make sure they are able to compete with Bollywood songs,” said Agarwal.

Gaana has already put in a large team to create a platform for new artists. “ The idea is to create a much bigger platform for non-film songs in multiple languages,” he said.

“In 2016, about 75 per cent of our music was Bollywood. Now, its about 50 per cent. English Music today contributes about 15 per cent while regional music is at 35 per cent.” said Agarwal.

Instead of offering users the songs in the languages they selected, Gaana has also experimented with a concept of adjacent languages to grow user engagement.

“Indians listen to songs in at least two languages. We started exposing users to different languages in July. Generally they select only one language. But if you're in Maharashtra, you might also be interested in Marathi music. This has helped us tremendously,” he added.

Increased subsriber base

The efforts made by Gaana has also translated in increased revenues as well as manifold increase in subscriber base. In the last one year alone, Gaana’s revenues have grown over 100 per cent year-on-year while subscriber base has grown four times.

To expand the paid subscriber base, Gaana is now planning to create cheaper subscription packs with different features.

“We need to de-couple Gaana Plus offerings. Currently, there are three key benefits that a user gets from Gaana Plus--ad-free experience, ability to download music for offline use, and high definition music. The idea is to experiment with different smaller packs to appeal to a wider audience that may be looking for one or two of these benefits instead of all three.”