Music streaming is a big enough market for 2-3 players to lead it in the long run even as the market is currently at an inflection point that would continue to see intense competition for the next 2-3 years, Prashan Agarwal, CEO at Gaana told FE Online ahead of global music streaming service Spotify’s expected launch in India in coming six months.

Agarwal claimed of having 80 million users of around 150 million users consuming music online in India. “We would like to continue to have the majority share of the market that would grow to around 400 million users in the next two years,” he said. However, all the players will have a fair play in the market, he asserted.

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Tencent-backed Gaana has grown to its existing user base from 10 million users in last two years, helped by its personalisation and recommendation tools, Agarwal said. Unlike e-commerce market where the key drivers are discount and delivery, in music streaming what drives is how you recommend songs to users and personalise the experience.

Regional play
Gaana’s increased focus is on regional music and associations with music labels as around 70% of its next 100 million users will be coming from tier 2, 3, and 4 towns. For instance, listeners for Punjabi and other regional languages has grown more than 100% in last year.

In terms of consumption, Punjabi and English make up for more than 10% of total user consumption on Gaana which it wants to replicate in other languages including Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati etc.

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Agarwal calls them adjacent languages that have seen growth. Hindi listeners who show interest in respective languages, are further exposed to more music in those languages. “For example, a listener might also listen to let’s say Marathi songs. So we expose him/her to more Marathi songs that drive regional consumption. Hence, the content and its discovery will be big by adjacency instead of someone’s primary language selection,” said Agarwal.

Further, for more content Gaana is investing in exclusive content in the form of Gaana Exclusives, Gaana Originals — a non-film platform for non-Hindi artists to share their music, and Gaana Specials which are programs such as talk shows, audio storytelling and comedy etc.

Gaana’s ad revenue and its ad-free paid subscription service Gaana+ contribute equally to its revenue, said Agarwal.