Hungama.com crosses 50 million monthly active users, bullish about multi-lingual support on Android
Music streaming has picked up very well in developed economies. For instance, in the US, music streaming revenues beat CDs in 2014 for the first time. In total, streaming services were responsible for $1.87 billion in revenue, compared to CDs' $1.85 billion. While in India and other developing markets, music streaming has definitely reached a considerable portion of users but is still pretty far from generating significant revenues. Most recently, Hungama.com announced that it has crossed 50 million monthly active users across its entertainment service.
A part of Hungama Digital Media Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. which is an aggregator, developer, publisher and distributor of Bollywood and South-Asian entertainment content in the world, Hungama.com itself has over 3.5 million pieces of content across genres and languages, in the form of music tracks, movies, videos and mobile content such as ringtones and wallpapers. Although trends show pretty steady growth curves, the company has been launching various initiatives to onboard new users.
Anticipating the market opportunity in semi urban and rural India, Hungama rolled out multi-lingual support in its Android app in October 2014. It is now available in 5 languages - Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Punjabi, along with English. In July 2014, Hungama also introduced its PRO service for Android and iOS devices. The service featured integrated video and audio downloading in a single app, along with a caching feature for music that allowed users to save their music and video which can be played without internet connection.
Mr. Neeraj Roy, MD & CEO of Hungama Digital Media Entertainment said, “We are glad to be the music & video service of choice for over 50 million South- Asians across the world. The milestone is the result of initiatives that we at Hungama began undertaking about 15 months ago. Over the next year, we plan to continue to build on this momentum to grow into newer markets and explore more avenues to distribute digital music and video. Hungama is on track to reach 100 million MAUs by March 2016."
And Hungama will have stiff competition. Players like Gaana and Saavn are ahead in terms of traction (according to Alexa and Similarweb) and big new players are hitting the market frequently. San Francisco based Rdio entered India in January 2015 after acquiring Dhingana, Airtel's Wynk has been blazing all guns while Vodafone has Vodafone Music, Australian music streaming site Guvera claims 3 million users in India, and the likes of Reliance also have music streaming services in the works. The music streaming field in India is now filled with some very large players and the next few years will unfold the climax of this rather intense melody.
Update on May 23, 2015: The original post mentioned that the 50 million monthly active users were across various services and apps but Hungama clarified that it is only for the music streaming service. A couple of other changes were made to retain factual accuracy.