Gaana introduces videos, and artist dashboard, hits 100 million active users

Digital music streaming service Gaana on Thursday introduced videos and artist dashboards to its app to attract both users and talent as well as to expand its market dominance.

The Times Internet-owned music streaming app had also revealed that it has become the first Indian music app to have more than 100 million active users, up from some 80 million announced in December 2018.

With newly launched features like Gaana Videos and Artist Dashboard, the app plans to increase the engagement rates with the users in the future.

Also read: YouTube Music beats Spotify with 3 million downloads in just one week

Gaana Video is the app’s exclusive vertical video format, built for mobile. This feature has been created in partnerships with India’s top artistes. Whereas, Artist Dashboard is a self-service dashboard for artistes to access insights and analytics around how their fans are consuming their music on the app. 

In February this year, Swedish audio-streaming platform Spotify rolled out in the Indian market. Within two months of Spotify's launch, Google-owned music streaming platform YouTube Music claimed to have hit three million downloads in the first week of its arrival in India.

According to KPMG report, the Indian recorded music business will reach $300 million in annual revenue in 2019. Apart from Spotify and YouTube Music, other popular music streaming services in India include Saavn, Gaana, Wynk Music, Jio Music, Google Play Music, and Amazon Prime Music.

According to media reports, Gaana’s CEO Prashan Agarwal said that with the launch of video, the idea is to increase the engagement time of the user on the app and increase the retention. He added that its advertisement strategy has changed and now include multilanguage ads and is feature- focused.

Prashan also said that the brand will continue to innovate with its AI- driven algorithms and productive innovations at scale to help Gaana become more accessible to new mobile users across India.  

Also read: The battle of the music apps just got louder as Spotify, YouTube Music add to your list of choices