KOLKATA: Gaana CEO Prashan Agarwal has stepped down after heading the music streaming service for five years.
“After an amazing five years of leading Gaana to be the No. 1 Music streaming service in India, I am stepping down from my role as CEO and am extremely grateful to my wonderful colleagues, music industry partners and investors who put so much trust and empowerment in enabling me to deliver,” Agarwal wrote in a LinkedIn post.
He thanked his mentors Satyan Gajwani and Vineet Jain for providing him with a platform to make such a remarkable impact on the Indian music ecosystem and bringing entertainment to more than 185 million users across the world.
Gaana is jointly owned by Times Internet (the majority stakeholder), and Tencent, which raised Rs 3.75 billion in debt last year to help finance the company’s growth.
Agarwal joined Gaana as CEO in May 2016. Before joining Times Internet, he co-founded multiple internet ventures including 19miles.com and PropTiger.com. He is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and the Indian School of Business.
KOLKATA: Short videos are the new buzzword on social media, with both content creators and consumption skyrocketing. To cater to the ever-growing appetite of Indians for entertaining short-video, the country’s largest music streaming platform, Gaana has launched HotShots – a platform that allows Indian content enthusiasts an intuitive, seamless and snappy tools to create and share short viral videos and stories with more than 150 million strong audience base.
Gaana HotShots offers emerging and established Influencers an opportunity to migrate to a robust Indian platform and build their own success stories. With the best-in-class product experience and a host of ‘HotShot Challenges’ in the performing arts like music, comedy and dance by HotShot influencers, celebs and international artists, the app would offer both the scale and the infrastructure to reach a massive audience who thrive on digital entertainment.
“At Gaana, we have always emphasized on placing the power of digital content creation into the hands of emerging talent. We had launched Gaana Vertical Video platform last year to allow our celebrities / singers to connect with our audience through Short Videos. Today we are building up on that expertise by unveiling the ultimate short video creation and consumption platform ‘Gaana Hotshots’. Our home-grown entertainment super app is ready to serve as the country’s go-to destination for entertainment across music, podcasts, short viral videos and buzz, offering aspiring Indians the power to become influencers in their own right with Gaana’s world-class live streaming & short video capabilities,” Gaana CEO Prashan Agarwal said.
The country is facing an unprecedented challenge with communities and livelihoods affected by the growing COVID-19 pandemic. With people coming together to help each other during this outbreak, India’s largest music app Gaana is showing solidarity and support to this shared challenge by helping the most vulnerable communities across India prevent and respond to the pandemic.
The brand has partnered with leading non-profit organization Give India to provide life-saving masks to the most vulnerable sections of society during the ongoing lockdown. Gaana has empowered its users to be able to contribute to this noble cause by streaming more music on the Gaana App. Gaana will endeavour to supply around hundred thousand masks of various types to ensure the protection of these peoples.
So, the next time you listen to a song on Gaana remember you are streaming more than a song!
MUMBAI: India, in the middle of a digital boom, has seen a stupendous growth in the OTT industry. Once considered a traditional audio-video market, India is increasingly taking to digital platforms for entertainment. The audio industry is the next big thing in the Indian OTT world. As revealed by IFPI Global Music Report 2019, which surveyed music consumers aged 16–64 across nine geographical locations in India, 97 per cent of the respondents admitted to listening to music on their smartphones.
Gaana CEO Prashan Agarwal says, “Currently more than 225 million users in India are consuming music online. The Indian music streaming industry is booming, and the market will grow to 400 million monthly active users in the next two years. As the country’s go-to music app, our users are streaming over 3.5 billion songs every month.”
IVM Podcast spokesperson also notes that audio platforms in India are increasing in popularity every day. “Currently in India, there are 200-300 million subscribers on OTT music streaming platforms and approximately 10 million listeners for podcasts.”
This makes for a good opportunity for advertisers to tap this gold mine of communication to reach their target consumers as the same report reveals that 86 per cent of consumers engage with on-demand streaming services for their music. Subscription streaming revenues grew by 33.3 per cent from Rs 73.2 crore to Rs 292.8 crore and ad-supported audio streaming income rose by 43.6 per cent to Rs 78 crore to Rs 257 crore in 2018.
Agarwal says that platforms like Gaana empower advertisers to connect to the consumers at a personal level, enabling them to create hyper-personalised ads in real-time by tagging parts of commercial scripts to create and serve relevant ads. Gaana also offers a suite of advertising opportunities including premium dynamic ads that can be fully customised based on the advertiser’s specific requirements.
Podcasts, which are an equally dynamic category experiencing mammoth growth online, also provide a great platform to advertisers. The IVM Podcast spokesperson says, “Those listening to podcasts generally tune in from the beginning of the episode and stay listening till the end. This gives brands immense scope to explore through the timeline of the episode and place their advertisements for greater impact. The audience that tunes in usually falls in the category of tastemakers and influential listeners. Because of this, the advertisers can carry out hyper-targeting to find their exact target group and approach them in a new fashion.”
The audio-industry is at an inflexion point right now and it will be smarter for advertisers to invest in it. It will not only help them reach their target audience at scale but will also provide a better-targeted reach.
MUMBAI: India’s No. 1 music streaming app, Gaana has unveiled new audio ad capabilities that will empower advertisers to talk personally with its listeners by creating contextual audio creatives in real-time. This will enable marketers to create hyper-personalized ads in real time by tagging parts of commercial scripts based on Age, gender, location, weather, time, music preference, device, and other 3rd party data to create and serve relevant ads to more than 150 million Gaana users.
Gaana’s innovation offers a unique layer of ad personalization to audio that was till now only available with display ads. The brand’s ad engine will leverage a mix of the extensive & highly evolved user-buckets created over the past 10 years and real-time data, such as age, gender, location, weather and artist preferences among others to create contextual ads. These finer aspects will help create some of the most dynamic advertising personas in the industry, and the ensuing collaborative process with the client can create thousands — even millions of permutations for each ad creative.
Speaking at the launch, Prashan Agarwal, CEO – Gaana said, “Audio streaming is rapidly evolving as an indispensable part of the media mix of most consumer brands across lifestyle, tech and online services among others. As the industry leader, we pride ourselves on having the most comprehensive suite of ad formats that enable our clients to reach their intended audience in a native and experiential setting. To further this agenda, we have launched Dynamic ads with the ability to customize audio creatives based on a target user’s demographics and other crucial psychographic metadata to drive significantly higher brand recall that will offer the crucial edge marketers need in this noisy world.”
The Indian music streaming industry is at the cusp of an incredible growth curve as more of us start consuming music online. The sector has seen a meteoric 3X growth in the past two years, and the market is expected to 400 Mn monthly active users in the next 2 years. As the country’s go-to music app with over 150 million users streaming over 3.5 billion songs every month, the ability to target this massive user-base with dynamic programmatic audio capabilities will be a game-changer for the Indian marketing community.
MUMBAI: India’s largest music streaming app, Gaana crossed 150 million monthly active users in December 2019, making it the country’s first music streaming app to have crossed the mighty mark. This staggering leap to 150 million, buoyed by 40 per cent growth in regional music consumption and 35 percent growth in Bollywood music consumption in the past year has consolidated the brand’s strong hold as a market leader in the country’s audio OTT market.
Over the past year, Gaana has launched several industry-first features like being the first music app to introduce in-app voice assistant, introducing sing-along lyrics on the player page, Gaana video, Instant app experience or smart downloads, where the app automatically downloads a premium user’s favorite tracks based on their listening history to deliver substantial value to the digital music experience of users across India. Additionally, Gaana’s AI and machine learning-led recommendations manifested by AutoQueue and ‘For You’ sections now power more than 23 percent of consumption. These innovations combined with Gaana’s vast 45 million songs-strong music library across Bollywood, International and 30 Indic languages and it's newly launched 3000 strong podcast library including its promising ‘Gaana Podcast Originals’ featuring youth icons hold great promise for sustained organic growth in 2020.
Gaana CEO Prashan Agarwal said, "At Gaana, we believe in being the music companion to our users by adding melody and meaning to their everyday lives. Touching the 150 million users milestone is a testimony to the efforts of our incredible team and our vision to bring the most intuitive and immersive musical experience to our users. This achievement will offer us a stronger motivation to leverage our proprietary AI-driven algorithms and newly launched features in newer ways at greater scale to enable the next generation of music-lovers to discover our unending collection of songs and offer them a more immersive and fulfilling experience.”
The Indian music streaming industry is at the cusp of an incredible growth curve as more of us start consuming music online. The sector has seen a meteoric 3X growth in the past two years, and the market is expected to 400 Million monthly active users in the next two years. As the country’s go-to music app streaming over three and a half billion songs every month, more than some of its competitors combined, Gaana’s new feat has cemented its reputation as a pioneer in bringing product and UI innovation into the country’s music streaming sector with a strong focus on the Indian music lover.
MUMBAI: On the occasion of India’s 71st Republic Day this weekend, DViO Digital conceptualized this recreation of Vande Mataram for a campaign for India’s favorite music streaming app.
India has always been hailed around the world for its unity and strength with a beautiful diversity seen across its landscape, food, people, religion, language & customs. This essence is what makes India, ‘INDIA’ with all of its beauty & exuberance. To celebrate India’s vibrancy in diversity Gaana unveiled ‘Vande Mataram- The National Song of India since 1950’.
This goosebump-inducing rendition, speaks to the soul of the nation & creates a shared space, cutting across the boundaries, to amalgamate different cultures together. This ode to our motherland, which played a vital role during the Indian Independence movement, has a renewed sense of significance during these dark days where there is an urgent need to rekindle the commitment, we as citizens have to our country.
This version of Vande Mataram features artists from nine different linguistic backgrounds that are Malayalam, Assamese, Urdu, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Odia, Telugu & Bengali to portray that in spite of our regional differences, we have one united identity and that is – ‘ONE INDIA’. The imagery of the video which begins with black & white scenes through the lens of diversity then transforms into a colorful visual symbolizing the vision and hope for an integrated & vibrant future.
Prashan Agarwal , CEO of Gaana said, “Music is one of the few strains of humanity that has the sublime power to cut across cultures, faiths, and borders to evoke our shared sense of culture, folklore, and music. To that effect, we have curated playlists that bring out the flavor of our music and our people as we tip our hats to one of the greatest songs that celebrates our spirit of unity. This Republic Day, we invite every Indian to discover and celebrate the music of our nation – only on Gaana.”
Sowmya Iyer, Founder & CEO of DViO Digital commented, “Never before has there been a need to recommit to the sense of patriotism and India. DViO believes in bringing the wealth of artists from all over the country and brands together to create more unique co-branded content. And this was our initiative in that direction. Gaana is one of the most enterprising brand we have worked with who believe in promoting great talent and also regional music.
DViO Digital successfully executed this campaign in association with Qyuki, as the Artist connect partner & Kavit Mody Production as its Production partner.
Catch the New Gaana Exclusive “Vande Mataram – The National Song of India since 1950” here:
New Delhi: On the occasion of India’s 71st Republic Day, the country’s favorite music streaming app, Gaana offers every Indian the opportunity to rediscover and celebrate his roots with its campaign- ‘Discover India on Gaana’. The app has reimagined the Indian National song ‘Vande Mataram’ and will host curated playlists that commemorate India’s diversity and the vibrant mix of musical ethnicities that the country offers.
The 50+ curated playlists curated by destinations would enable music-lovers to enjoy popular native melodies from a region along with rich media cards featuring trivia about the origin of these tunes, popular genres & artists and much more. That way, users can discover and celebrate the classical essence of India by snacking on its indigenous tunes with a simple tap – exclusively on Gaana.
As a part of the campaign, Gaana also looks to uphold India’s cultural diversity by giving a native earthen twist to the one song that epitomizes India’s true glory- The Indian National Song. Gaana’s original reimagination of the National Song involves nine emerging singers- Amrita Nayak, Diya Ghosh, Subhechha Mohanty, Simran Sehgal, Aswin Ram, Jishan Ali Thobani, Ashish Patil, Sandesh Motwani, Antareep Hazarika and Illiyana Gogoi, who come from the length and breadth of the country to bring the flavor of their own roots into the talismanic song.
Prashan Agarwal, CEO – Gaana said, “In a world more divided than ever, as the largest music app, we felt it is upon us to revive our collective sense of camaraderie. Music is one of the few strains of humanity that has the sublime power to cut across cultures, faiths, and borders to evoke our shared sense of culture, folklore, and music. To that effect, we have curated playlists that bring out the flavor of our music and our people as we tip our hats to one of the greatest songs that celebrates our spirit of unity. This Republic Day, we invite every Indian to discover and celebrate the music of our nation – only on Gaana.”
With the campaign, Gaana plans to celebrate India’s heterogeneity while invoking the sense of fraternity that binds the nation and its different cultures with the same thread.
Experience the diverse aura of India’s music exclusively on Gaana.
While we all know the importance of Republic day, brands have taken this opportunity to put on their creative hats and roll out their contributions through Republic Day campaigns On this special day brands have chosen social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Instagram to channelize their patriotism. Some of the most notable brands that have launched their respective Republic Day campaign 2020 are, FBB, Gaana, Lava, TVF Girliyappa and many others. While some brands like FBB India have opted for video campaigns such, some brands chose to convey their message through creative illustrations. Patriotism remains the one the key element that resonates with every Indian hence, republic day becomes the most important day for brands to leverage. We bring you the list of campaigns that we have spotted on social media on the occasion of Republic day. FBB India Fbb India celebrates this Diversity through a special campaign #WearYourPatriotism curated to commemorate the countries 71th Republic Day. The fashion brand has designed an exclusive collection of, ‘Scarves’ that are inspired by the Indian National Flag. For a country of many faces, many styles, many cultures, and many expressions, there is no one way of expressing your patriotism. Hence, FBB is celebrating this diversity with a symbol as versatile as the Indians themselves – The Tricolor Inspired Scarf.
Girliyappa Girliyapa Spotlight, that aims to be the voice and platform for social causes, is putting its best foot forward towards raising awareness. As the country is all set to mark its 71st Republic Day, the channel has yet again collaborated with the non-profit organization (Zero Cash) Robin Hood Academy for their latest mission. As the voice that tackles social issues, the aim of the initiative is to propel students towards a path where they take the first steps towards developing their career. The mission focuses on getting volunteers to devote 4 hours in a month to educate underprivileged children. And largely inspire them to pursue higher education. Lava Indian mobile handset brand, Lava International Limited, today announced the launch of its Republic Day campaign- #SendItBack. The hard-hitting campaign video highlights the ongoing menace of fake forwarded messages that create panic and fuel acts of violence. Speaking about this special initiative, LAVA marketing and strategy head Mugdh Rajit said,” LAVA is a Proudly Indian brand and we believe that it is our responsibility to contribute to society. With #SendItBack initiative we intend to spark-off a movement against fake forwards so that social media does not become a tool for the perpetrators of the violence.” Bobble AI Bobble AI has launched a series of GIFs, Stickers, and Emoticons expressing secularism, pride and nationalism on its Indic keyboard to mark the 71st Republic Day of India. Bobble has also become the first Indic keyboard to integrate with WhatsApp and will now allow users to share any personalized stickers & emojis in just one tap. In a press release, Bobble AI founder and CEO Ankit Prasad said, “Republic Day is the red-letter day in the history of India. It is celebrated with the same spirit and manner as we celebrate other festivals in India. People share Republic Day messages so that they can convey their pride, patriotism, and nationalism. Our special series of Republic Day GIFs, Stickers and Emoticons are giving a strong message of what India believes in i.e – UNITY. With our secular emojis, we encourage more and more people to share and communicate their love for India.” Nexus Malls Nexus Malls has collaborated with Bollywood actor Ayushmann Khurrana to announce flat 50% sale on Republic day.
Do you know what’s special this #RepublicDay? A sale that not only brings you to #NexusMalls, but your entire family too! So go on and rush to your favourite shopping destination to avail #Flat50 on your favourite brands! pic.twitter.com/KyLChGV4c4
Tata Stryder Tata Stryder promotes the company’s agenda by running a campaign with the #WheelOfStryde which showcases two wheels depicting the principles of business, prosperity, safety, equality, awareness, and artha.
CNBC TV18 CNBC-TV18 news in their campaign for Republic day on their social media platform has put on a video that shows how has India changed since 1950.
Orient Bell Orient Bell, one of India’s largest manufacturers of ceramic and vitrified tiles, has joined hands with FoxyMoron to launch a heart-warming Republic Day campaign, #HandsThatBuildIndia. The campaign pays homage to the masons who literally build our homes for us. Gaana This Republic Day music streaming app Gaana has come up with a new feature on the app where the users can discover the essence of India’s snack on the tunes of all these cities with just a click. Through this feature 50 cities across the country can stream these playlists. Apart from this consumers can also avail the information about the popular artists/celebs from that city, movies/songs shot in that city. They can also, listen to the podcasts related to the pilgrimage/historical facts of that city. Ministry Of Information and Broadcast MIB ministry on their official twitter handle has announced #MIBContest contest. Where participants are requested to share their ideas on the theme “Unity in diversity”.
Only 5 Hours Left!!!
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Share your ideas on the theme “Unity in diversity” by using #MIBContest.
TIMES NOW Commemorating the 71st Republic Day of India, TIMES NOW, which is India’s leading English news channel unveils an exciting programming line-up of thought-provoking shows. Shedding light on the unspoken, untold and unseen stories, TIMES NOW brings to its viewers three curated shows, Dispatches from India, Republic Day – Behind The Scenes and 2020 – India’s decade, this weekend 25 & 26 January , 2020. Gatsby India Gatsby India through its Republic Day post encourages youth to stay in the forefront
Red Chillies Entertainment Indian film production and distribution company Red Chillies Entertainment dedicates this Republic Day to the people of India.
Mumbai: India's No.1 music streaming app, Gaana’s annual report on the country’s music consumption trends registered an unprecedented demand for regional music. This genre accounted for more than 1 Bn music streams in Dec 2019, registering an incredible (8X) growth in the past 2.5 years – making regional music the most vibrant and potent genre in the country’s audio OTT market.
Currently regional music accounts for more than 35% OTT music consumption, with more than half of all users of regional music coming from smaller cities. Given the rising popularity of Punjabi, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam music across the country, the country’s audio OTT market is expected to grow to 600 million users in the next 3 years, buoyed by the surging interest in regional music consumption. Gaana Originals, Gaana’s initiative to promote regional non-film music also saw a sharp jump and now contributes more than 100 MN streams per month. The most notable song amongst the Gaana Originals was Lehanga by Jas Manak that topped all charts in 2019 and crossed 115 Mn streams on Gaana.
Commenting on the year gone by, Gaana CEO Prashan Agarwal said: “2019 was a landmark year for music lovers, artists and the industry in more ways than one. The meteoric rise in regional music consumption across the nation marks one of the biggest cultural shifts in perception of music in the past decade. As established and emerging musical artists across the country realised the growing importance of music streaming apps to reach their fans at scale in their own language, our primarily young music streaming population are embracing their respective cultures and are ‘going back to their roots’. It's no longer ‘uncool’ to groove to music from your own region or culture, it's rather the ‘in’ thing to have a playlist featuring music in multiple languages. At Gaana, we are humbled to be at the centre of this vibrant blend of cultures, powering these musical connections that celebrates our country’s unity and diversity.”
