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Tag: Prashan Agarwal

  • FanTV aims to onboard over one lakh creators and 10 million users

    FanTV aims to onboard over one lakh creators and 10 million users

    Mumbai: FanTV, the leading decentralized social app with over four million users, has announced a strategic partnership with Mysten Labs to drive mass adoption of Web3 technology. This collaboration marks a significant milestone in FanTV’s mission to revolutionize the content creation and consumption market and expand its creator base and user engagement, FanTV aims to onboard over 100,000 creators and 10 million users.

    By harnessing the expertise of Mysten Labs and leveraging the capabilities of the Sui blockchain, FanTV is poised to reshape the social media landscape and empower creators worldwide.

    FanTV founder and CEO Prashan Agarwal stated, ” At FanTV, our vision has always been to empower creators and users. Content creators and users have primarily been the product while the respective platform reaps majority of the benefit. FanTV is hyper-focused on disrupting that status quo. We believe that content creators and consumers are the backbone and should be rewarded proportionately for their contribution. Through our collaboration with Mysten Labs, we are committed to driving innovation and democratizing the content creation ecosystem. Our goal is to onboard over 100,000 creators and 10 million users, ushering in a new era of decentralized social media in the next 12-18 months.”

    FanTV had earlier raised $5.5 mn in their seed round led by Multicoin capital with Krafton, IOSG Ventures, Woodstock Fund.

    FanTV’s unique watch-to-earn offering has garnered widespread acclaim, attracting over four million users and more than 20,000 creators. With the global video streaming market projected to surpass $1.9 trillion by 2030, FanTV is well-positioned to capitalize on the burgeoning creator economy and foster community-driven content creation.

    “Prashan and his team have built a groundbreaking product with seamless UI / UX experience, and seeing FanTV attract millions of real users speaks volumes about the love from creators and users,” said Mysten Labs chief product officer Adeniyi Abiodun. “We are excited to witness their continued success in the Web3 social space.”

    FanTV’s ambitious goal of onboarding over 100,000 creators and 10 million users underscores its dedication to driving innovation and fostering community engagement. With the support of Mysten Labs and the capabilities of the Sui blockchain, FanTV is poised to redefine the future of decentralized social media.

    For more information about FanTV and its transition to Sui, please visit https://fantv.world.

  • Ex-Gaana CEO Prashan Agarwal launches spiritual wellness platform OMI

    Ex-Gaana CEO Prashan Agarwal launches spiritual wellness platform OMI

    Mumbai: Prashan Agarwal, ex-CEO of Gaana and co-founder of PropTiger, has teamed up with Aniket Lila, ex-Nexus Venture Partners, to launch OMI, an online spiritual and wellness platform.

    OMI aims to combine ancient Vedic methods with a new-age lifestyle. It has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Nexus Venture and is looking to disrupt the spiritual wellness market in India that is valued at more than $ ten billion, the platform in a statement on Wednesday.

    “Today the world is faced with a multitude of changes in our life in terms of the way we live, we connect, we embrace, unprecedented things we go through and this has had an impact on the spiritual, devotional, and mental wellbeing of all of us,” Agarwal said. “Alongside, the internet and digital payment penetration amongst the Indian population is at an all-time high and growing. These dynamics make the market ripe for innovation in this category.”

    “We are disrupting what is nearly a 4000-year old market in India by bringing the best of what ancient India has to offer to millennials through a convenient, private, holistic, and personalised platform,” Lila said. “OMI will be your personal spiritual guide. Our mission is to make the world a happier place. Most Indians are spiritual and this presents us with a blue ocean opportunity.”

    “We’re excited to partner with Prashan and Aniket. This is a very deeply India-specific problem, with very large existing profit pools,”  said Nexus Venture Partners principal Pratik Poddar. “No one has addressed the market in a millennial-centric way and made a product-first, scalable and trustworthy solution. Having known the founders for many years, I am very excited to get a chance to work with them to crack this $ ten billion market!”

    Prashan is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and ISB alumnus. At Gaana, he was instrumental in growing the business and raised more than $ 200 million from Tencent to build Gaana into a household brand. Lila is a graduate of Northwestern University and was most recently part of the investment team at Nexus Venture Partners, India’s largest home-grown VC.

    On the undisclosed amount of funding from Nexus Venture Partners, Agarwal further said, “Primarily, the funding will be used to hire talent across product, technology, and operations. We are looking to onboard leaders with a passion for the stage and who want to help us build OMI from Day zero.”

    “Our aim is to improve the wellbeing of ten million people in five years and create the largest spiritual wellness community in the world. Starting out, on the OMI platform, you can consult with our ‘Astro Guides’ and get a personalised remedy plan which includes activities like meditation, chanting mantras, affirmations, and journaling. Currently, we are focusing on aggregating a fragmented supply and building a trusted brand. As OMI scales, you will see us expanding and adding many more services on the platform aimed at helping you improve your spiritual wellness,” added Lila.

    OMI is available for download in Google Playstore. 

  • Gaana unveils social video platform ‘HotShots’ for Indians to unleash creativity

    Gaana unveils social video platform ‘HotShots’ for Indians to unleash creativity

    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.

  • Gaana Rolls Out Dynamic Creatives For Audio Ads to Empower Indian Marketers

    Gaana Rolls Out Dynamic Creatives For Audio Ads to Empower Indian Marketers

    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.
     

  • Music streaming app Gaana reaches 150 million monthly active users

    Music streaming app Gaana reaches 150 million monthly active users

    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.

  • DViO Digital Recreates Vande Mataram for Gaana

    DViO Digital Recreates Vande Mataram for Gaana

    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:

  • Gaana’s Republic Day Campaign Celebrates India’s Diverse Musical Roots

    Gaana’s Republic Day Campaign Celebrates India’s Diverse Musical Roots

    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.

  • Regional Music Consumption Hit A 3-Year High in 2019

    Regional Music Consumption Hit A 3-Year High in 2019

    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.”

  • Gaana enters Shows and Podcast Originals segment

    Gaana enters Shows and Podcast Originals segment

    Mumbai: India's largest music streaming app, Gaana has announced its first batch of platform-exclusive line-up of podcasts and shows, including ‘Ummeed’ with Zakir Khan, ‘Confessions’ with Sunny Leone and ‘Life ki Ranneeti’ with Rannvijay Singha that will go live on Gaana in Nov-Dec’19. These are a part of the brand’s overarching vision to host the country’s widest and most diverse range of original audio content by the end of FY 2021.

    Commissioned by Gaana, produced by the hosts & syndicated from networks, the shows & podcasts in multiple languages span categories like Comedy, Bollywood, Devotional, News, Kids, Motivational, Astrology, Business, Lifestyle &. Culture and Self Help among others. Gaana currently hosts over 3000 diverse shows & podcasts in multiple languages including ‘Cyrus Says’, ‘The Bhagavad Gita’, ‘Stories of Akbar Birabal’, KadhaiPodcast's PonniyinSelvan and ‘Paisa Vaisa’ among others.

    Speaking at the launch, Gaana CEO Prashan Agarwal said, “Shows & Podcasts have the potential to be among the most popular mainstream non-music genres in our country owing to the diversity of our audience. At Gaana, we have been investing steadily in this space, and have now taken it up a notch with our Original Shows & Podcasts  that would engage our users with interesting content that will inform, entertain and enthral them in more ways than one.”

    India is the world’s third-largest podcast market, second only to the US and China, and is one of the fastest-growing podcast markets globally.  

  • This World Heart Day, Gaana raises awareness about heart health with #DilKiSuno Playlist

    This World Heart Day, Gaana raises awareness about heart health with #DilKiSuno Playlist

    MUMBAI: On this World Heart Day, India's largest music streaming app, Gaana has partnered with Isobar India to launch an exclusive #DilKiSuno playlist, where every song reminds users to take care of their heart’s health.

    The Gaana playlist uses popular Bollywood songs with the word ‘Dil’ (heart) along with a witty tagline – ‘Apne #DilKiSuno aur rakho apna khayaal. Gaana dwaara, dil-hit mein jaari’, to remind music lovers to get check-ups done for heart-related health risks. The #DilKiSuno campaign is exclusively live across social media and Gaana.

    Speaking of the launch, Prashan Agarwal, CEO – Gaana said, “Music is a true universal form of expression in its ability to be able to entertain while connecting with people at levels where sometimes words cannot take you. This World Heart Day, we want to use this bridging power of music to reach out to every Gaana user and remind them to take care of their heart.”

    Commenting on the launch, Gopa Kumar, Chief Operating Officer, Isobar India said, “The rush of modern life often takes a toll on us, and we tend to ignore the little warning signs from our bodies that all is not well. On the occasion of World Heart Day, we are excited to partner with Gaana to launch the #DilKiSuno playlist that drops a melodic reminder to check one’s heart through songs that talk of the heart!”