India-based music streaming firm Gaana has reached a landmark 100 million monthly active users (MAUs) and claims to be the first platform in the market to do so.
During a press conference confirming the milestone, Gaana’s Chief Executive Officer Prashan Agarwal said that the platform expects to reach 200 million MAUs in the next two years.
Publicly traded Spotify, which launched in India at the end of February, had 207m global MAUs at the end of last year.
Gaana also launched two new features yesterday (April 24), Gaana Video and an Artist Dashboard.
Gaana was founded in 2010 by Times Media / Times Internet and last year Chinese media giant Tencent led a $115m investment round in the service.
The service surpassed 50m monthly users in November 2017.
At the time of it its $115m investment round, Gaana’s competitors in India included Saavn, Wynk and Xiaomi-backed Hungama, as well as Apple Music, but there has been some major activity in the market since, including mergers and new entrants to the market.
In March 2018, MBW reported that Saavn was merging with rival service JioMusic in a deal that values the newly-combined platform at over $1 billion. JioMusic then rebranded in December 2018 as JioSaavn.
Spotify signed a global content deal with India’s largest homegrown record company, T-Series, in January and then finally launched in India in February following a public spat with Warner Chappell Music, after the music publisher wanted to block Spotify’s attempt to clear performance rights for its music via an Indian statutory licence.
March saw the arrival of the (competitively less expensive) Google-owned music streaming subscription YouTube Music. In India YouTube Music is priced at 99 Rupees compared to a standard recurrent monthly Spotify Premium subscription of 119 Rupees.
Also last month, Facebook inked deals with some of the leading music rightsholders in India, including Zee Music Company and Yash Raj Films – plus T-Series Music.Music Business Worldwide
