Gaana, which claims to be India’s largest music streaming service, has announced that its platform now reaches over 125m monthly active users.
The company says that this customer base is generating more than 3.2bn monthly streams.
Gaana previously announced that it had topped 100m monthly active users (MAUs) in April, meaning that the firm has added approximately 25m MAUs in the past eight months, or an average of just over 3m per month.
China media giant Tencent led a $115m investment into Gaana in February last year.
For comparison, at the close of Q3, Spotify counted 248m active users worldwide, suggesting that Gaana’s audience is around half the size of that of Daniel Ek‘s company. In the three months to end of September, Spotify added 16m MAUs – an average of just over 5m users per month.
The confirmation of Gaana’s new numbers came in an announcement that it has struck a deal with voice dialogue marketing platform Instreamatic to enable Gaana’s advertisers to create interactive voice ads on the service.
Gaana is also joining Instreamatic’s voice ad exchange for enhanced voice ad monetization as part of the new partnership.
“At Gaana, we strive to connect listeners with the experiences that put them in the driver’s seat, whether it’s choosing to listen to their favorite songs or, through this partnership, engaging with interactive voice ads.”
Prashan Agarwal, Gaana (pictured)
“At Gaana, we strive to connect listeners with the experiences that put them in the driver’s seat, whether it’s choosing to listen to their favorite songs or, through this partnership, engaging with interactive voice ads where they control the conversation,” said Prashan Agarwal, CEO, Gaana.
“With voice poised to be the interface of choice in the coming decade, we’re excited to introduce Instreamatic’s pioneering technology on our platform, and look forward to helping advertisers deliver the positive experiences it makes possible.”
Gaana says that more than one-third of its plays are of music in languages other than English and Hindi. Apart from India, Gaana also has a user base in the U.S, UK, Australia, Canada and UAE.
“As the popularity of streaming audio continues to increase, advertisers require empirical real-time ad metrics to fully understand the impact of their ad campaigns, while listeners seek more of a say in what shape those ad experiences take,” said Stas Tushinskiy, CEO, Instreamatic.
“We’re proud to be partnering with Gaana and expanding into India in such a big way, and to play a role in delivering superior audio ad experiences for listeners and advertisers alike.”
Gaana, which is majority-owned by Times Internet, who launched the app in 2010, says both its ad revenue and subscription revenue are growing at about 100% year-over-year.
The service features more than 45 million songs across Bollywood, International and 30 Indic languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Punjabi, Malayalam, English, Bhojpuri, Rajasthani, Bengali, Assamese & Oriya.Music Business Worldwide
