Times Internet owned music streaming service Gaana.com has launched mobile apps which allow users to access categorised music according to language, artists and genres. (Hat Tip: NT Balanarayan)
Launched about a month ago, there are 10 apps: Kishore Kumar Hits, Hindi Sad Songs, Love Songs Hindi, Top Ghazals, Top English Songs, EDM Songs and Trance Music, Tamil Songs, Hindi Romantic Songs, Classic Hindi Love Songs and Hindi Bhajans.
The apps provide options to stream music in three formats 128Kbps, 64Kbps and 32Kbps according to the users internet speed, along with features like social sharing and video streaming. The old Hindi songs app seems to be the most popular among Gaana’s apps: It has seen more than 1,00,000 downloads on Play Store alone. All in all, Gaana has music in 21 languages – Hindi, English, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and other Indian regional languages – so there is potential for many more apps. Gaana seems to have tried to tap users who might not be loyal to the app but to an artist or genre of music. This makes things easier for users looking for particular playlists and content, because they don’t have to search or create separate playlists. It also allows Gaana to acquire users who are merely searching on the play store for “Tamil Songs” or “Hindi Songs” or specific artists, instead of content aggregators (Gaana or its competitors: Hungama, Saregama and Saavn). Hungama and Saavn might have the same music, but haven’t yet launched genre, language or artist specific apps. With Gaana going down this path, we might soon see similar apps from them.
Not the first to do this
While none of the major music streaming/aggregation companies, before Gaana, had adopted this strategy, others apps were already doing this. For Kishore Kumar music:
For Tamil Songs:
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Earlier this year, Gaana.com had introduced skippable advertisements like youtube and had opened up its API for music development. The company had been expanding its music catalogue for a while now. In February last year, the company partnered with the South Indian Music Companies Association (SIMCA) to acquire music from 79 regional labels to expand its catalogue. The website claims to have over 2 million songs across different genres like Bollywood, regional, devotional, among others. Gaana.com has also come up with a premium download service Gaana+ to support legal consumption of music.
Update: The apps are genre specific, not playlist specific, and we’ve corrected the story. Some typographical errors have also been fixed. Our apologies
