Gaana Claims Top Spot In India With 150 Mn Users, 30% Market Share

After crossing 150 Mn monthly active users in December 2019, Gaana has emerged as the biggest music streaming platform in India with control of over 30% of the market in January.

“As the industry leader, we have constantly innovated on the user experience to appeal to the first-generation mobile internet user and gained a deep understanding of the Indian music lover’s preferences that will now help us onboard the next quarter-billion Indians from tier II and tier III cities onto the music streaming bandwagon,” Gaana CEO, Prashan Agarwal said.

According to the OTT Audience Measurement Insights, Gaana is followed by JioSaavan with 24% market share and Wynk with 15% market share. Global music streaming giants like Spotify, Google Play Music, Amazon Prime Music and YouTube Music trail the Indian players. Spotify has control over 15% of the market, whereas Google Play Music had just 10% of the market share. Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music and YouTube Music trail the pack.

The market share of Spotify and YouTube Music comes as a surprise, given that both are just one year old in the Indian market. YouTube Music, which was launched in March 2019, managed to get 3 Mn downloads within a week of its launch. Whereas, Spotify managed to get 1 Mn within the first week. Launched in February 2019, Spotify managed to cross 2 Mn users by March 31, 2019.

Times Internet-backed Gaana’s catalogue includes more than 45 Mn songs across Bollywood, International and 30 other local languages — Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Punjabi and others.

While announcing 150 Mn active users, Gaana highlighted that it noted a 40% in the consumption of regional music and around 35% growth in the Bollywood music section. Last year, Gaana also launched several new features like video stories, artist dashboard, in-app voice assistant, sing-along lyrics, and smart downloads.

As per YouGov’s research report, YouTube Music is one of the most frequently used music apps by 23% of Indians. The report adds that access to the latest soundtracks and the ability to share music has struck a chord with Indian users.

Meanwhile, the report adds that 17% of all respondents claim that Gaana is the most frequently used app by them in order to listen to music. Gaana is followed by Google Play Music and JioSaavn with 13% users each.