Music streaming app Gaana expects to have over 200 million subscribers in the next two years on its platform, a top company official has said.
The Times Internet subsidiary has only 80 million monthly active users at present and streams over 2.2 billion songs every month.
The music streaming market is estimated to have 150 million users now, which is expected to expand to over 400 million over the next two-three years.
“In the next two years, we think the market will grow from 150 million users to over 400 million users and we would like to lead the market with over 50 percent market share,” Gaana chief executive Prashan Agarwal told PTI.
With a content library of 30 million songs across 26 languages, most of its customers are free customers now, while the paid subscriber base, though growing at 100 percent, is in lower single digit only.
He further said Gaana, launched in 2010, is still in investment and growth mode and it will take time for them to be profitable.
“We continue to be in an investment mode. The market is only at about 10 percent penetration and we think that at least a 50-60 percent penetration of the total population is needed to make money. Today growth and investments are the key agendas for us,” he said.
Though he claimed that revenue is growing at 100 per cent, declined to quantify it.
The company, which raised $115 million this March from Chinese Internet investment company Tencent and Times Internet, said it has no immediate fund raising plans and a good run-rate for the next 18 months.
Agarwal declined to share investment details of the company since its inception, but said it plans to sell shares to the public some years down the line.
The company is investing on machine learning and artificial intelligence-related technologies to personalize music experiences.
It is banking on its voice search feature to drive the consumption over the next two years, as millennial find it convenient and most of its new-users would be from vernacular background who would prefer using the voice search than typing in English, he said.
Agarwal said that voice search is consumed by 22 percent users now, and is expected to cross 50 percent in the next two years.
This is published unedited from the PTI feed.
