Gaana tops audio streaming charts with 30% share

MUMBAI: Gaana, the music streaming service owned by Times Internet, has emerged as the leader in the category with a 30% market share in January, according to OTT Audience Measurement Insights, a passive, continuous audience measurement service.

Gaana was ahead of competitors including JioSaavn (24%), Wynk and Spotify (15% each), and Google Play Music (10%), in the music streaming space last month, according to the first OTT Audience Measurement Insights report. All other music services, including Amazon Prime Music and YouTube Music, put together had a 7% market share.

"Happy to note that the Kantar report reinforces the fact that Gaana is the clear market leader in audio OTT,” said Prashan Agarwal, CEO - Gaana.


“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.”

The OTT audience measurement service has been launched by WPP-owned media measurement platform Kantar and audience measurement technology company VTION. The report is based on data collected from more than 9,000 mobile users in the country’s top nine cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad and Lucknow/Kanpur). It covered male and female users aged 18 years and above.

Gaana’s top markets in January were Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad, while for JioSaavn, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Lucknow/Kanpur and Mumbai were the core markets.

Listeners spent 63 minutes per day on Gaana, 49 minutes on Jio Saavn and 40 minutes and 39 minutes per day on Google Play Music and Wynk, respectively.

Times Internet is owned by BCCL, which also publishes The Economic Times.

“Today, the listeners are spoilt for choice as far as content consumption is concerned and move across the platforms to fulfil their entertainment needs,” said Hemant Mehta, the managing director of the Insights Division and chief strategy officer at Kantar South Asia.

Mehta said the OTT Audience measurement will provide insights on listening habits across devices, age groups, peak times, and genres. “Our joint initiative with VTION has provided the industry with the much-needed metrics that will ultimately help the marketers understand the consumer profiles, their content and platform preferences required for effective communication planning and implementation,” Mehta added.

“We believe that a well-defined and unbiased independent measurement system will catalyse growth even more as marketers, platform owners and content owners will be able to drive relevance, programme meaningfully and target audiences effectively,” VTION founder and CEO Manoj Dawane said.

The two companies will release monthly reports for some time, gradually shifting to a weekly model. Starting April, they plan to release similar data for video streaming services. “We plan to offer OTT insights similar to what BARC India offers for TV,” Mehta said.