Gaana’s Shashwat Goswami on the growing clout of regional content in music streaming

Shashwat Goswami leads Gaana’s brand marketing, user growth and retention initiatives. With 15 years of experience, Goswami has handled marketing and business roles across leading FMCG and e-commerce brands across brands like Pepsi, Kurkure, Grofers and several other smaller brands.

Click here to check the Award Categories

For the World Music Day this year, Gaana paid an ode to the world’s diverse and rich culture with a specially curated playlist, called “Gaana World Tour”, which featured top songs in almost 50 languages, taking the listeners on a global journey through the universal language of music.

In conversation with Adgully, Shashwat Goswami, Head of Marketing, Gaana, speaks about the emerging trends in music streaming in India, the rise in regional content consumption, challenges that music streaming apps face, innovations introduced for the users, and more.

What are the trends dominating the music industry currently?

Regional consumption has gone up, sad songs consumption has gone up and all over, the music industry is opening up to a great deal of vernacular music as well, where people are opening up to listening to music in different languages. Thus, the Gaana world tour playlist also works really well based on this trend.

What are your observations on content consumption trends in the country? How much has the pandemic period impacted this consumption?

Usually the peak music listening times are typically the morning and evening commutes on a BAU basis, let’s say morning 9 am to 11 am and evening 6 pm to 10 pm, which are the big spikes that we have seen. But since commutes were not happening during the Covid period, these spikes plateaued at an average across the day. Some of the trends mentioned earlier, such as the rise in regional consumption and growth of Indie music were also observed during the pandemic. With no big movies getting released, Indie music got more bandwidth to grow, and so did regional music. Another content consumption trend that we saw, especially during the pandemic, was that of devotional and motivational content. Besides, a lot of people have started consuming non-music content on Gaana as well, such as podcast and videos stories. The three big genres are – Romance, Motivational, and Devotional content.

What are the key challenges that you face during streaming and broadcasting?

The biggest challenge is the scale in which we operate – 180 million users across web and close to 40 million on the app. These are monthly active users, that is a huge number of users. The biggest challenge for Gaana or any streaming app is how do you personalise the experience of 40 million users. Tamil users want Tamil content to be discoverable easily, Punjabi users need Punjabi content to be discoverable easily, at the same time a lot of users are dual language, so they might be consuming Punjabi + Hindi + English, so they become multi-language in a sense. Therefore, what proportion of songs do they need and in which language is a key question. The biggest challenge of streaming is how do you personalise the recommendations, and the look and feel of the app based on what you know about each and every user.

What kind of innovations can we expect in the field of music?

A lot of stuff is happening behind the scenes on innovation. Gaana is India’s most loved app for a reason, because we keep Indians at the centre of the plan. For example, one of the innovations that Gaana has done historically and even today is a big differentiator for us, which is the fact that you will find 24 different languages on Gaana. If you go to the setting of Gaana, you can see Gaana in 20+ language songs, those songs can be browsed in 12+ languages, which is not something even global players are able to offer.

Moreover, now there is so much active participation of artists when it comes to creating content and having an active performance.

There is also innovation in terms of music experience on Gaana. For people who don’t understand English, the content will be translated for them in their local languages independently, you can browse on the app and use the app in the language you are familiar with and that is big localisation and innovation that Gaana has done in the past.

Increasingly we are doing innovations in the content, such as we are the first one to experiment with live events and live concerts getting streamed on the platform. Recently, we did 8 events – no other streaming app has done 8 live events in the last month. That’s another innovation being led by Gaana. We are doing more and more live events for Gaana users and a lot more innovations are happening in terms of how we want our users to experience music and a lot of features are getting developed on UI/UX and products, which we cannot talk about right now, but will be launching soon.