Overall, Saavn has the smoothest playback
With the launch of its music app
last week, Gaana.com becomes the latest major music streaming
service to be available as a mobile app in India. While
Internet radio has been around for a long time, both in India
and abroad, it’s not been a huge success here until recently,
because both average connection speeds and access were quite
limited.
Today, music streaming in India is
split between three main services—Saavn.com, Dhingana.com and
Gaana.com. Saavn has a larger international presence, with
listeners around the world, and has nearly three times the
number of users of the other two services. Dhingana has a
larger regional catalogue and Gaana has a good catalogue of
English music in India, something the two other services added
on later. Gaana, however, still has the lead on that front.
The market for music streaming
in India is enormous—the latest Internet and Mobile
Association of India numbers suggest that there are 150
million Internet users in India, and for most, piracy is the
only affordable way to access the music they want given that
there aren’t many legal sources of digital content. With the
numbers for mobile users skyrocketing, streaming is a
solution.
At around Rs.6
per song, services like Flyte and iTunes are fairly expensive,
and that’s where companies like Dhingana and Saavn come in,
relying on ad revenue to let users listen to the music for
free. Both Satyan Gajwani (CEO, Times Internet Ltd, which owns
Gaana.com) and Vinodh Bhat (CEO, Saavn.com) feel that
streaming is competing with piracy, and not paid download
services such as iTunes or Flyte, because piracy offers the
same content for free.
Streaming offers a large variety of
free content with ease of use and safe, virus-free access to a
large library of music, making it a viable alternative to
piracy. Bhat tells us that the numbers are likely to be driven
by mobile users, because “mobile users are much more engaged
and listen to more songs in a session than a Web user”.
With a number of great free options
available today, which is your best bet?
Gaana is the only ad-free music app
Pros:
The mobile app clearly needs a few tweaks, but it shares a lot
of the design input with the website. Gaana.com launched in
early 2011, and with just over one million songs, it has a
comparatively smaller catalogue.
To make up for this, the app
features a lot of curated “Best of…” lists to get you
listening to popular music. At the same time, the focus is a
little different from the other apps where search has the
priority. Gaana’s “radio mode” can also automatically build
playlists for you, based on the music you’ve been listening to
and the song you’re on when you press the radio button, to
help you find tracks you haven’t heard before.
The app also handles its social
integration really well—it’s easy to set up, you can keep it
from spamming your wall, and it finds your friends quickly.
Gaana’s friend list allows you to see what music your friends
are listening to, and also any playlists they’ve created.
These are not static lists, so if your friend then changes the
songs in the playlist, that shows up on your device as well.
While the eventual model will
likely be ad-supported, Gaana is currently the only ad-free
music app. So it has, for now, the nicest user experience.
Aside
from Gaana, Gajwani’s team has also been working on BoxTV, a
TV-streaming service which could work like Hulu or Netflix,
letting users watch movies, TV shows and trailers on demand.
Cons: The
radio feature feels underdeveloped. You often get stuck with a
single album or a single artiste instead of finding music
which wouldn’t have been heard otherwise. Another issue is
that the app currently performs badly on EDGE—it can take a
long time to start streaming though playback is generally
smooth. Wi-Fi and 3G performance don’t have any issues.
Saavn
Pros:
Saavn’s app has a minimal design which is easy to use,
particularly in phones. According to Saavn, the service has
two million songs, with songs in six languages—Hindi,
Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and English. The English
songs were added in November, partly because as an American
company, Saavn’s focus was on the large demand for Indian
music outside India.
Once you’re playing tracks
though, the buttons on the app clash with the Android buttons
and make it look cluttered without really helping the user.
Saavn’s implementation of adaptive
streaming is well done—the company has six different versions
of each song saved, and dynamically switches between them to
prevent any loss of quality. Overall, Saavn definitely offered
the smoothest playback at all times.
Cons: Saavn
is due for a redesign. The entry screen looks bland and the
player, cluttered. And since it’s an older service, there are
already a lot of ads on the screen which play before your
songs do.
Dhingana has the biggest selection
of local music
Dhingana
Pros:
Launched in 2007, and based in California, US, Dhingana is one
of the oldest streaming services around, and the huge amount
of local music available on the site reflects this. While it
has fewer tracks than Gaana, the 3.5 million songs in the
catalogue are in 35 Indian languages.
Like Saavn, Dhingana also uses
adaptive streaming, allowing the best possible quality for
your connection even when you’re on the move. This means that
unlike Gaana, which sometimes gives a bad experience on a 2G
connection, Dhingana offers smooth playback.
While it doesn’t have the same
degree of social sharing, Dhingana integrates “trends” showing
what even people you’re not connected to are listening to.
Cons: If
Saavn looks bland, Dhingana looks downright ugly. The home
page has four buttons and a logo that looks like it was made
using MS Paint. In a few cases, the thumbnails presented with
songs were not kept in the proper aspect ratio, so you see
squashed pictures, and the screens look too plain.
