BANGALORE, INDIA: A portal that combines free song streaming as well as recommendation service should be music to ears.
Swapnil and Snehal Shinde's music streaming company Dhingana.com is a 'cross' between the more popular cousins Pandora and Spotify. Pandora is an Internet radio service for free music and automated music recommendation in the U.S. and Spotify a digital music service.
"One can listen to music as on radio and interactively select songs on our website," says Swapnil, one of the twin brothers, and co-founder and COO of Dhingana. Through the service, users can create and share playlists and musical greetings with friends as well as see what their friends are listening to.
"We use advanced built-in algorithms for clustering. We assure personalized never-ending stream of music and have strong focus on mobile platforms, including those of iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia's Symbian and Android."
Five years since its launch, he claims that the California-headquartered site has the largest catalog of songs streamed on the Internet in the country. "We have about 350,000 digitized songs from more than 300 music labels." It is spread across 35 Indian languages and 34 genres, which primarily comprise Bollywood songs. It also has albums, pop songs, ghazals, bhajans and other devotional music.
Shinde foresees the number of Internet users in the country to grow up to 500 million by 2015 and as an outcome, the opportunities multiplying manifold. "We have the biggest user base on mobile and Internet in this space in India. Our unique users are about 3.5 million per month, which has seen about a 300 per cent growth over the last one-and-a-half years."
The company is now keen on bringing out multiple OS and more platforms for mobiles. Says Shinde, "We always acquire more content and licensing deals as well. We are evaluating newer platforms, too, to add a lot of value to our apps."
Their business model is similar to that of Pandora's and, "as of now, users can stream all our contents for free. In future, we might explore subscriptions and other premium models," concludes Shinde, who used to specialize in engineering and product management for major companies in the past.