Month: April 2019

We all need to invest significantly, for that, more competition is good as companies will invest to educate the users and grow the market because that’s the need of the hour, says Agarwal Music streaming app Gaana crossed 100 million monthly active users (MAU) in March 2019 and its CEO, Prashan Agarwal, believes for further growth, targeting tier-2 and 3 cities is the way to go because “the next 100-200 million users will pretty much be from those cities”. Gaana claimed its user growth was the fastest in tier-2 cities (96%), followed by tier-1 cities (84%) and tier-3 cities (78%) in the last year. Here are the excerpts: The competition is rapidly increasing in the music streaming space with the arrival of Spotify and YouTube music. How do you see it? The penetration of music streaming is only 10% in the Indian market with around 150 million users, the market needs to grow to 600 million in the next 2-3 years. We all need to invest significantly, for that, more competition is good as companies will invest to educate the users and grow the market because that’s the need of the hour. Gaana has the lead of at least 1-2 […]

Telecom operator Bharti Airtel Tuesday announced a foray into music video streaming with focus to tap 200 million potential users in tier-II and III towns. “There is a large population in tier-II and III towns and villages who wants to listen to music as well as watch videos. We have developed Wynk Tube to reach out to 200 million users. This includes both Airtel and non-Airtel customers,” Bharti Airtel Chief Executive Officer (Content and Apps) Sameer Batra said while announcing the launch. The music platform of Wynk claims to have 100 million users. “With Wynk Tube, users will have option to switch to video of song that they want to watch and switch back to audio only,” Batra said. Wynk Tube will focus on vernacular content to reach out to users in small towns and cities. “The app will be available to users in 12 Indian regional languages including Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Bhojpuri,” Batra said. This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.

Bharti Airtel on Tuesday said that it proposes to sync its music and video apps with its direct-to-home (DTH) offering, so that the content can be watched through television as well. “We will eventually get there (streaming on television through DTH). We have only had Wynk for the last 4-5 quarters, so I don’t think this is a big issue. Technology-wise, any model will work,” Sameer Batra, CEO, Content and Apps, Airtel, told BusinessLine. However, there are no plans for a ‘Live TV’, he said, adding that the company does not have any rights for it. Wynk Tube launched After the success of its over the top (OTT) music streaming app Wynk Music, Bharti Airtel on Tuesday launched its new music streaming app Wynk Tube, which has a collection of 40-lakh songs and related videos. The company is offering a free trial for the first 30 days and then charge Rs 99 from non Airtel customers. For Airtel subscribers, it will remain free. The app will be available to only Android devices right now, and the company would think of iOS devices later. With this Airtel has further expanded its fast growing content portfolio, especially keeping in mind the needs […]

In a Beats 1 interview with Zane Lowe, Philadelphia R&B singer Pink Sweat$ laid out his ambition: “I’m trying to expand people’s palettes of black music.” To achieve this, Pink leans on lonely guitar and natural beats (“Listen to Bobby McFerrin and you’ll understand,” he adds). The spare accompaniment allows his voice to blossom across this five-song EP. The backyard strummer “I Know” shows his ability to get to the heart of a matter without being overcome by it. The genesis and aftermath of a love hangover plays out in the two-parter “Coke & Henny”—”Pt. 1” is playful and strutting, “Pt. 2” is solemn and regretful. “Your Side” and “Body Ain’t Me” reveal the old-school R&B soul—he’s from Philly, after all—underneath those comfy pink sweats. https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/volume-2-ep/1457267889?app=music

There’s one moment critical to understanding the emotional and cultural heft of Lemonade—Beyoncé’s genre-obliterating blockbuster sixth album—and it arrives at the end of “Freedom,” a storming empowerment anthem that samples a civil-rights-era prison song and features Kendrick Lamar. An elderly woman’s voice cuts in: “I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up,” she says. “I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.” The speech—made by her husband JAY-Z’s grandmother Hattie White on her 90th birthday in 2015—reportedly inspired the concept behind this radical project, which arrived with an accompanying film as well as words by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire. Both the album and its visual companion are deeply tied to Beyoncé’s identity and narrative (her womanhood, her blackness, her husband’s infidelity) and make for Beyoncé’s most outwardly revealing work to date. The details, of course, are what make it so relatable, what make each song sting. Billed upon its release as a tribute to “every woman’s journey of self-knowledge and healing,” the project is furious, defiant, anguished, vulnerable, experimental, muscular, triumphant, humorous, and brave—a vivid personal statement from the most powerful woman in music, released without warning in a time of […]

It isn’t just us curled up on the sofa binge-watching Game of Thrones in our trackies; it’s also your favourite artists, cradling a bowl of snacks, streaming away on the tour bus. As this compilation of Thrones-inspired songs makes clear, their fascination with the fabled, now-iconic drama runs deep. On “Too Many Gods”, A$AP Rocky and Joey Bada$$ mull over false prophets while dropping in a GoT reference (“Playing with fire but I’m no Targaryen”). Singer-songwriters like Jacob Banks, Lennon Stella, Chloe x Halle and ROSALÍA imbue their tributes with stern keys and an existential dread that’s so familiar to the show’s fans. And it’s especially fun to hear a pop singer like Ellie Goulding tap into a sinister ruthlessness on “Hollow Crown”: “Making a noose out of your hollow crown/I hold a match up to your paper castle/And watch it all burn down, down, down.” https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/for-throne-music-inspired-by-hbo-series-game-thrones/1458925215?app=music

“Hurts 2B Human was sort of a pebble that rolled downhill and became this boulder,” P!nk told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe. “It just kept steamrolling.” In 2018, while touring her seventh album, Beautiful Trauma, the singer found herself in spontaneous recording sessions with musicians she’d never worked with before (Beck, Sia, Chris Stapleton, Cash Cash, Wrabel, Imagine Dragons’ Dan Reynolds and many others). Eventually, she realised she’d made album number eight—a lightly political package of sentimental ballads and pre-game bangers that feels like like classic P!nk. The topical numbers speak to the times. “The news will try to make you believe that everybody hates each other, and it’s just not true,” she said about the inspiration behind the title track, which features Khalid and was written by Teddy Geiger (best known for authoring some of Shawn Mendes’ biggest hits). “I am a woman, Khalid is a man, he’s African American, I’m Jewish… Everybody has their own experience and is going through something, so it’s all about the circle you create around you to get through all the bulls**t in this world. That’s where this song came from.” In the EDM-inspired “Can We Pretend” featuring Cash Cash, she asks rhetorical […]

“Jacknife took our brains for a walk,” Catfish and the Bottlemen’s Van McCann tells Apple Music about working with Killers and U2 producer Jacknife Lee. “You’d be surrounded by music all day. Every other day, you’d get a knock at the door and it would be new vinyls he’d ordered to show you new stuff. You’d be buzzing off his excitement.” These brain strolls have helped bring extra adventure and exploration to the band’s third album. The Balance still contains the key ingredients that have taken Catfish from indie-rock tyros to arena-fillers in a few years: exhilarating choruses, pin-sharp melodies and relatable lyrics (on “Basically”, McCann even sings about doing housework). “Don’t write anything that isn’t worth a place on a set list some night,” says McCann. “By the end of the year, we would have done every arena in the [UK] and probably sold them all out. Where’s it go from there? It has to go outdoors, and you’ve got to start writing songs that are big enough for those occasions. It was always about pushing it.” Here, McCann and guitarist Johnny Bond take us through the album track by track. “Longshot”Van McCann: “This is the first one we […]

Universal Music Group has become the first major international label to license its catalog to uduX, a Nigeria-based music streaming service. The service is currently available as part of subscription with music and lifestyle company Habari, but will soon have its own stand-alone app. Effective immediately, uduX will distribute music from UMG’s extended family of labels, giving subscribers access to both Nigerian and global artists including Bob Marley, Maroon 5, Tekno, Lady Zamar, Post Malone, Eminem, Nicki Minaj, Brenda Fassie, World, J. Cole, Mr. Eazi, Lil Wayne, Hugh Masekela, Tamia and others. “This partnership extends our reach and makes our artists’ music even more accessible to Nigerian music lovers,” said Ezegozie Eze Jr., general manager, Universal Music Nigeria. “We are delighted to be the first global music company to partner with uduX and look forward to bringing the extraordinary creativity of our artists to as many Nigerian users as possible.” UMN launched in July 2018 and is based in Lagos. In November the label became the first major to license its catalog to Africa’s biggest streaming platform Boomplay, which recently announced it has raised $20 million in Series A funding to continue its rapid expansion on the emerging continent. In […]

MUMBAI: Even as global biggies like Spotify and YouTube Music have made their entry in India this year, Gaana, the music streaming service owned by Times Internet, has cemented its position on the leader board as the country’s top ondemand music streaming service. The service clocked 80 million monthly active users (MAUs) in February, out of the total market of 150 million users, said Prashan Agarwal, CEO of Gaana. The service, which hosts 2.7 billion songs across genres — Bollywood, non-film, regional and English music — has witnessed 100% year-onyear jump in terms of both, revenue and paid subscribers. “We continue to lead the space with a clear majority. Now we are focusing on taking the product to the next level to give our users best experience. Last year, we launched voice assistant, which is now used by 24% of our users for a lean-back experience,” Agarwal said. The company’s investments in new age technologies have also paid off. A voice assistance service powered by Google’s text-to-speech allows users to search and play music or playlists based on singers/ actors/ mood/time of day and more. “Our machine learning algorithms have now started predicting user behaviour and almost 17% of songs […]

It is easy to get nostalgic for the era when most music lovers bought LPs. They would save their pennies for a Saturday trip to the local record store, before heading home clutching their glorious new vinyl in a plastic bag to drop the needle on the turntable and listen on repeat. This anachronistic ritual will be resurrected on International Record Store Day on Saturday April 13, as consumers queue to buy exclusive limited edition vinyl releases from their favourite artists. Launched a decade ago, this annual event is an industry drive to boost ailing independent record stores in an age when most people stream music online. Ah, the good old days. pxhere, CC BY-SA But is it actually true that earlier generations placed a greater value on recorded music than music fans in the present day? We are loath to succumb to the mythology of a “golden age” for music and lend credence to baby boomers moaning of bygone days when music somehow mattered more than it does now. We decided to investigate the numbers to see if they told a different story. As it turns out, they do – and it’s far worse than we expected. We conducted […]