Digital Music Service Saavn Crosses 9M Active Users & 1M Daily Streams

One of the Techcircle Fastrack 2012 Winners Saavn (South Asian Audio Video Network), a US-based free Indian digital music service, has announced that the company's active users worldwide (across Web, iOS and Android platforms) has hit 9.3 million mark, 25 per cent increase from December, 2011.

It says the registrations for the service have increased five-fold since 2011 and are currently at 1.25 lakh per month. The listening hours have also increased five times with over 2 million hours of content streaming per month and the daily streams have increased to over 1 million, according to the company.

Saavn had launched its music service on the social networking site Facebook in December, 2011 and the service had around 7 lakh Facebook-connected users till mid last month. This number has now grown almost 3 times to over 2 million, with Saavn content published on Facebook every 5 seconds in over 200 countries.

The startup offers an ad-supported digital music service available globally on Web, iOS and Android and the music offered under the service has been licensed from over 200 content providers. The service also provides dynamic audio bitrate adjustment for better streaming on any connection quality (EDGE, GPRS, 3G, 4G and WiFi).

The company was founded as BODVOD networks in 2006 by Vin Bhat, Neal Shenoy, and Paramdeep Singh, in a partnership between New York-based parent company 212Media (also founded by Bhat, Shenoy, and Singh) and Indian company Hungama and Schramm Sports & Entertainment.

Some other players in the domain include Gaana.com, MusicIndiaOnline and Raaga.com, among others.

Saavn has also announced that its Saavn Radio service which was launched for Android in July 2011 will be launching soon on iOS. Saavn currently has 2 million mobile users, and as of January 2012, it is downloaded for iOS or Android once every 10 seconds.

Out of the worldwide usage of the service, more than 50 per cent (58 per cent to be exact) comes from India, followed by the US with 10 per cent. Additionally, 59 per cent of the total Web traffic, 68 per cent of the total Android traffic and 27 per cent of the iOS traffic comes from the country. These numbers are not surprising considering the fact that it is an Indian music service after all (the reason for the low iOS numbers is that Android is the most popular operating system in the country).

The company was and is currently developing its music products for launch on Java (J2ME), Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile platforms.

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