Music streaming site Gaana.com unveils a new look with personalised features; what's new?

Gaana.com, a music streaming service from the house of Times Internet Ltd, has revamped its site adding new features to make it easier for users to browse and discover different genres of music. The new version boasts of thousands of editorially curated playlists, professionally programmed radio streams and a host of social and personalisation features. It also offers listeners an opportunity to tune into a variety of pre-programmed radio streams, featuring popular Radio Jockeys' bytes, celebrity favourites and loads of curated music.

The new version allows one to browse music on the home page by new releases, most popular, genres, etc, and sort music by popularity and alphabetical order, etc. The company said in a press release that it will soon feature radio stations based on artist, genre and other categories.

The firm claims that currently it has more than 2 million songs from Bollywood, international and regional movies on its platform spanning 84 languages and multiple genres. The firm has also added a 'Themes' feature, along the lines of Google's email service Gmail to allow users to choose and customise from some 10 background themes available on the platform. In July this year, Gaana launched a Karaoke feature, called SingAlong, which allows customers to sing along existing songs and earn virtual points based on their performance.

While the SingAlong feature is something new in India, the curated radio stations application is not new. Gaana's competitor Dhingana is already running this feature on its portal that offers 16 radio stations across various music categories, genres and themes. Gaana was launched in 2011 and early this year, it launched mobile apps on Android, iOS, BlackBerry and J2ME platforms. Post that, it rolled out subscription-based premium service Gaana+ for iOS and also upgraded to version 2.0 with new features.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)