Is Dhingana shutting up shop?

Rumors are rife that social music streaming site Dhingana is looking to ring the curtain down on its service. As per a report by Soundbox, the US- and Pune-based music streaming company is looking to close up shop soon. A Medianama report quoted Rohit Bhatia, CEO, Dhingana, as stating that the company is restructuring the operations. However, he refused to comment on the alleged shutdown.

Emails sent out to Swapnil and Snehal Shinde, the sibling founder duo of Dhingana, did not elicit a response at the time of posting this story.

The Soundbox report cited T-Series President Neeraj Kalyan as saying that the company has withdrawn music from Dhingana as they were not seeing much traction on the platform compared with other services. "We were not able to see much traction from this platform compared with other similar services in India and abroad and thus decided to part ways in an amiable manner," Kalyan stated.

To this, Bhatia responded that Dhingana's contract with T-Series ended earlier this month and they have deliberately not renewed it since they don't have T-Series on mobile. "Today, more than 75 per cent of my users are on mobile. We're a mobile-first company. When the licence expired, it was mutually agreed that we would not renew it," he said. The site will suffer a huge setback in terms of content as T-Series is the label behind a lot of Bollywood music and the non-renewal of the contract could also result in loss of goodwill in market.

As per the last update, Dhingana had crossed 9 million users globally. The company is backed by VCs like Lightspeed Ventures, Helion Venture Partners and Inventus Capital Partners and raised its last round of $7 million in October 2012.

It also launched its paid subscription model in July this year and more recently tied up with General Mobile to pre-load the app on one million handsets. With all this going for the music streaming company, is it plausible that it would suddenly shut shop?

We will update the post as we get more information.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)