MUMBAI: Buoyed by the successful launch of Gaana HotShots (short videos), live streaming & podcasts, India’s largest music streaming app, Gaana has consolidated its leadership position in the country’s audio OTT sector with over 185 million monthly active users.

The platform is currently powering more than 3.3 Bn streams with more than 35% contribution from regional music. Efforts on AI/machine learning-based recommendations have shown great progress, and are now powering more than 27% of music consumption. Podcasts on Gaana are contributing more than 50 million minutes of consumption and the UGC podcast platform is now seeing more than 2500 user-generated podcasts per month.

The latest to join the bandwagon in Gaana’s new product initiatives is HotShots, a short video section (similar to TikTok) within its app, that offers Indian content enthusiasts intuitive, seamless & snappy tools to create & share short viral videos. This will offer emerging & established influencers the perfect opportunity to create an audience for themselves and build their own success stories. Top influencers and creators like Neha Kakkar, Darshan Raval, Riyaz Aly, Avneet Kaur, Jannat Zubair, Awez Darbar, Anushka Sen, Nagma Mirajkar, Ritz Badlani and Baba Jackson have joined the Gaana HotShots platform to create exclusive content across music, comedy, dance, lip-sync and other categories. In the past three weeks, more than 300,000 creators have signed up on Gaana HotShots to offer creative short videos.

In the launch month of HotShots, nearly 80% of Gaana users were retained loyalists, and this means that users find huge value in the concept of a Super App with Music, Podcasts & Short videos all at one single destination. Gaana believes that this will power it to an additional 100 Mn new users in the next 12 months.

Prashan Agarwal, CEO - Gaana said, "Over the years, we have been relentless in our focus on consumer-centricity & foresight on product innovation. As one the biggest home-grown digital entertainment platforms in the past decade, we have invested heavily in building a comprehensive multilingual content library, and a solid AI-led technological foundation that makes content discovery and access convenient and enjoyable for every Indian. Currently, 80% of all Gaana users are loyalists, i.e. they love the idea of being able to access songs, podcasts and short videos from their favorite artists in a single integrated experience. We believe this ability to deliver a strong value to entertainment-lovers will help us onboard 250 Mn new users in the next 12 months.”

In the past year and a half, Gaana has launched several innovative & industry-first initiatives like being the first music app to introduce 24*7 Curated Online Entertainment Content Feed, gamification of content consumption with Gaana Coins and unveiling features like in-app AI-led ‘For You’ personalized song recommendations, multilingual Voice assistant, sing-along lyrics, vertical videos, instant app experience or Smart Downloads, where the app automatically downloads a premium user’s favorite tracks based on their listening history to deliver substantial value to the digital music experience of users across India.