MUMBAI: Music streaming service Gaana recently announced its partnership with music, film and video distribution company- The Orchard, which has resulted in an increase of Gaana’s catalogue from 3 million to 10 million songs. This partnership is exclusively for India.

Without disclosing details of the deal, Gaana business head Pawan Agarwal said, “We have been in talks with The Orchard for a while now. Partnering with them will help us expand further into the Indian market, and we will continue to expand our catalogue.” He added, “International music is a growing category. It is a top-category among the upper economic class, we understand our space and we want to grow further in our space.”

In February 2014, Gaana acquired the independent song portal Musicfellas, funded by TLabs. This acquisition was to further strengthen its brand through content in the indie space. With its new partnership with The Orchard, Gaana has now further expanded into the indie space, by adding over 7 million songs to its catalogue. Tracks by popular Indian indie acts including Raghu Dixit, Soulmate, Dhruv Ghanekar and Blackstratblues, will also be made available on the music service. Agarwal said, “Indie is growing in India but there is lot to be done in this space. There are many companies that have contributed to making the indie genre popular in the country. In the end, it is about good music getting the right platform and Gaana offers a platform. ”

Agarwal said, “Our focus is to create the best music experiences for our users, and we are focused on bringing the widest selection of songs from India and International markets to our consumers. The Orchard is an important partnership for us, and we believe consumers would love it.”

“We are excited to be working with Gaana as it grows its presence in India," said The Orchard CEO Brad Navin, "Bringing our quality catalogue to local listeners and extending our labels' brands in the region is the perfect representation of what we are about: using technology and relationships to bring music to engaged consumers wherever they are in the world." The Orchard operates in more than 25 global markets.

Gaana has limited itself to India, and the reason for doing so is because Gaana believes India has massive opportunities and the service wants to explore and exploit it to the maximum level. Agarwal said, “We are focussed in India and we have no plans to expand outside India at this point of time. There is a massive opportunity available in India. We have differentiated ourselves compared to other services, which helps us to reach out to our consumers.”  It has more than 15 million app downloads and over 12 million registered users.

This is the first major announcement Gaana has made since getting hacked in May this year. Following up on the hack, Agarwal said that the company is still in talks with the ethical hacker to join the company, and also has upgraded its service to prevent any such issues in the future. He also maintained that after the hacking incident Gaana did not face any loss in its user-base.