Dhingana
Dhingana provides online streaming of Indian music across the globe. More than 350,000 free on-demand songs are available in Dhingana, with over 35 Indian languages and genres. A recent announcement stated that they have 10.5 million ACTIVE visitors and the cloud-based service allows for international users unlike other streaming services.
Dhingana has AbOUT 200,000 new users that join every month, contributing to a monthly total of 100 million minutes of music streamed on the site. Dhingana’s founders Swapnil and Snehal Shinde know they can be compared to other music streaming sites like Pandora, Spotify and Slacker, but say their strongest competition is the fight against piracy in India. To fight piracy online, Dhingana created an interface that they describe as easy and reliable, with an abundance of free content that is accessible on mobile devices for usage when on the go. Dhingana apps are available on multiple platforms including iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia and Win8.
In May 2012, Dhingana also released an application for Facebook, allowing friends to share playlists and listen to music directly in their timeline. The launch of the Facebook app helps reinforce the focus on social music discovery and recommendations. In addition to fighting piracy, founder Snehal Shinde said that what makes Dhingana different is "we allow our users to easily discover music and share it with their friends, in a very social way. Also, we provide personalized music recommendations based on music that is already being enjoyed by users and their friends, to improve their music experience.". Open Graph integration is also supported in the Facebook app.
Company history
Launched in 2007, Dhingana was founded by twin brothers, Snehal and Swapnil Shinde along with Sushil Choudhari , former employees of Yahoo, Symantec and Microsoft, who started the company based on their love of Bollywood and Indian music. Their team consists of individuals from other successful software organizations including a former chief architect at Yahoo, and individuals involved with MySpace Music, Orkut, Zynga, Microsoft, Amazon and Google. The service is based out in Silicon Valley’s Sunnyvale with offices in Pune, India.
'Dhingana’ is a word from the Marathi language which means joy, zeal and frenzy.
Genres
- Hindi
- Marathi
- Tamil
- Telugu
- Malayalam
- Gujarati
- Bengali
- Punjabi
- Pop
- Remixes
- Bhajans
- Ghazals
- Devotional
- Sanskrit
- Urdu
- Nepali
Business model
Currently, Dhingana considers advertising as its primary revenue stream. Although the founders have discussed alternative revenue models such as subscriptions or downloads, "Shinde admitted that the company has so far not focused much on monetization, but said that it intends to focus on optimizing around revenues in Q3 of 2012 and hopes to break even by 2014."