Indian Music Streaming Service Dhingana Is No Longer Running Its Business

On-demand music streaming service Dhingana.com has shut shop, finally. For some time now, rumours were rife that the company was restructuring its operations and Soundbox was the first to report that Dhingana could be quitting the game soon.

When we visited the site today, a short message was up there that said: Goodbye! We hope that you enjoyed listening to Dhingana as much as we enjoyed building it. But alas, all good things must come to an end. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for letting us be a part of your musical moments! -- The Dhingana Team

It is the second music streaming service to shut shop within the span of three months. In November last year, Network18-owned In.com shut down its music offering as it could not meet the cost to content and monetisation was not adequate to continue the business. With Dhingana’s closure, the Indian music market will just have three major players in this space – Times Internet’s Gaana, Tiger Global-backed Saavn and Hungama, which is extensively supported by T-Series content.

Surprisingly, Dhingana has not given any specific reason for the sudden shutdown. Last we checked, its mobile app was up at Google Play Store.

One key reason could be T-Series withdrawing its music from Dhingana. T-Series said it was parting ways as there was very little traction on the Dhingana platform, compared to other services. So it is quite possible that a content crunch or revenue crunch has driven the company to withdraw its services.

“We were not able to see much traction in the service and secondly we couldn’t agree on the commercials and both parties thus decided to part ways in an amicable manner,” T-Series president Neeraj Kalyan told TechCrunch at the time of the break-up.

Set up in 2007 by twin brothers Swapnil and Snehal Shinde, Dhingana essentially operated from the US although the company had an India office in Pune. It was a popular music service and claimed to have more than 9 million unique users per month while more than 50% users accessed the service from the US and Europe. Dhingana offered a library of 1 million-plus songs, in more than 42 Indian languages and genres.

The company was backed by VC investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Helion Venture Partners and Inventus Capital Partners, and had raised $7 million in Series B funding in October 2012. Lightspeed led that round while existing investors Inventus and Helion also participated in the funding.

In spite of growing competition, Dhingana had gone ahead with its growth plans last year and tied up with General Mobile Corporation (G-Mobi) to pre-install its music app on 1 million devices. This would have enabled Dhingana’s Android app to be installed on Intex, Zen, Hitech, m-Tech and Maxx devices. The company also partnered with Idea Cellular for a music subscription service, which allows users to download unlimited music with no data charges. The service was to be made available to Idea users using Android smartphones and WAP feature phones. In a bid to monetise its mobile content, Dhingana came up with a paid subscription service for its iOS app, called Dhingana Gold.

With so many growth and monetisation plans in place, it is still unclear why Dhingana had to bite the dust and go out of business so suddenly. Watch this space as we bring you more updates on the latest development.

Image: Thinkstock Photos/Getty Images