Dhingana

» see dhingana.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

T-Series told Dhingana in December 2013 that it would not renew, and by 14 February 2014 the largest music streaming service in India had put up a goodbye note. Nearly eight thousand songs were about to leave the catalog, all of them from the label that owns the Bollywood soundtrack business more completely than any label owns anything anywhere.

The note read: 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.

Twin brothers, Snehal and Swapnil Shinde, had started it in 2007 as a free place to stream Hindi and regional Indian music, on the web first and then on phones as India moved onto phones. It raised eight and a quarter million dollars across two rounds, the second being seven million in October 2013 led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. More than ten million people had registered accounts by the end.

Four months between closing a seven million dollar round and closing the company.

~ the case file ~

~ eight thousand songs ~

Indian music licensing runs through a small number of very large catalogs, and T-Series sits on top of the pile. Its president said out loud in December 2013 what the label was thinking: the streaming business has to move from a free economy to a paid one, because the sustainability of an advertising-supported model is a big question mark.

He was describing the entire Indian market at the time. Dhingana was free and advertising-funded, and so were its two nearest competitors, Gaana with seven and a half million monthly users and Saavn behind it. The labels looked at what advertising was returning per Indian listener against the piracy figures and started declining to renew.

~ a different catalog ~

None of this reached me and I would not have known what to do with the catalog if it had. Bollywood playback and regional Indian music is a world I can describe and cannot hear properly, and the fight in question was between Indian services for Indian listeners on Indian mobile data. My own version of that year ran on a Turkish connection with a different set of labels behind it, and the services there were doing the same arithmetic just as badly.

What does travel is the mechanism. Every country got the same lesson at a different time and in the same order. Free streaming builds an audience that will not pay for it, and then the rights holder ends the arrangement.

~ the buyer ~

Rdio bought the company on 13 March 2014, a month after the shutdown, for an undisclosed amount. The whole team came with it, and the Shinde brothers joined Rdio's executive line to run expansion into India and other emerging markets. Rdio brought its own service to India after the deal.

Rdio filed for bankruptcy in November 2015 and sold its assets to Pandora. The Indian expansion went with it. Gaana and Saavn were both still standing, and both are still running now, Saavn under the JioSaavn name after Reliance folded its own music service into it.

~ the market it left ~

India ended up with one of the largest streaming audiences in the world and among the lowest revenue per listener anywhere, which is the shape Dhingana died holding. Ten million registered accounts with no working route to charge any of them, and one licensing decision in December that settled the whole thing.

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