On-demand music streaming service Dhingana.com is shutting
down. The reasons behind the shutdown of the service are not clear yet,
but according to several people with knowledge of the development, a
formal announcement on the closure will be made this week.
Emails
sent to Dhingana founders Swapnil Shinde and Snehal Shinde did not
elicit any response. Even the chief executive officer Rohit Bhatia did
not respond to the calls and text messages sent by ET. The portal, which
claimed to have crossed nine-million monthly active unique users
globally, was backed by investors like Helion Venture Partners and
Inventus Capital Partners.
Launched in 2007,
Dhingana had raised $7 million in series B funding led by Lightspeed
Venture Partners. Experts point out that many music streaming services
are struggling because T-Series and Hungama have blocked access to
T-Series music for all services except for Hungama, hurting all
competition's offering. "I have been informed about the closure of
Dhingana a couple of days ago and I speak on behalf of the music
industry when I say it saddens us no end," Devraj Sanyal, managing
director of Universal Music and EMI Music South Asia said.
There
was a new wave of newer services from telecom companies, which are a
hybrid of the streaming and download models. "And those in my opinion
will be the greatest threat to the pure play streaming services," he
said.
With a minuscule wallet size of 95% of
the mobile population, the dream of millions of consumers paying 50-300
monthly depending on the level of the service is still a while away, he
says.
Dhingana was also facing competition
from other services like Saavn and Gaana.com, operated by Times
Internet, a subsidiary of BCCL. With 7.5-million monthly active users,
Gaana has just launched a new version for iPhone and Android devices
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