Gaana — English Music Catalogue

Disclaimer: This and the articles that follow are an attempt at understanding the music tech industry from a Product perspective. We do not claim to be experts in the field. All we claim is to be students of music tech. We hope this series will help others understand music tech and hopefully appreciate the industry.

Gaana for me was the first platform where I couldn’t find some of the music I listen to on an everyday basis. I agree that I don’t always listen to the most popular music, but some of these artists I couldn’t find were artists who are big enough to be touring the world all the time.

Gaana was the first platform that I tried and I decided to not use full time directly because of the lack of music that was available. Surprisingly, I did find a lot of Indian artists who I didn’t find on Apple music and Saavn. Maybe this is because it is cheaper/free for an artist to put up music on the platform or maybe because they have a faster uploading process?

What was super disappointing for me in particular was that the first artist I searched for was the artist I was currently listening to all the time. It was a band called Twelve Foot Ninja who played in my city a few weeks back and I’ve been listening to them 24/7. And when I searched for them on Gaana, they weren’t even available. I know its not right to make my first impression the last one, but I can’t help but be sad about it.

Now, as I entered the website, I saw a lot of Hindi music. I was disappointed but in 5 seconds, I was thrown with a prompt to select language. On selecting English, the whole page data reloaded with English music. This made me feel a little more comfortable. I started playing a song, and it had “Autoplay” on by default. The really liked the second song that played but it honestly had no relation to the first song I played. It was probably just a random suggestion that I coincidentally liked.

Gaana has a “Radio” section that is located in their primary navigation. On clicking on it, again I saw only Hindi radios. This again was super disappointing as an English-only user. They have a “Top songs” section in the “Browse” category of the Primary navigation which suggested a lot of nice music but I guess that’s them picking out the most listened to songs and showing it. Also, on closer observation, I noticed that the song “random” song that Gaana played and all the songs that followed that up were songs from the Top Songs.

Their “Discover” section again has a big issue of showing me only Hindi playlists which now started to really get to me and would probably have led to me closing the web app if I wasn’t doing a review on it.

Overall, Gaana seems to have a lot of Hindi music which you can find out more about from an article in our publication written by Mittul. But in terms of English music, they seem to have most of the pop music but if you’re someone like me who is picky about their artists, I would definitely not recommend it. Also, not having good and easily accessible playlists for English music is also a big deal breaker.

Note: This is the seventh article among a series of articles that I will be writing related to the music tech industry under a publication called “Uncovering Music Tech”. Do let me know what you think. You can get in touch with me via LinkedIn Here, Instagram Here and my Twitter Here.