GAANA MUSIC APP PRODUCT ANALYSIS — Part 1

6 min readJul 12, 2020

The article aims to describe a few admirable features of the GAANA app and suggest improvements in it. To uncover the product story, I have touched upon the basic needs of a user. Then I have outlined a typical user journey and use cases to substantiate the user journey. The second half of the article elaborates on some key features of the app as well as a few areas of improvement. These can be derived from the use-cases mentioned in the article. After reading this article one would be able to answer frequently asked product improvement interview questions with ease.

What is Gaana Music app ?

Gaana — India’s largest online music streaming app hosts 30 million songs in 21 different languages. Streaming refers to the process of listening to music in real-time without actually downloading it. Gaana touts a consumer base of 150 million monthly active users and 3X YOY growth in its paid subscribers base. They are not only credited for reducing music piracy but also changing the behavior of music listeners in India.Gaana(streaming industry as a whole) has benefited from the recent wave of low-cost data availability and thus enabling the music streaming giant to understand the music preferences of the diverse Indian diaspora.

How Gaana make revenue?

At present, approximately 90% of listeners use the free service. Advertisements remain the primary source of revenue contribution, followed by subscription. Gaana premium is available at a pocket-friendly price of Rs. 99 per month, Rs.199 for a quarter and Rs. 1098 for a year. At present, Gaana is offering a special discount on its one-year subscription. The yearly plans are heavily discounted even more for students — a proven retention strategy to prevent acquired customers from switching to other music streaming services. Mostly music seekers (music lovers who actively lookout for good music and spend a lot of time discovering music on their own) upgrade to the premium model. The premium model allows users:

Ad-free access
Song downloads (offline)
HD quality audio

Source: gaana.com

User Needs

Gaana/ any music streaming app caters to below user needs:

Access to an online music library
Discover music by self or through recommendations
Stream music on multiple devices
Store music offline
Play music on a speaker

Customer journey and sample use-cases

Here is a sample journey the user takes post landing on the app:

A user starts with a search
Reviews or browse charts, genres, new releases; this can be step one for many users who decide what to listen after landing on the platform
Finally, the user streams/listens one of the results

Now, I will brainstorm activities the users may want to do at each of the stages mentioned above.

Let’s start with Search. Some thoughts users may have at this stage.

“ I want to listen to the music of a given artist, genre, language, region, musical era, etc”
“ I want to listen to music but I don’t exactly know what I want to listen**”
“ I want to listen to music while meditating, working out or any other activity”

In the Review stage, the user may think:

“I scroll through the results to figure out what to play”
“I want to fine-tune the results search based on certain attributes .”
“I want to know if other listeners with similar interests liked a particular song or playlist”
“I want to curate a playlist that matches my interests, present mood, etc”
“I want to curate a playlist with a friend or a group of friends”

Post Decision stage, the user may want to

“I want to view the lyrics of the song that is playing”
“I want to add another song to my queue list or curate a new playlist”
“I want recommendations on what to add in my queue or playlist”
“I want to add a song to an existing playlist ”
“I want to share a song with a friend or group of friends with the motivation that they would listen to it”

Please note the use cases listed are not exhaustive and not all of them are catered to in the product. Also, some of the use cases may apply to more than 1 stage. For example, the user may want to curate a playlist by self before beginning to listen to music.

Feature Highlights

Curation: Gaana heavily relies on curated playlists to drive engagement and retention. Playlists are often curated artists, super hits of a particular decade, language, etc.
Quick Discovery: Gaana sports quick filters based on attributes important to the user on its home screen to make the search process smarter and faster. Some popular quick filters that one would see are language, artists, decade, genre, etc.
Social Sharing: Gaana allows users to share songs (not playlists unlike Spotify) via Whatsapp, Linkedin(not sure why), Hangouts, msg, mail, etc.
Lyrics Display: This is my personal favorite. This feature is a bane for users who enjoy singing and are shit at remembering lyrics. It also maintains my engagement level during the entire song duration.
Voice Search: The feature is a great attempt to mimic the voice search experience on Alexa and is particularly helpful for users who are not very comfortable with typing.
Gaana Videos: Most recently, it has also launched. I am not a big advocator of this feature as the video streaming quality is often poor. The videos also divert the listener, defeating the core purpose of music listening.

Suggested Areas of Improvement

Search Enhancements: Many of us use Google to identify a song heard during an event, occasion, or party. And it gets very frustrating when Gaana cannot understand your gibberish song searches while youtube can. A free-text search would make life easier for a lot of us. Try searching patriotic songs from the 1990s and you would know what I am talking about.
Personalization: One of the areas on which Gaana has been working a lot is its ability to provide intelligent playlists based on the user interest, streaming history, and a tonne of other data points. However, I have observed that the ‘UNIQUELY YOURS’ playlists are not updated frequently, are even incomplete with less than 10 songs for new users, lack diversity i.e. contain songs from a single artist, etc. The problem if more profound for new users with limited platform history. Spotify is light years ahead when it comes to personalization playlists.
Party Playlists: Gaana has a feature that allows you to create a song playlist for a party. However, it does not allow more than one person to add songs in the same playlist. Wouldn’t it be great if you and your friends can create a playlist in real-time during a house party? Well, it will save some petty fights over which song should be queued next.
Shared Playlists: Loosing out on song recommendations sent over WhatsApp is very common. I wish songs could be added in a shared playlist so that I don’t have to scroll through my WhatsApp messages to look for a song sent by my BFF last week or last year.
Assisted Playlist Curation: In case you are one of those people who want to listen to the music of a certain kind but have not been exposed to a lot of variety. I wonder if the curated playlists can be made more relevant by getting the first few songs added by the user.
Communities: Do you miss listening to songs with your friends and family. I sure do and have been waiting for music streaming apps to start building on some social experience aspects. For example, a feature that allows two or more users to listen to the same track simultaneously and in sync by creating a private channel. The channel can be made more engaging by enabling the users to interact on it with the help of a real-time chat. I have created a few mocks to illustrate this feature.

Summary

Uncovering user needs and pain points associated with them is one of the most certain ways of generating new product ideas. Plus, 2020 looks a good time to explore and build the social experience aspect of music streaming apps.