JioSaavn receives around $20 Mn from parent - Reliance

Music streaming platform JioSaavn has raised Rs 140.35 crores from its parent entity Reliance Industries.

The investment has come one year after RIL had acquired the Saavn music app and merged it with its music streaming product JioMusic. The merged entities turned into a Unicorn with a $1 billion valuation in March 2018.

Currently, JioSaavn has over 100 million monthly active users (MAU) with audience across 150 countries. It offers more than 50 million tracks in 15 regional languages which include Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi and Gujarati among others.

Early this year, the music streaming app had secured 1st position in Fast Company's list of top 10 Indian firms in Most Innovative Company on a country basis.

JioSaavn had also grabbed the eyeballs for being the only Indian company that was ranked 28th and managed to find a position in the top 50 most innovative companies across the globe.

Before the merging with Jio Music, Saavn had scooped up $100 million in a round led by Tiger Global Management in 2015. Having an estimated $9.2 million annual revenue, JioSaavn counts Gaana, Hungama, Wynk, Amazon and new entrants Spotify and YouTube Music as competitors.

Among them, Gaana had already crossed 100 million MAUs in April, whereas YouTube Music crossed 15 million download mark in one month and Spotify grabbed 3 million download milestone within a week of their launch in India.

The current data on the number of downloads and MAU of Saavn's competitors mentioned above aren't available.

Over the past couple of years, video and audio streaming have been growing in India at a quick pace.

As per a report by Indian Music Industry and Deloitte on the growing Audio OTT industry, the Indian OTT market is valued at $280 million with revenues from the audio OTT industry contributing to 67% of the total recorded music revenue in the country.

Music streaming (audio+video) in India has turned hyper-competitive and overcrowded at the same time. Besides global majors, space also has stakes of behemoths Reliance, Tencent and a few others. Going forward, it would be interesting to observe who all come as winners and survive in a long haul.

The development was first reported by Financial Express via paper.vc.