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<ul><li>Gaana has a new CEO, COO and CTO now. </li><li>Gaana has now set its sight firm on tapping the country’s unprecedented potential in the OTT sector.</li></ul>Gaana has strengthened its management by appointing Sandeep Lodha as its new CEO and roped in former <keyword id="51757" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="TIMES-INTERNET">Times Internet</keyword> executives <keyword id="1645388" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Vivek-Pandey">Vivek Pandey</keyword> as COO, and Ram Awasthi as CTO. By strengthening the leadership, Gaana has now set its sight firm on tapping the country’s unprecedented potential in the OTT sector. All three leaders bring with them almost 60 years of rich experience that is poised to provide Gaana with the growth impetus. Speaking on the announcement, Gautam Sinha CEO Times Internet said, “The Indian OTT ecosystem is about as exciting, dynamic, and competitive as it has ever been. We have seen an amazing batch of OTT brands develop and flourish over the last few years, and we have seen unprecedented interest from global companies keen to tap into the Indian consumer opportunity. At Gaana, we are equally excited about our next stage of tech-led relationships with users, content producers and advertisers with Gaana. Our new CEO Sandeep’s experience leading hyper-growth brands like Disney &amp; OYO, Vivek's 360-degree product, growth and monetisation experience, and Ram’s strong &amp; visionary leadership in technology make us believe we can achieve the audacious goals we have set for the brand in the coming years.” A proven leader within the media &amp; entertainment industry, Sandeep has 22 years of rich experience in scaling brands in hyper-growth sectors with Disney, Bain &amp; Company, Weddingz.in &amp; Intel Capital. Sandeep founded Weddingz.in and created India’s largest wedding co which he then sold to OYO. The brand scaled 14X within 15 months post acquisition, while Disney’s consumer products business grew by a healthy 50% YOY under his leadership. Sandeep holds an MBA from The Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania, and BTech from IIT Delhi. Vivek has been the Vice President of Revenue Strategy and Analytics at Times Internet, also managing TIL's AdTech stack. He has contributed towards the goal of increasing the group’s reach to a billion Indians and monetising this reach effectively through revenue initiatives. He has also been instrumental in major digital transformations at companies like Tata Cliq, MakeMyTrip and Indiatimes Shopping. Ram is a technology leader with hands-on experience in envisioning, architecting and delivering a broad range of distributed, internet scale &amp; real time applications. In his earlier role, he was responsible for leading new business initiatives &amp; setting up high performance technology teams &amp; evaluation of tech stacks for different business units under Times Internet, technology evaluation for new business acquisitions, integration of central services to different business units, responsible for cyber security of all Times Internet businesses and acquired businesses. With over four decades of combined experience between them, Vivek Pandey &amp; Ram have been the key pillars of the Times Internet’s central leadership team, having set up and led high performance analytical product, marketing &amp; technology teams for the group over the years.

Gaana shuffles leadership; hires Sandeep Lodha as new CEO

<ul><li><keyword id="3237946" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="sandeep-lodha" source="Orion">Sandeep Lodha</keyword>, CEO, <keyword id="-77" type="General" weightage="100" keywordseo="gaana" source="Orion">Gaana</keyword> pens down the platform’s success story.</li><li>He shares how Gaana* has managed to beat all its competitors and vision ahead.</li></ul>A lot of work has been happening behind the scenes at gaana to take the user experience up to the next level, we are as excited and passionate about what Gaana is becoming than we’ve ever been. Here’s a brief update on what we’ve been working on at Gaana, and some of the results that get us excited to get up every morning and bring music to a billion Indians! Creating the most intuitive and engaging musical experience At our core, our passions are centered on making Gaana the most intuitive and engaging music product available. We’ve worked hard to improve a lot of things under the hood to make that happen - like optimizing our recommendation algorithm, speeding up music playback, and improving our user experience. The major metric, which tells us if we’re doing a good job, is retention - how many people who used Gaana last month are still using it this month. And we’re happy to share that from May to Sep, we’ve improved our monthly retention by 48%. Source: App annie Other metrics tell us the same thing. Today, our users listen to 36% more songs and spend more time per day on Gaana than ever before, up 39% in the last 6 months. The verdict is clear: Users love Gaana, more than any other streaming product Source: Google Play Store Retaining &amp; Growing Users Our focus has been to ensure Gaana delivers a great experience. And because of this, our growth efficiency is higher than ever before. Over the last few months we have improved our marketing efficiency (cost per net added user) by 31%. Making Gaana a healthy business Delivering a great musical experience to crores of Indians is exciting, but we’re also here to make a healthy business. We’ve revamped our ad products to make them more effective. Increasing the share of direct business allows us to actually reduce ad load. The net impact is that our ad revenue per user (ARPU) has grown 135% in the last six months. I’ve been the CEO of Gaana for just four months, and I know we are just getting started. We have so much more to offer, and you’ll continue to see exciting product innovations and of course great music on Gaana in the months to come. Today, hundreds of million music lovers use Gaana. We’re building one of the largest consumer media platforms in India. The party has just begun! Bas Bajna Chahiye Gaana, Sandeep *Gaana is owned by <keyword id="51757" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="times-internet" source="Orion">Times Internet</keyword>, which is the parent of Times Bridge, Business Insider's partner in India*

Inside Gaana’s success story: Sandeep Lodha on the platform’s journey so far and what the future holds

<ul><li><keyword id="-77" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="gaana" source="Orion">Gaana</keyword> recently reshuffled its management, bringing <keyword id="3237946" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="sandeep-lodha" source="Orion">Sandeep Lodha</keyword> on board as its CEO.</li><li>We recently caught up with him and he spoke to us about the potential of the <keyword id="2435252" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="audio-streaming" source="Orion">audio streaming</keyword> space, where India is headed and the platform’s growth trajectory and all that the platform is doing to make sure it holds on to its leadership position.</li></ul>In the last 1.5 years, as most of us had to lock ourselves in our houses, music gave us that much-needed respite. While a lot of music and <keyword id="1590914" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="podcast" source="Orion">podcast</keyword> consumption used to happen during commute time in the pre-pandemic era, the lockdown led to people using music as a stress buster. Haven’t most of us streamed music in the background to make everyday chores less monotonous? There has been an increase in both the number of subscribers and the time they spend on audio streaming platforms in 2020. People have been experimenting with the kind of content they listen to, and podcast uptake has seen a significant jump. In fact, a report from KPMG revealed that India is the third-largest podcast-listening market globally and is expected to be valued at Rs 17.62 crore by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 34.5%. Currently, Times Internet-owned streaming platform Gaana is at the top of India’s audio streaming chart with a 30% market share, according to a study by Kantar and audience measurement and analytics company VTION earlier this year. The platform also recently reshuffled its management, bringing in Sandeep Lodha as its CEO. We recently got an opportunity to catch up with Lodha who spoke to us about the potential of the audio streaming space, where India is headed and the platform’s growth trajectory. Excerpts: Q) Audio streaming has witnessed a boom in India in the past few years, and Gaana has been one of the key players in the segment. In fact, reports reveal you have the market leadership position currently. What are a few things that have helped you get that edge? Over the years, we have invested heavily in understanding the musical content consumption tastes of the Indian audience. Gaana has set up an internal team on content &amp; product innovation called Gaana Innovation Labs, which will launch a suite of cutting-edge products and content formats at the concurrence of Music and technology. The team consists of people from content programming, event production, music engineering and few external consulting advisers tasked to deliver India Specific innovations. In addition to enhancing the platform experience by lieu of technology, we constantly conduct market research to drive user insights and based on the findings, we curate our offerings to meet the demands of users across India. So, be it tailoring playlists to launching properties such as Gaana Lives that assists singers / artists connect directly with the audience in the absence of Concerts, we aim to ensure that every user is catered to. The coming months you will see more of the insights being put to action as we work towards our goal of being the go-to music destination of India. On the advertiser front, we realized advertisers increasingly demand clear attribution modelling, better ROI and actionable leads, so we launched voice activated ads and dynamic audio ads. Similarly, in order to serve SMEs and MSMEs who demand local advertisers, we will bring them onboard with self-serve ads. Each of these steps have kept us ahead of the competition in the <keyword id="808056" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="music-streaming" source="Orion">music streaming</keyword> space. Q) A lot of players make the best use of algorithms, to play just the songs I want. How is Gaana strengthening its offering, to become more personalized, to give users a more holistic experience? Each music listener has a specific taste in music, languages, genres, artist’s moods etc. like a Bollywood fanatic, party lover or EDM fan. Therefore, personalization and recommendation are of utmost importance for a platform like Gaana. We pay close attention to user personalization across all our consumers and product journeys each aided with respective and suitable product interventions. Every user who enters the platform is automatically classified into various user persona buckets based on his /her journey, actions, kind of music consumed: language, era of music, genre of music, time of day, type of podcast consumed etc. etc. This allows us to be hyper-contextual to each and every user basis their personas. We are constantly working with the technology teams out here who are developing algorithms to better understand a user’s music consumption patterns across beats / mood / genre and based on that, the platform suggests music recommendations. Of course overlapping playouts on top of that. The coming months a lot of great stuff can be expected on this front. Q) How has Gaana has been enabling brands to create engaging ad experiences? How are you also ensuring that ads don't become intrusive from the user perspective? We believe ads need to have relevant and useful information, in order to not come off as intrusive. Our brand partners can target a specific audience based on their age, gender, location, weather, time and even music preferences. By matching the advertiser’s ideal target audience with our user personas, we are able to reach the right set of people at the right time. Our ‘Unwind with Taj’ campaign is a great example of what audio advertising can do for brands, where we brought alive the magic of Indian classical music for millennials. The specially curated ‘Unwind with Taj’ playlist on Gaana was aimed to serve as a destination for millennials and a set of premium audiences with refined taste to explore the splendor of a genre that showcases the music heritage across generations. Q) How have you enabled brands to create budget-friendly ads? We have recently launched a self-serve ads platform, where advertisers can plan, create and monitor their campaigns on their own. SMEs and small advertisers who are interested in hyperlocal targeting of audiences, have found huge value in both these initiatives. We believe this kind of innovation will further strengthen audio ad’s share in advertiser plans. Q) How do brands stand to benefit by partnering with you over other players from the segment? The audio streaming industry is evolving, and we believe competition in the space is healthy enough to keep the brands at a task of bringing new offerings to the table for its users and maintaining the market share. When partnering with Gaana, advertisers have access to the widest distribution of any music streaming service in the country, while having access to a rich set of audio advertising formats and an end-to-end creative studio to tailor campaigns to their individual needs. Q) How have you been using AI to bolster your ad offering? We use AI and ML capabilities extensively in our voice-enabled ads, helping our clients struggling with the “click challenge” inherent to the medium: because audio can’t be clicked – unlike the visual-based digital ads published on web and mobile interfaces. With voice activated ads, users can engage with audio ads via voice commands to take a specific action. This kind of ads empowers the listener of the audio ad on Gaana to talk back to the ad and tell it if they are interested in the offer or not. Cutting edge innovation that makes advertising more democratic than ever before. Leading the right set of users to the client. Q) What is your target in terms of the number of users you want on the platform for this financial year? We hope to continue our leadership in the music streaming sector. Our target is to increase our user base to 500 million over the next 3 years, and turn profitable in two years. During the course of the last 12 months, there has been a significant shift in audience behaviour as well as content consumption patterns. On Gaana we witnessed a substantial increase in music consumption across India. To cater to the needs of the users, we will constantly expand our library to have music right from Bollywood to regional languages such as Bhojpuri, Haryanvi, Tamil and more. Not just that, we will also focus on genre-expansion in a bid to meet the needs of our users. We aim to be the go-to platform for everything in music. Q) Where will the next phase of growth for Gaana come from? Going ahead, what will your key focus areas be? As we constantly look to expand our library and focus on diversification of music content, we strongly believe the next phase of growth would come from Indie music. As we foray into newer markets and focus on regional content, the growth is slated to stem from tier II and tier III cities as well. Our primary focus area of expansion will be diversifying our content library. We aim to have everything in music, not just in terms of languages but also genres meditation, devotion, workout and so on. We will also focus on bringing new avenues of entertainment, such as live streaming. The Dua Lipa Studio2054 concert hosted exclusively on Gaana witnessed a tremendous response with over 150,000 users attending the stream. This huge in comparison with say a concert that hosts a few thousand attendees at best. In addition to that we hosted a number of live sessions with podcasters from various categories. We are also implementing a pay per view and subscription-only model with the premium live events starting with Shankar, Ehsaan and Loy who performed live on Gaana apart from other iconic singers in the upcoming events. From a revenue aspect, there are quite a few avenues that we are looking at: Ad revenues, subscription driven revenues and promotional marketing. Q) How have podcasts been performing for you? Are you already monetizing them? There was a surge in podcast creation during the pandemic and that is primarily attributed to the low cost of investment. Podcasts have always enjoyed a loyal audience base and on Gaana too, we saw a healthy consumption on podcasts. Having said that, currently podcast consumption on Gaana comprises 1% of our minutes. We aim to be the YouTube of Podcasters and scale up 20X in the next 12 months. From an Advertising viewpoint as well, podcast listening has great value in terms of user attention and hence an opportunity for users. It’s an anytime, anywhere audio medium which provides a great platform for content creators. So from all quarters creators, suppliers, consumers and platforms - the podcast ecosystem is poised to rapidly expand and bound for exponential growth in revenues. Q) How has 2021 been in terms of growth so far? Do you anticipate consumer sentiments will pick up, thereby improving the growth for the overall audio streaming segment? Over the last year, at the beginning of the pandemic there was a stabilization in the volume of engagement of consumers. However, with time consumers discovered new content formats, new content categories and hence the engagement rates kept on growing. With the brutal second wave, clearly there was an impact on sentiments and engagement as well. With most of the major cities now unlocking the engagement numbers are back to earlier levels and we believe that with new content formats and categories being discovered, there will be a surge in engagement and consumption over the course of next few months.

We aim to be the YouTube of podcasters and scale up 20X in the next 12 months: Sandeep Lodha, Gaana

<ul><li>The usual fervor of the Big Fat Indian Summer weddings have given way to downsized miniature ceremonies this year.</li><li>However, the global pandemic hasn’t affected Indians’ love for weddings. </li><li><keyword id="3237946" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Sandeep-Lodha">Sandeep Lodha</keyword>, CEO, OYO’s Weddingz.in voiced his optimism for the recovery of the sector. </li><li>He spoke to us about the brand's journey, COVID-19’s impact and projections for 2021 and how they are sticking to their idea of togetherness in times of social distancing. </li></ul>It was at a wedding that Sandeep Lodha, CEO, OYO’s Weddingz.in conceived the idea of starting a brand that could cater to the rising need for professional and organised wedding-related venue and non-venue requirements for the new-age, tech-savvy consumer. The idea was simple. Lodha wanted his Weddingz.in to be a one-stop-shop that enables the promise of a great event at guaranteed best prices and allows the bride and groom to focus on their dream wedding and not worry about mundane tasks. Walking us behind the idea that led to Weddingz.in, Lodha shared, “It all started in 2015, while I was attending a relative’s wedding. I realized that the Indian <keyword id="562840" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="wedding-industry">wedding industry</keyword> hadn't changed at all since 1999 when I got married. In fact, it was still very fragmented and disorganized, in terms of promises made by vendors vis-a-vis lack of delivery, which became one of the biggest pain points for to-be-weds as well as their families. I realised among all services, the largest investment or budget was allotted to venues alone, and poorly managed catering, sound, decor, among other elements threw a spanner in the works for the couple on their big day.” He saw an immense opportunity to organise the wedding sector with technological solutions, and he believes that the wedding industry still has a long way to go as an average Indian parent spends about one-fifth of the wealth accumulated in his/her lifetime on their child’s wedding. According to a KPMG report, India’s current wedding market is at $50 billion, growing rapidly every year. In 2018, Weddingz.in was acquired by OYO and has grown leaps and bounds since. As per Lodha, Weddingz.in is the largest wedding company in India that offers venue and non-venue wedding-related services. “Within the first year of acquisition, we scaled great heights. Just last year (2019), we executed over 27,000+ events and just before the pandemic-led nation-wide lockdown, we executed 4,000+ successful events in February 2020,” said Lodha. From the 'big-fat Indian wedding' to 'small is the new big' The big-fat Indian wedding industry in our country has never seen a recession period. However, 2020 has been an unusual period for businesses of all shapes and sizes, as well as economies of scale. Weddings that last usually for 4-5 days in India, had to be cut down to only include the main wedding day and ‘small is the new big’ emerged as the biggest trend of the year in the industry. Until early September, weddings were not a grand affair -- the overall spending on elements such as photography, food, decoration, etc also dropped with the number of people. In March 2020, Weddingz.in also saw its revenue dip by 90% but in the same quarter, things started looking up. Telling us how the 5-year-old brand tried to minimise COVID’s impact, Lodha said, “With restrictions on large social gatherings and events including wedding ceremonies, the pandemic has changed the wedding landscape in India. In the initial phase of the lockdown, customers were holding back. During this time, in light of the situation, we offered our existing customers the option of free rescheduling and offered potential value-based packages inclusive of venue, photography and makeup, among others. Owing to this flexibility that we offered our customers, the majority of them chose to reschedule their events, as opposed to cancelling them. Owing to our efforts, in Q1 itself, over 3000+ summer weddings were rescheduled for the latter half of the year, specifically, October-November-December 2020.” Weddingz.in launched a program called ‘Wz Safe’ with a 20+ point checklist to ensure social distancing, hygiene and sanitation across venues and win its audiences’ trust. It also offered flexibility to reschedule events free of charge. During the lockdown, it launched a multi-video conferencing platform called ‘Next Gen Weddingz’, with an emcee and multiple chat rooms. It also allowed the virtual attendees to interact so that they feel as much a part of the celebrations. As of today, the government allows 50-200 guests at the wedding. Weddingz.in’s partners are also scaling their operations by embracing the digital world. “These efforts also enabled our venue partners with online demand during such ‘socially distant’ times. For instance, we’re extremely glad to share that some of our Weddingz.in venue owners that leveraged our online platforms saw approximately 50-60% demand levels, thereby making operations feasible and enabling them with the necessary cash flow to sustain expenses towards rentals, etc. In my opinion, in a way, the pandemic is an accelerant, leading to the ‘digitization’ of events, a trend that we would have seen maybe 5-10 years from today. Since couples are trying to avoid running about and meeting the multiple vendors to fulfil their requirements, there was an uptick in demand for one-stop-shop online solutions that offered packages with all services,” said Lodha. Adding on how the lockdown period accelerated Weddingz.in to become a digital-led company, Lodha said, “This (lockdown period) really pushed us to re-think and accelerate our pace of innovations for sustainable and long-term health of the business. We decided to move on from being a tech-enabled organisation to a tech-driven/led company. Through a three-pronged approach to resurrect, win customer confidence and build for the future, combined with the steady relaxation of government restrictions, as of today, we have been able to reach 75-80% demand of pre-covid levels and believe this will continue to grow month-on-month in 2021.” Trends in 2020 and 2021 Brides and grooms are now taking the punt to travel to a different state and have their dream weddings with a smaller group of people. Commenting on the trends that emerged during 2020, Lodha shared, “We’re seeing an upswing in inquiries/demand for destination weddings - couples are opting to tie the knot across exotic locations like palaces, beach-side venues, outdoor farms or even in-city affordable resorts. Preference for open-air lawns or alternatively, booking hotel banquets twice the size for a much safer and socially distanced wedding are also on the rise. Another trend that’s definitely on the rise is live streaming of events for virtual guests/attendees. As couples are also increasingly opting for one-stop-shop solutions to avoid running about and meeting the umpteenth number of vendors to fulfill all their requirements. And of course, if there’s one thing in demand more than others, it has to be a lot of stress on hygiene-focused efforts.” According to Lodha, the wedding industry could roughly be at 35% of pre-covid levels in 2021 if three factors go in their way: the scale of weddings, number of events per wedding and guestlist increase. Lodha explained, “While things are almost there, we are already at 75-80% of pre-covid level demand. Some clients still continue to postpone their events but most are now taking the punt and going ahead with it. Secondly, the customer’s willingness to go ahead with pre-wedding ceremonies like Sangeet, Mehendi, Haldi etc. will help the industry bounce back sooner and steadily. In the short term, small and intimate functions may take place, however, large scale events will take time to make a comeback. For the winter wedding season, we saw a rise in guestlist (depending on region-wise relaxation of restrictions). But as you know, if cases continue to rise, the guestlist may shrink again. We feel as long as Covid is here to stay, the guest list will continue to remain small compared to pre-covid days, but with an upward trend as customers get accustomed to the new normal.” Vision for the brand Weddingz.in is now aiming to be there for its customers from the beginning of their planning and become the most sought after tech-led platform. It is betting big on tech and customer experience-driven path to recovery. “As we enter a new decade, for our customers, we want to be the most sought after platform for weddings in India. We want to truly become a one-stop-shop for all our customer’s requirements and continue delivering on our promise of a 100% great event. To do so, we will enable customers with our technology to plan their wedding right from the beginning. For our partners, we want to enable them to scale up operations by leveraging technology and equip them with the right infrastructure to make customer transactions more transparent, reliable and authentic. We want to create significant value for their business,” said Lodha.

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