London, UK (Top40 Charts/ Shazam) Shazam, the world's leading media engagement company, today announces an exclusive new partnership with Saavn, the world's largest Indian music streaming service. The new partnership gives music fans a great new way to discover the latest tracks from their favorite South Asian artists in Bollywood and beyond, with popular genres such as bhangra, devotional, ghazals, Carnatic, Indipop, and more; and music in regional languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, and Bhojpuri.
"Shazam is incredibly excited about our partnership with Saavn - as the leader in the Asian music industry as it represents the largest partnership we've done in this region and they will help us provide our music fans with an amazing discovery experience."
"The Indian music market is experiencing tremendous growth worldwide, and is expected to grow by 98% over the next five years," said Will Mills,
Director of
Music and Content for Shazam. "Shazam is incredibly excited about our partnership with Saavn - as the leader in the Asian music industry as it represents the largest partnership we've done in this region and they will help us provide our music fans with an amazing discovery experience."
The new partnership gives fans of Indian music a fast and easy way to find out the name and artist of their favorite tracks along with an easy way to purchase tracks from iTunes. Additionally, they can share their finds with friends on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ via Shazam. As of this announcement, Saavn's vast library has already been incorporated into Shazam's music database, and will continue to grow with thousands of new and exclusive tracks every week.
"Our partnership with Shazam represents an exciting evolution in our ability to both provide an enjoyable listening experience as well as provide an enjoyable discovery experience. We couldn't be more excited to be part of Shazam's efforts to bring its highly popular music engagement tools to fans of Indian music," said Vinodh Bhat, CEO of Saavn. "And with Shazam's in-app music purchasing feature, encouraging users to buy the music they hear, we feel this collaboration is well-aligned with Saavn's mission to impede the rampant flow of music piracy in India."
The Indian music industry is the world's fastest-growing, with revenues increasing by 60% each year, driven in part by a mobile music sector that is growing at 17.6% per year. In particular, the expanding Indian-American population, which has jumped by 69% over the last decade, has a median income that is nearly double the national average of $49K/year. Accordingly, companies like Saavn have seen year-on-year growth of 100% for streaming devotional music, 300% for regional music and more than 1000% growth of independent music.
Founded in 2006, Saavn's comprehensive music catalog includes over 1 million Indic tracks for its streaming "search and play" and radio services. With the smartest search, the fastest results, and the largest library of South Asian music, Saavn delivers a seamless, on-the-go listening experience to fans of South Asian music worldwide, across Web and mobile. Saavn's latest industry-leading innovation is ad-free, offline play for subscribers of its newest product, Saavn Pro.
Shazam's music database currently exceeds 27 million tracks, and includes social sharing features as well as streaming lyrics in time with the music with LyricPlay™. Shazam recently announced the industry's fastest unlimited tagging for iOS and Android devices. In addition to LyricPlay, the Shazam App also includes great features such as Shazam
Friends social sharing, links to YouTube videos, artist and tour information.
About Shazam
Shazam is the world's leading media engagement company with more than 300 million people in 200 countries and adding another 2 million new users each week. With the industry's unlimited fastest tagging in the Free and premium Encore Apps on iOS and Android devices, Shazam is the best way for people to discover, explore, buy, and share more music, TV shows and branded content they love.
Shazam makes it easy for people to share their discoveries with their friends on Facebook using the Shazam
Friends feature, as well as on Twitter and Google+. For people who don't yet have the Shazam application on their smartphone, it is available for FREE on every major platform and can be found on iTunes App Store, Google play, Amazon App Store, AT&T's AppCenter, Verizon VCast app store, Nokia Store, Windows Phone Marketplace, BlackBerry App World, and GetJar..
For further information about Shazam Entertainment visit www.shazam.com and @ShazamNews. You can also follow us on Facebook or Google+. For daily music updates follow the Shazam Blog and @Shazam.
Shazam Media enquiries:
[email protected]
The Shazam, Shazam Encore, LyricPlay, Shazam for TV names and icons are trademarks of Shazam Entertainment Limited.
About Saavn
Saavn (South Asian Audio Video Network) is an ad-supported digital music service available globally on Web, iOS, Android, and WAP that delivers targeted display and rich media ad units for global advertisers who want to use music to engage audiences. The Web and mobile applications provide its millions of users with the highest quality audio, and most comprehensive catalogue of Bollywood, Indian and regional South Asian music anywhere, licensed from over 200 content providers. Saavn's extensive collection at www.saavn.com includes the latest releases, like Babli Badmaash, Himmatwala, Kai Po Che, Mere Dad Ki Maruti, Race 2, Khiladi 786, Student of the Year, Murder 3, Ek Tha Tiger, Vicky Donor, Jab Tak Hai Jaan, and Cocktail; classic favorites, like Dabangg, Om Shanti Om, Jab We Met, Singh is Kinng, Taal, and Veer-Zaara; and features artists like A. R. Rahman, Yash Chopra, Yo Yo
Honey Singh, Atif Aslam, Shreya Ghoshal, Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Ranbir Kapoor, Katrina Kaif, and Priyanka Chopra.
Thanks to direct partnerships with Google and Facebook, Saavn reaches more music fans than any other South Asian music service - having generated over 2 billion story impressions on Facebook's Open Graph alone (https://bit.ly/XhqxZW). Saavn ensures that users can always find the music they are looking for with its proprietary phonetic search that intelligently understands what a user is looking for, disparate spellings notwithstanding. Saavn products also include dynamic audio bitrate adjustment so users can enjoy flawless streaming on virtually any connection quality, including EDGE, GPRS, 3G, and WiFi. All of this has led to millions of downloads of Saavn's mobile apps, which continue to be top rated in the iTunes and Android marketplaces. Saavn's newest product, Saavn Pro, brings offline, ad-free listening to fans of Indian music worldwide (more information available at pro.saavn.com).
For more information about Saavn, visit www.saavn.com or corporate.saavn.com; follow Saavn on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Saavn and on Twitter @Saavn; or email us at
[email protected].
