Digital music provider Gaana.com has a new inductee at the senior level. Pawan Agarwal, who has more than a decade of successful tech based entrepreneurial record has joined the Gaana.com team as Business Head with promise and expectation of bringing in fresh and innovative ideas to take the site to the top. Agarwal will be reporting to Gautam Sinha, COO of Times Internet.
Radioandmusic.com caught up with Agarwal as he chalks out his vision and goals for Gaana.com and shares his view on the music industry.
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Kindly share with us your earlier experience, before joining Gaana.com.
I carry more than 12 years of entrepreneurial experience, leading and building high growth technology businesses through ideation, change, crisis, growth and sale. Before joining Gaana, I was the co-founder & COO at Sunstone Business .Prior to Sunstone, I was the Country Manager at Lime Labs, US based leader in Internet based products.
How will your earlier experience help you?
My experience has largely been entrepreneurial- setting up and growing technology-enabled businesses-aligning product offering with customer needs using technology to transform people’s lives. At Sunstone we came up with a unique technology-led management program that enabled technology professionals’ transition in to business roles. We see Gaana as a product that uses technology and content to create music experience for users.
What are the areas that you plan to explore?
In addition to building a world-class digital music streaming service, one of the areas we plan to focus would be to closely work with the music industry to ensure we are able to create value for everyone. With the next wave of Internet penetration, we foresee regional music opportunity getting bigger and would like to increase focus there.
What is your vision for the music-streaming site?
Our vision is to be the number one and the best digital music-streaming service. Number one in terms of engagement and music consumption and best in terms of experience.
What are the challenges the industry faces?
The biggest challenge for the music industry is Piracy; a large chunk of revenue is lost because of that. Digital music streaming services like us are trying to address that placing convenience at the center of the offering. The core hypothesis is that consumers would start paying for storage, accessibility across devices and discovery if content is new. That should expand the pie for everyone including the artists, music labels and services like us.
How positive is the music industry?
Over the last few years, there have been a lot of changes in terms of music consumption patterns from the consumers. Physical sales are on a constant decline for most players, VAS offerings are witnessing lower uptake and there has been an increase in digital consumption of content. This poses a lot of challenges but also opens up an opportunity to evolve newer business models.
How do you plan to move ahead of your competitors?
We feel that the only way to get ahead of the competition is to have a world-class offering that shouts engagement. We plan to take Gaana to a level where we own end-to-end music consumption experience of the consumer.
What are the changes we will see with you on board?
We are completely focused on evolving the music experiences we create for the consumers. I would like you to wait and experience what we come up with and provide feedback which would help us evolve.
