Dhingana

LIke

Type	Private
Fate	Acquired (March 14, 2014)
Founded	2007
Founder	Snehal Shinde[1] Swapnil Shinde[2]
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Swapnil Shinde[3] (Co-Founder & COO) Snehal Shinde[4] (Co-Founder, President, CTO, Founding-CEO) Rohit Bhatia[5] (CEO) Sandeep Johri[6] (Board Member) Gokul Rajaram[7] (Advisor) Nickhil Jakatdar[8] (Advisor) Jessica Steel[9] (Advisor) Manu Rekhi[10] (Advisor) Manish Chandra[11] (Advisor)
Products	Dhingana.com, Dhingana for iphone,[12] Android,[13] BlackBerry,[14] Nokia,[15] Windows phone[16] & Windows Tablets[17]
Services	Online and Mobile Streaming Music Service
Parent	Shaikh
Slogan	Your music
Website	www.dhingana.com

Dhingana was an online Music streaming service founded in 2007, that provided a variety of Indian music to listeners worldwide.^[18] It offered a library of over 1 million free on-demand songs, in over 42 Indian languages and genres. By the month of Dec 2013, Dhingana had over 10 million active unique users.^[19] Dhingana was acquired by online music service Rdio on March 14, 2014.^[20] Dhingana founders Snehal Shinde and Swapnil Shinde joined Rdio's^[21] executive team as Vice Presidents to lead India and emerging market expansions.

A report in late 2012 announced that Dhingana averaged 200,000 new users who join each month, contributing to a monthly total of 100 million minutes of music streamed on the site.^[22]

In addition to fighting piracy, founder Snehal Shinde has stated "we allow our users to easily discover music and share it with their friends, in a very social way. Also, we provide personalized music recommendations based on music that is already being enjoyed by users and their friends, to improve their music experience.".^[23]

Company history

Launched in 2007, Dhingana was founded by twin brothers, Snehal and Swapnil Shinde along with Sushil Choudhari,^[24] former employees of Yahoo, Symantec and Microsoft, who started the company based on their love of Bollywood and Indian music.

Rohit Bhatia, formerly of Ericsson and Seamless, was appointed as CEO of Dhingana in February 2013, as Snehal Shinde and Swapnil Shinde remained President/CTO and COO/VP Products respectively.^[25]

Other notable people among the Dhingana team were Sandeep Johri (xEVP HP, as board member) as well as Gokul Rajaram (Product Director of Ads at Facebook), Jessica Steel (xEVP Pandora), Nickhil Jakatdar (CEO Vuclip), Manish Chandra (CEO Poshmark), and Manu Rekhi (Principal of Inventus Capital Partners) as advisors.^[26] The service was based out in Silicon Valley’s Sunnyvale with offices in Pune, India.^[27]

Dhingana’ is a word from the Marathi language which means joy, zeal and frenzy.^[28]

Genres

• Kannada
• Hindi
• Marathi
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Malayalam
• Gujarati
• Bengali
• Punjabi
• Pop
• Remixes
• Bhajans
• Ghazals
• Devotional
• Sanskrit
• Urdu
• Nepali

^[29]

Business model

Dhingana considered brand advertising and paid monthly subscriptions as its primary revenue streams

References