Shazam Forms Exclusive New Partnership with Saavn for the Best Indian Music Discovery Experience

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.

“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.