Saavn partners with Twitter to crowdsource song requests
South Asian Audio Visual Network (Saavn), an India-based streaming radio service similar to Spotify, is teaming up with Twitter to create a tweet-powered playlist.
If you are not a fan of Bollywood musicals or Indian music in general, then you might not have heard of Saavn, but the Indian company owns the rights to several million songs and other media such as films and music videos.
Like Spotify, Saavn offers both a free service supported by ads and a subscription service without ads. Saavn claims that their service receives about 10 million monthly active users, roughly 20 percent of Spotify’s numbers, and their streaming activity is four times higher now than it was in January.
Saavn’s new tweet request feature takes a more active role than Twitter’s own failed music experiment, which looked at the music that was trending in conversations on Twitter rather than individual requests. Saavn’s new feature builds its playlists directly from songs suggested by Twitter users.
“There are so many conversations around music on Twitter that it was only logical that we extend those conversations to further enhance user experience on the platform,” said Saavn Business Development Director Arvinder Gujral.
In the official announcement of the tweet-powered radio station, Saavn Co-Founder and CEO Rishi Malhotra credited “the great team at Twitter” with helping in the development of the new social media playlist.
“Social is more than a feature,” Malhotra said. “it’s part of the DNA of streaming music, so this is an extremely powerful partnership for us.”
How it works
Saavn listeners can request their favorite songs by tweeting the song title and artist to @SaavnRadio. Users can request one of the millions of songs owned by Saavn, and people located in India can request popular English language songs as well.
Listeners whose requested songs get played on Saavn will also get a confirmation and an @mention from the @SaavnRadio Twitter handle.
The feature currently works for Hindi and English language songs, but Saavn said via their Twitter handle that they “hope to roll out more languages soon.”
Availability
Saavn is available through the web, as well as on iOS and Android.
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