Indian music service Dhingana shuts down 2 months after losing its biggest label

Indian music streaming service Dhingana has quietly closed the shutters on its service, ending months of speculation about its future after it lost a key partnership.

A brief farewell note on the Dhingana website — first spotted by Medianama — simply says that “all good things must come to an end” and thanks its users. No explanation for the closure is given:

Dhingana had raised venture funding — its most recent $7 million round closed in 2012 — and hired its first external CEO less than one year ago, but ultimately it came unstuck after its biggest music label partner — T-Series — declined to renew its licensing agreement in December.

“We were not able to see much traction in the service and secondly we couldn’t agree on the commercials and both parties thus decided to part ways in an amicable manner,” T-Series president Neeraj Kalyan told TechCrunch at the time of the break-up.

Speaking at the time, CEO Rohit Bhatia told Medianama only that the service was in the process of ‘restructuring’. However, the service appears to have paid the ultimate price for its break-up with T-Series.

We’ve reached out to Dhingana for more details. For now Indian music lovers can turn to Saavn or Times India’s Gaana.com, but the fact that the most funded company is bowing out of the game illustrates the difficulties of running a legitimate streaming service in a country where labels are all powerful.

Related: India’s Flipkart shutters digital music store, says country’s download market ‘will not scale’

Headline image via ronfromyork / Shutterstock