MUMBAI: Aiming to enhance the music listening experience of Indian music aficionados, music streaming service Saavn has partnered with media engagement company Shazam to give users a new way to discover, buy and share the music they like and expand its global reach.

The new partnership will enable users to attain a fast and easy way to find out the name and artist of their favourite tracks along with an easy way to purchase tracks from iTunes.  Additionally, they can share their finds with friends on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ through Shazam.  Saavn’s library has already been mapped to Shazam’s music database, and is stated to keep growing with thousands of new tracks every week.

Saavn CEO Vinod Bhat said, “Our partnership with Shazam represents an exciting evolution in our ability to provide both an enjoyable listening experience and an enjoyable discovery experience. We couldn't be more excited to be part of Shazam's efforts to bring its highly popular music discovery tools to fans of Indian music. And with Shazam's in-app features that encourage users to buy or stream the music they hear, we feel this collaboration is well-aligned with Saavn's mission to disrupt massive music piracy in India and recapture revenue for our record label partners and their artists.”

The partnership will enable users  to discover latest tracks from a vast catalogue comprising of bollywood, bhangra, devotional, ghazals, Carnatic, Indipop, and music in regional languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada and Bhojpuri.

Shazam director music and content Will Mills said, “The Indian music market is experiencing tremendous growth worldwide, and is expected to grow by 98 per cent over the next five years. Shazam is incredibly excited about our partnership with Saavn- 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.”

With the Indian music industry revenues growing steeply by 60 per cent each year, a major chunk of the earnings come from the developing mobile music sector growing at a rate of 17.6 per cent per year. In India, the industry is projected to grow at a rate of 25 per cent year-on-year.

Amongst these, online music streaming services too have performed well and posted a good growth rate. Saavn has witnessed year-on-year growth of 100 per cent for streaming devotional music, 300 per cent for regional music and more than 1000 per cent growth of independent music, with a potential user base of over 350 million data-enabled mobile handset users in India.

Saavn’s music catalogue includes over one million tracks for its streaming ‘search and play’ and radio services, while 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.

Saavn’s latest industry-leading innovation is ad-free, offline play for subscribers of its newest product, Saavn Pro. Meanwhile, Shazam recently announced the industry’s fastest unlimited tagging for iOS and Android devices.