How does Saavn make money?

http://www.saavninteractive.com/

To understand saavn's model ,we first need to understand that it's into an industry which is at nascent stages but growing rapidly: digital streaming music industry. We have seen a tremendous growth worldwide in increase in the digital content being consumed and especially the streaming one. The growth has been to such an extent that even companies like apple has shifted gears from selling songs on its popular iTunes library to apple music which is more of streaming based service. Now coming back to the question of making money. Since digital music is the way forward and we have seen in the past the past that winner takes it all in tech space (like uber for cabs, airbnb for lodging), saavn is concentrating on onboarding as many customers on its platform as it can. The focus for the company right now is to grow its Monthly Active Users (that's what makes the basis of its valuation) . Then later on it would focus on top line growth and then think about making its bottom line greener. In the long term it aims to make money from two thing:- Subscription revenue Revenue from advertisements Revenue from subscription would remain low in long term too , as i think costumers being thrifty would never onboard to the paid subscription and hence the long term revenue from this source would remain low. Since advertisements from such digital platform are expected to generate higher revenues (just as what google ads and facebook has done) , this will be the focus area for the company.

You can find similar business websites like Saavn,Twitter,Linkedin,quora.....etc websites which provide free services  to the people .Here every one try's to know how one can make comfort income for growth of their business. Well this might be a typical one but solution comes from the twitter bird wings. Firstly every one tries to follow the concepts of twitter. Here twitter makes income from different source like selling emails of celebrities for a huge amount and publishing tweets of MNC companies for large amount. In this format Saavn,Linkedin,quora ....etc sites makes the business by selling emails to newly formed or advertising media's. Publishing ratings to the songs(saavn) or writing content to a topic(quora) or publishing different jobs of companies(linkedin) would gain money for their sites. But Saavn sells secondary music license to the regional websites.

They are also selling their product as a service to Verizon which then sells or gives this add-on-service (named Bollywood Music) free to their customers http://news.verizonwireless.com/news/2008/04/pr2008-04-01a.html

On both, the mobile apps (iPhone and android) and on the website, they put up ads to make money. however we should not be surprised if they bring up another way to make money as well.

on the website.. they show display ads below the music player. I am not sure about the mobile.

Currently they have advertisements but I wont be surprised if they release premium plans for listeners who dont want to see advts.