Music and more!

Audio world

Prashant Vasudevan and Naman Chaturvedi met through common friends at an indie gig at a local performance space in the City about eight months back. They were listening to some awesome live music when they realised that none of the Indian indie music has any representation on a digital platform.

The party ended but the idea stayed. The two met again several times to figure out a format and the market and struck upon the realisation that though almost everybody wants to listen to something fresh and new, most people are not up-to-date on music and they don’t have the energy to explore beyond the usual Bollywood and popular international tracks.

That’s when the duo decided to bootstrap their idea and came up with ‘ListenIn’, an android app, which aims to offer interesting new audios everyday through an exciting mix of content from music, spiritual talk, artiste interviews, poetry and more.

“Bengaluru, being the start-up capital, was the best place to start working on the idea as we figured out that there is so much energy and enthusiasm here and the right talent as well,” say the duo adding, “It’s the mobile generation with most of us consuming information and entertainment on our smartphones. There is a lot of audio content from music, artiste interviews, poetry, short stories and biographies to daily news, sports updates and comedy. This entire audio space is unexplored and undiscovered by users which otherwise makes up for quite unique and engaging content. In that respect, ListenIn is a first of its kind curated audio experience for the Indian audience.”

An MBA, Naman has more than nine years of experience, building, managing
and marketing consumer technology products and has held product management and development roles with various companies. Prashant started his career in radio in 2001 with Radiocity Bangalore handling content and music.

 With a wide experience in starting and managing music stations, he has a vast insight into the Indian music scene. Music distribution platforms are of deep interest to him and he has been following its evolution since its early years. And the two have blended their knowledge and expertise in a rather wonderful way.

“Our belief is that humans are better than software when it comes to audio discovery. We have created a team of what we refer to as ‘music and audio experts’ who handpick original playlists for our users everyday,” explains co-founder and chief content editor Prashant.

He says ListenIn powers ‘active content discovery’ by curating handpicked original playlists for the time, day and occasion. For instance, there’s yoga talk in the morning and a stress reliever audio stream by a psychiatrist. They also create content around celebrities’ birthdays and special days like Diwali, Christmas and Independence Day.

Launched recently, ‘ListenIn’ is currently available only on Android devices (Google Playstore search – ListenIn: Handpicked Playlists) and offers a curated playlist section which constantly evolves along with a ‘share’ and ‘my music’ section.

The team has partnered with Timbre Media (started by the erstwhile Worldspace radio team) and is discussing tie-ups with other content partners too. Prashant and Naman say it has been a fun experience working together and they wish to revolutionise the audio space further by bringing in more peppy features to the app.