Gaurav Gupta's Blog

[This blogpost was originally written by me and published on WebYantra.net, but that website does not seem to be maintained anymore. I am re-publishing this article on my blog so as to keep the content available to anyone who may still be interested in reading it.]

Dhingana.com is a social network built around the concept of sharing music. Dhingana aims to provide a large base of streaming audio for Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi and Tamil songs. What makes it interesting however is that the music is streamed by Dhingana itself.

If you are not interested in the social networking aspect of the website, Dhingana is just a great place to find a bunch of latest songs which you can listen to streaming over the Internet. Streaming is smooth and the site claims that they have plenty of bandwidth for which they have planned in advance to maintain a good quality of service even during sudden traffic surges.

Dhingana has got a step further and added a lot of interesting social features like Public SmartLists, Public mGreetings & Musical Profile Pages. Put simply, Public Smartlist is like your online playlist which you can build using Dhingana’s huge song repository and then share publicly on the site. They also feature a 360Widget, which allows you to feature a song collection by adding a widget to your blog.

Dhingana is reportedly experiencing fast paced growth. For now, their revenue source remains online advertising which is displayed on their website. But the company plans to experiment with other revenue sources in the future.

I am not convinced about their “Games” section however. For me, it’s just a dilution to the site theme and an unnecessary distraction to their main motive of building social networks with people sharing similar tastes in music. The videos section requires the Windows Media Player 11 plugin incase you are viewing the site in Firefox. In IE, the videos tend to play smoothly. Dhingana does not promote user generated content at all, which some people might find restrictive. For example, a music composer might want to spread the word about his compositions through Dhingana and may want other users to listen to his music and add the songs to their playlists, blogs etc. Dhingana.com offers a good collection of regional music as well, but it’s still restricted to Marathi, Punjabi and Tamil songs only. More regional content would be a great addition.

Dhingana has a attractive search feature to allow searching for songs based on the album title, song title, singer etc. This makes it really convenient if you are say, wanting to listen to songs from a particular singer only.

If you are looking only for online music streaming only, there are a few other sites in this domain too. Sites like Raaga.com, MusicIndiaOnline.com and Smashits.com are established players in this field. MingleBox shut down their streaming service recently because of licensing issues.

My overall verdict would be Dhingana needs a lot more work to be known as a social network but when it comes to searching and listening to quality streaming music online, it does a great job. Excellent for a start, considering that providing good streaming would be the major force to pull the masses to Dhingana anyway.

Review posted by Gaurav Gupta (with inputs from Swamy G.)