26: [ACS] Ragya with Aditya Dipankar

जैसे भैरव.. यह सुबह का राग़ हैं। पवित्र स्थानों पर सुबह की पवित्रता अगर आपके मन को सुकून पहुचा सकी तो भैरव क्या कहना चाहता है शायद ही आप समझ पाओगे। सारंग राग गाने से पहले दोपहर करीब २ बजे कीं तपती धूॅंप में किसी गांव ख़ेडे में गोबर से सिंची हुई आंगन में कभी बैठे हो? अगर हाॅं.. तो ही शायद सारंग की रूह तक पहुचना संभव हैं। भीमपलास का अर्थ हैं पलाश वृक्ष के विशाल पत्ते। बसंत की दोपहर के साडेतीन- चार के दर्मियान कभी इस वृक्ष के सायें में खडे रहे हो? तब ही यह विशाल वृक्ष और उसी तरह विशाल भीमपलास क्या कह रहा है समझ पाओगे। and many more such reference are given by the legendary Pt. Kumar Gandharva. The reason why i am saying this is becuase, our today's guest has made an app which serves specific music tracks base don their prahar; timining. BTW, the above piece was originally in Marathi and translated by Rashmi Patwardhan in Hindi. Well, what does this mean in a nutshell is, every Raag has a specific time and you need more than just a clock to experience the emotion and mood that Raag evokes. Today I have Aditya Dipankar with us on Audiogyan. He is a Designer and also trained in Hindustani classical music. Aditya has a huge body of work in design from infographics for rural Indians to creating designs for successful brands like Nutanix and Freecharge. Today we are here to discuss a case study of his project, Ragya.com (http://ragya.com/) . Ragya is a streaming service focusing just on Indian classical music: specifically ‘ragas’ designed to be played at specific times of the day. And that's why I started with Kumar Gandharva's quote. What is Ragya? Why & how did Ragya happen? What was the MVP like, to test it this is worth the effort? Since this a niche subject especially in the online context. Can you share insights about the algorithm? How does it work? What went behind the scenes? Enabling the discovery of music through time of the day and serving the relevant Raag is one axis. Do you have any more axis to handle personalization? How can an artist come onboard? Is there any curation process? How do you keep feeding content? How do you handle copyright and licenses? How have you been dealing with artists? What point in time and how did you realize that this has a commercial angle to it? Do you think, subscription model is sustainable in this case? Can you share any numbers/observations / VOC w.r.t your subscribers What is the long term future of this project/app/tool/website?