Gaana partners with FENIX360 to build artist-fan ecosystem

MUMBAI: Gaana has decided that streaming alone will not cut it. India’s audio-streaming platform has unveiled a partnership with FENIX360, the Singapore-headquartered creator platform, to bolt an artist-fan economy straight onto the Gaana app, stitching discovery, engagement and monetisation into one place rather than scattering them across a dozen apps.

The plan was unveiled at All About Music in Mumbai during a session titled “Gaana & FENIX360, building the artist fan ecosystem,” which laid out the roadmap and previewed the first features expected to land on Gaana by year end. The pitch is simple: bring content, community and commerce together so artists and fans stop needing five different platforms to have one relationship.

The centrepiece is a native scrolling social feed inside Gaana, letting artists post visual content around their work while fans discover, follow and engage without leaving the app. Around that sits a fuller monetisation stack borrowed from FENIX360’s toolkit: digital storefronts, physical and digital merchandise, ticketed live shows, gated and paid livestreams, and direct fan support. A dedicated artist app adds multimedia upload tools, audience insights and community management on top.

The number that will catch artists’ attention is the split. Under FENIX360’s creator-first model, artists keep 70 per cent of revenue generated through its monetisation tools, a meaningfully generous cut in an industry not known for generosity toward creators.

The logic behind the tie-up is a broader industry shift. Streaming platforms are quietly outgrowing their old job of shuffling playlists and are becoming full-blown ecosystems where the real value sits in the relationship between artist and fan, not just the play count. For artists, that means new routes to build community and revenue beyond streaming royalties. For fans, it means the chance to move from passive listening to active membership: following, supporting, attending and getting access that a plain streaming subscription never offered.

Yatish Mehrishi, chief executive officer of Entertainment Network India Limited, which owns and operates Gaana, calls it an industry-first step in bringing a direct-to-fan experience into music streaming, framing the tie-up as a way to let artists build community and new revenue streams from fan relationships rather than treating fans as pure listeners.

Allan Mark Klepfisz, founder, chairman and chief executive officer of FENIX360, is equally direct about the ambition: streaming changed how people access music, and the next opportunity is changing what streaming can do for the artists making it, by giving them more direct, sustainable ways to build on their fan relationships.

If it works, the read-across is significant. Music discovery becomes the entry point rather than the endpoint, with community, experience and revenue stacked on top, a template every streaming platform watching this deal will be studying closely.