Is Streaming Music On 3G Affordable? Gaana vs. Saavn vs. Hungama

Most of us love listening to songs, and there are times when we hear our favorite song on loop or keep on humming it incessantly, even if it’s a song you’ve barely heard. Primarily because we heard it in the background or maybe because we just stumbled upon a situation similar to it. Like, Imagining a paan shop would make you hum ‘Khaike paan banaras wala’ or experiencing the rains and thinking of songs like ‘Rimzim Gire Sawan’ or Skylar Grey’s ‘It’s Raining Again’ is something very impulsive.  The songs may not be the same for everyone as different people will have different choices. After all, the songs you listen to reflect your personality.

In earlier days, the songs coming on radio were the only ones which trended and if you wanted to listen to some other song, there was nothing else to do but wait for it patiently by shuffling between channels. Some might have stored ‘MP3s’ of the particular songs they like. But, nowadays the scene has changed completely.

With everyone owning a smartphone with a 3G data plan, it gives them an easy access to Internet on their fingertips. One can simply download apps like Gaana, Saavn, Hungama, etc., search for their desired song and listen to it. But, will your existing data plan make these services affordable? Or will a subscription to these apps that allow downloads be cheaper than streaming it for free? Is it better to stream only on Wi-Fi or your 3G pack will suffice? We decided to find out answers to such questions by doing a research on how much data is consumed by each song. 

To begin with, We took into consideration the amount of data consumed by the 3 popular music streaming apps like Gaana, Saavn & Hungama. We did so by streaming 5 different songs ranging between duration of 3 min 40 secs and 5 minutes, then calculating their average data consumed. We streamed all these songs at the highest quality available, by manually changing it from the App settings.

The findings were as below:

1. Saavn consumed 0.47MB per minute
2. Gaana consumed 0.45MB per minute
3. Hungama consumed 0.84MB per minute

While Gaana consumed the least of all, it is not strikingly less. If you intend to listen one hour of songs every day i.e 30 hours of music per month; Here is the result on how much data you would consume from those apps.

1. Saavn would consume 28MB for every 60 minutes per day i.e 846MB per month.
2. Gaana would consume 27MB for every 60 minutes per day i.e 810MB per month.
3. Hungama would consume 50MB for every 60 minutes per day i.e 1.47GB per month.

The data consumption by these apps will surely burn your entire data pack if you have a 1GB or a 2GB plan. And, this is when the subscription plans of these apps come into picture. All these apps have similar plans ranging from 100-120 rupees which offer similar services like ad-free unlimited streaming of music in the highest possible quality they offer. But the big money-saver feature would be the offline storage to listen to songs without consuming the internet. While Gaana and Hungama gives you unlimited archiving, Saavn only allows you to cache 3GB of your songs; which isn’t bad considering you can store about 600 songs of an average 5-minute length.

So at the end of the day, what did we learn? Say, if you are on a 2GB Vodafone 3G pack that today costs Rs. 450, you can subscribe to these apps for a mere hundred rupees per month and cache your songs, so that you don’t have to keep streaming your favorite songs over and over. Streaming can be an expensive affair on mobile data, so if you do all your streaming on WiFi, then it should not pinch you as much. You’ll just have to deal with the ads.

Update: We received a tremendous response for this comparison. Things have changed since this article was written, there are some new players like Apple Music and Jio Music. So we did the tests again, this time including all the major streaming apps in the market. Head here to read Saavn vs Gaana vs Wynk vs Apple Music vs Jio Music