India insight – every month, music business journalist Amit Gurbaxani shares his expertise, insight, and analysis on key stories from the exciting, exploding market of India.
This is the first of a two-part look from Amit into the Indian music landscape today – first looking at the streaming and live landscape in 2024, and in the next part, how that ecosystem may change in 2025.
When Spotify and Apple Music published their lists of India’s most-streamed tracks of 2024 earlier this month, there wasn’t a single song by an international act in their entire top 50s, if you discount a spillover hit from 2023, the chart-topping ‘Tu Hai Kahan’ by the Pakistan trio Aur. This was down from four and eight last year, figures that also included a smash from our neighbouring country.
It’s expected that, as the DSPs acquire new listeners across the country, the consumption of music by local artists and in local languages will increase, especially when it comes to the highest-played tunes on those platforms.
Yet, on ground, it seems like the audience for international music is the strongest it’s ever been, with a record number of acts performing here over the course of the last 12 months.
If we take just the UK acts to perform in India this year, the list features a diverse range of solo artists and bands including Ben Howard, Dua Lipa, Ed Sheeran (who is said to have tallied the audience for a show by an international act in India when he played to over 50,000 fans in Mumbai), Everything Everything, TesseracT, The Wanted and UB40, plus Jungle, Keane, Royal Blood and Sting, each of whom played the second edition of Lollapalooza India (2023) in Mumbai.
Other international stars that made their India debuts in 2024 were Avenged Sevenfold, G-Eazy, Halsey, Jonas Brothers, JPEGMAFIA, Maroon 5 and Pusha T, who either did a stand-alone show or headlined a festival.
Apart from Lipa, Sheeran, Jungle, Sting and TesseracT, who had visited in previous years, there were repeat appearances by Akon, Animals As Leaders, Fatoumata Diawara, God Is An Astronaut, Jungle, Karnivool, Lauv, OneRepublic, Vieux Farka Toure, and last but definitely not least Bryan Adams who came back for this sixth and largest tour here with sold-out stops in seven cities where he played to 140,000 people, says promoter EVA Live.
In Spotify and Apple Music’s most-streamed tracks of 2024 lists, there wasn’t a single song by an international act in their entire top 50s
I’ve not listed here the seemingly countless DJ-producers who’ve known for over two decades that India is one of the largest markets for electronic music in the world. Here, festivals such as Sunburn (2007) in Goa cater to fans of its most mainstream purveyors while those like Magnetic Fields (2013) in Rajasthan and Echoes of Earth (2016) in Bengaluru are targeted at its more alternative and experimental exponents. There are now also a handful of genre-specific fests, such as the Mahindra Blues Festival (2011) and the metal-focused, Wacken Open Air-affiliated Bangalore Open Air (2012) and relatively new ones dedicated to K-Pop like K-Wave (2023) and K-Town (2024).
Over the last decade, India has seen the quantity of annual music festivals it hosts more than double to about 50, and a significant number of these showcase local artists across the country.
Owen Roncon, the chief of business at promoter BookMyShow Live – which staged the Sheeran and Maroon 5 shows and runs Lollapalooza India and the rock-centric Bandland (2023) festivals – believes that the growth can be attributed to the widening of the audience, which can be divided into four categories. “In the festival scenario, there’s a fan of a talent, then there’s a fan of the performer, and then there’s the fan of an experience,” he said on an episode of my podcast, The Indian Music Charts Podcast, in August.
Deepak Choudhary, the founder and MD of EVA Live, explains the surge in demand more succinctly. “It’s an influx of two things, YOLO and FOMO,” says Choudhary who also feels that live events are drawing audiences away from other entertainment avenues such as films – this was a particularly poor year for Bollywood movies at the box-office – and web series, “the competition” from which has fallen owing to “digital fatigue”.
There’s no sign of things slowing down either with Coldplay, Ed Sheeran and Cigarettes After Sex set to come back for their biggest tours yet. On the other hand, India suffers from a lack of infrastructure. In my home city of Mumbai, the country’s entertainment capital and the most popular destination for touring acts by far, the venues include the city’s racecourse, a government-owned open plot of land, an exhibition centre, a film studio, and a cricket stadium on the outskirts of the city.
The industry is also grappling with fresh challenges that have come along with the new opportunities. The year has seen BookMyShow get summoned after tickets for Coldplay were sold out in minutes but almost instantly available on secondary sites; one of the strangest back-and-forths between an artist manager and festival organiser and the last-minute cancellation of the long-running NH7 Weekender festival.
In part two of this column, I’ll write about how India’s promoters are working to solve some of the problems that have beset the country’s exponentially-expanding live music sector, which is now swelling faster than ever before.
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