India in 2024: Streaming looks local while live content goes global

Insight into India – music business journalist every month Amit Gurbaxani shares his expertise, insights and analysis on key stories from the exciting, exploding Indian market.

This is the first part of a two-part look from Amit at today’s Indian music landscape – first looking at the streaming and live landscape in 2024 and the next part looking at how this ecosystem might change in 2025.

When Spotify and Apple Music released 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 50, barring one spillover hit from 2023, the chart-topper ” Tu Hai Kahan” by the Pakistani trio Aur. This was down from four and eight last year, and the figures also included a cracker from our neighboring country.

As DSPs across the country attract new listeners, consumption of music by local artists and in local languages ​​is expected to increase, especially when it comes to the most played tracks on these platforms.

But locally, the audience for international music appears to be the strongest it has ever been, with a record number of artists performing here in the last 12 months.

If we just take the British acts performing in India this year, the list includes a wide range of solo artists and bands, including Ben Howard, Dua Lipa and Ed Sheeran (who is said to have assembled 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 as well as Jungle, Keane, Royal Blood and Sting, who each played the second edition of Lollapalooza India (2023) in Mumbai.

Other international stars making their India debut in 2024 included Avenged Sevenfold, G-Eazy, Halsey, Jonas Brothers, JPEGMAFIA, Maroon 5 and Pusha T, either doing a standalone show or headlining a festival.

In addition to Lipa, Sheeran, Jungle, Sting and TesseracT, who have guested in recent years, there have been repeated appearances by Akon, Animals As Leaders, Fatoumata Diawara, God Is An Astronaut, Jungle, Karnivool, Lauv, OneRepublic, Vieux Farka Toure , and finally Bryan Adams, who returned for this sixth and largest tour here with sold-out stops in seven cities where he performed 140,000 people played, says organizer EVA Live.

I have not listed here the seemingly countless DJ producers who have known for over two decades that India is one of the largest electronic music markets in the world. Here, festivals like Sunburn (2007) in Goa are aimed at fans of mainstream organizers, while festivals like Magnetic Fields (2013) in Rajasthan and Echoes of Earth (2016) in Bengaluru are aimed at the more alternative and experimental representatives. There are now also a handful of genre-specific festivals, such as the Mahindra Blues Festival (2011) and the metal-focused Wacken Open Air-affiliated Bangalore Open Air (2012), as well as relatively new festivals dedicated to K-pop, such as K – Wave (2023) and K-Town (2024).

Over the last decade, the number of annual music festivals in India has more than doubled to around 50, and a significant number of these festivals showcase local artists across the country.

Owen Roncon, managing director of promoter BookMyShow Live – who staged the Sheeran and Maroon 5 shows and runs Lollapalooza India and the rock-heavy Bandland festivals (2023) – believes the growth can be attributed to expanding audiences in four Divide into categories. “In the festival scenario, there is a fan of a talent, then there is a fan of the artist and then there is the fan of an experience,” he said in an episode of my podcast The Indian Music Charts Podcast in August.

Deepak Choudhary, the founder and CEO of EVA Live, explains the increase in demand more succinctly. “It’s an influx of two things, YOLO and FOMO,” says Choudhary, who also feels that live events are diverting audiences from other entertainment options like films – this has been a particularly bad year for Bollywood films at the box office – and the Internet distract series, “the competition”, which was canceled due to “digital fatigue”.

There’s no sign of slowing down either, with Coldplay, Ed Sheeran and Cigarettes After Sex returning for their biggest tours yet. On the other hand, India suffers from a lack of infrastructure. In my hometown of Mumbai, the country’s entertainment capital and by far the most popular touring destination, venues include the city’s racecourse, a government open land, an exhibition center, a film studio and a cricket stadium on the outskirts of the city.

The industry is also struggling with new challenges that come with new opportunities. This year, BookMyShow was convened after Coldplay tickets sold out in minutes but were available almost immediately on secondary sites. one of the strangest back and forths between an artist manager and a festival organizer and the last-minute cancellation of the long-running NH7 Weekender festival.

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In the second part of this column, I write about how India’s promoters are working to solve some of the problems plaguing the country’s exponentially growing live music sector, which is now growing faster than ever before.