Four initial observations on India's music industry

By: Cherie Hu

Published: 2019-08-25

As promised, here are some initial thoughts and reflections on the Indian music industry, based on conversations I’ve had so far here in Mumbai. There will be a lot more to chew on and share once the All About Music conference kicks off on Tuesday.

As always, if you have any feedback or additional questions, please feel free to write them in the comments section below and/or in our Discord channel!

But first, some resources if you need them

For those who are unfamiliar with the Indian music market, I’ve written two articles on the topic so far that may be helpful to you — in terms of laying the landscape of how most artists make their income in India, and how there are technological and cultural disruptions to come with respect to Bollywood’s influence:

Here are some recent articles that have been helpful for me in my own research:

Thought 1: Even more than good taste, licensing deals are the true backbone of global A&R.

The connections may not be immediately apparent, but effective A&R cannot happen without comprehensive licensing deals, particularly for regional artists seeking global audience reach.

To my knowledge, Gaana and Wynk — the two biggest audio-first music streaming services in India, aside from JioSaavn — don’t have agreements in place with incumbent indie distributors like CD Baby and TuneCore. That means that local indie artists looking to strengthen relationships with Indian audiences arguably have little incentive to go through the distributors that will give them the fastest track to a truly global audience, because a lot of local Indian services are still being left out.

In the other direction, many Western streaming services don’t yet have the proper licensing deals to showcase new Indian artists legally on their platform (see Spotify’s disputes with Warner Music and Saregama as key examples). Saavn and Gaana both dominate the market of original music initiatives with local artists (Artist Originals and Gaana Originals, respectively) — essentially acting as independent labels in their own right, with a direct role in both A&R and marketing. While any service can hypothetically take on this A&R function, local services definitely have an advantage in surfacing local talent due to a deeper, firsthand knowledge of culture on the ground.

Licensing deals between labels and streaming services are situations over which individual, independent artists have little to no control, but which are crucial for determining a given artist’s potential reach worldwide, no matter where they come from. A&R has no impact if the right people can’t hear your music.

Thought 2: Specifically in India, local and foreign streaming services are often subpar at curating each other’s music. Which is the better problem to have?

A local industry veteran told me in conversation that Indian music services are excellent at curating and recommending regional music, particularly in switching across Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and other regional languages — but are not so good at the same task for English-language music.

Spotify has the exact same problem; it’s excellent at curating music and understanding user behavior in Western markets, but has gotten mixed reactions to its official editorial playlists in India so far (some examples: Bollywood Blast, Bhangra Bangers, Indie India and Indian Chill).

Admittedly, Spotify is much newer to the Indian market, and can certainly improve its local curation chops over time. But the big question in this situation is, which problem is the better one to have?

This reminds me of another recent conversation I had with an employee at Saavn, in which he claimed that “the next billion people to sign up for a streaming service will look and behave much differently from the first billion.” Their musical tastes, socioeconomic status and motivations to pay for a media service will all be different from what the mainstream music-industry media is used to talking about.*

Under this argument about the “next billion,” the services that will win are those that can build effectively for these behavioral nuances — which, as of today, are the local rather than international music services, which capture majority market share of music consumption in their respective markets.

*I’ve also learned on this trip that after Rolling Stone India shuttered its print edition in the summer of 2018, there is basically only one remaining major music-centric publication in print in India, called The Score. I hope that funding for independent, objective music media (i.e. not funded by a record label) will continue to increase in the future, for both online and print, and that foreign trade publications like Billboard and Music Business Worldwide will continue to include India in their international expansion plans.

Thought 3: The definition of what it means to be “independent” is even more complicated in India than in the U.S. — because the vast majority of “independent” artists still make most of their income from the Bollywood machine.

With the exception of a few people, every single independent Indian artist I’ve met, heard of and/or watched perform to date still makes the majority of their income from being a session musician and/or songwriter for Bollywood films. In other words, incumbent, corporate industry practices — far from being “disrupted” — still comprise the bread & butter and financial lifeblood of the independent music scene.

Many articles and research studies on the current state of the Indian music industry have corroborated this claim. That’s in part because there are few alternatives for independent artists to get funding and exposure for new records. In fact, many of the publicly-lauded initiatives for showcasing independent talent in India, such as VYRL Originals and Sterling Reserve Music Project, are actually owned by a major label, and often feature musicians who are already active on the Bollywood circuit.

In fact, it’s gone so far such that major-label execs are crediting Bollywood films with strengthening the independent music scene — publicly declaring that the two are intertwined.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone India, Shridhar Subramaniam, President of Sony Music India & Middle East, claimed that the Bollywood film Gully Boy — largely inspired by the lives of Indian rappers Divine and Naezy — played a large role in equalizing the playing field between pop/hip-hop music and traditional Bollywood music.

But the interviewer, Nirmika Singh (Executive Editor of Rolling Stone India), rebutted that that recent frenzy around independent hip-hop precisely could not have happened without Gully Boy‘s “Bollywood” tag, and that the phenomenon was far from genuinely indie.

To which Subramaniam replied: “Bollywood has lent an amp[lification] effect; it hasn’t created the scene” [emphasis added].

That actually starkly parallels what’s going on in the U.S., in terms of major labels trying to position themselves as “amplifiers” of, rather than competitors with, independent talent.

For instance, Warner Music Group recently struck partnerships with Audiomack, Troy Carter’s Q&A and Pat Corcoran’s Nice Work — all allegedly “pro-indie” and, in some cases, “pro-DIY” companies. Nas’ label Mass Appeal also partnered with Universal to launch Mass Appeal India, with Divine as their first artist.

This will likely be a future newsletter topic, but I’m still trying to wrap my head about why these kinds of companies are trying to position themselves as partners to the incumbent system, rather than truly sustainable alternatives. One potential reason is that there will naturally be a certain amount of churn from “pro-indie” companies, in terms of artists outgrowing smaller resource pools (the music distribution landscape is a perfect example of this), and there should be a way for such companies to participate in that upside instead of completely losing their most important customers.

In India, it seems that the problem is not so much whether artists will “outgrow” smaller resource networks, but whether those networks even exist in the first place, let alone remain sustainable.

Thought 4: There’s just as much confusion in India as in the U.S. about the actual role of YouTube Music and how it’s differentiated in a valuable way from the original YouTube platform, for both artists and consumers.

Lol. Maybe it’ll take another 15 million downloads to finally curb the confusion.