Where is the artist development in India's music industry?

By: Cherie Hu

Published: 2019-08-31

This will be the first of several posts I’ll be publishing in the coming week that will reflect on my trip to Mumbai, with a focus on the Indian music industry.

I’ve learned and absorbed so much from attending the All About Music conference (where I moderated a panel on the state of “non-film music” in India), as well as from having one-on-one discussions with stakeholders of all kinds across the local music industry, including but not limited to record-label and streaming executives, concert promoters and independent artists and managers.

Today’s post will try to unpack artist development in India — a concept that even the most experienced local industry veterans are still trying to understand, especially in a Bollywood-dominated environment. Future posts will dive into specific challenges and opportunities for the Indian music industry around brand partnerships; publishing, sync and public-performance royalties; music-tech startups and entrepreneurship; and the myth around consumers’ “low willingness to pay” for music and media. Hope these reflections are valuable for you!

Disclaimer: having spent all of my time in India just in Mumbai so far (and for the rest of this trip), I fully understand that I’ve seen only a small, perhaps non-representative sample of life in the country, including how people consume and relate to music. My conclusions below and in future posts will draw from this perspective, so please feel free to call out any limitations I should take into account in the comments section below!

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While people constantly question the state of A&R departments at record labels, I think everyone in music would agree that when done right, artist development is a vital growth driver in the music business. The best A&R initiatives offer long-term, mutually beneficial investments in artists’ careers that give them the tools to improve their creative chops and stage presence, grow their fanbases and tighten their “brand-market fit.”

So you can imagine my alarm at the fact that most music-industry professionals I have met so far in India have openly admitted that A&R and artist-development resources are virtually nonexistent in the country.

At the All About Music conference (hereafter AAM), I tried asking the same question to multiple stakeholders in the local music ecosystem: “What’s the state of artist development here?” The response usually started off with a scoff or eye-roll, then went on to express some combination of frustration, amusement and worry about the lack of progress over the last few years.

The lack of artist-development resources in India is due in large part to Bollywood’s current dominance. Don’t get me wrong, Bollywood does make significant long-term investment in specific kinds of creative professionals — namely, composers and vocalists (known as “playback singers”) who are content with creating content only for the high-volume film industry, while giving up most of the rights to their work. This film-centric development machine is why Bollywood celebrities like Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy and A. R. Rahman have now garnered global appeal.

A Bollywood-first world, however, makes it difficult for singers, instrumentalists and other musicians to grow their own brands around original output that isn’t necessarily tied to a film.

Based on conversations with people on the ground here, I’ve broken out the reasons why into four parts:

At large, artist development cannot happen if the dominant companies aren’t willing to make long-term commitments to sustaining artists’ individual growth. A&R also arguably cannot happen without audience development, which requires pillars such as a robust live-events scene and an active, independent music-media ecosystem.

These factors manifest themselves in different ways in vibrant music markets around the world, and there remains ample opportunity to improve them specifically in India.

Lack of copyright education for artists

As has been widely covered in both local and international media, Bollywood music directors hire musicians to compose and/or perform soundtrack material on a flat-fee, work-for-hire basis, buying out all the rights to their compositions in the process. This is a stark contrast to the “music supervisor” model in most Western films, whereby internal supervisors license soundtrack music from third parties, rather than buying out rights to bespoke content. (More on this difference in a later post.)

Because Bollywood still drives so much music consumption in India, this work-for-hire model is basically a way of life for most local musicians who want to make a sustainable living. This is bad in terms of creative freedom, though, because those working in this system have historically lost ownership over, and hence any long-term financial benefits for, their work. For instance, former pop star turned playback singer Neha Bhasin shared during our AAM panel that one of her Bollywood songs has 300 million streams on local service Gaana, but she’s received no money from the label or streaming service.

Surely you can get yourself out of this system as an artist, right? Not so simple. The majority of artists I met this week who are releasing original, “independent” music still make most of their annual income from Bollywood gigs.

Moreover, there are so few educational resources about the other types of revenue streams and business models available for artists outside of Bollywood. I learned this the hard way myself, from the vantage point of a curious journalist. In the weeks leading up to my Mumbai trip, I tried to find any reliable, comprehensive resources online that laid out the copyright landscape in India, but quickly came to a dead end. I could only rely on piecing together anecdotes about copyright lawsuits and payment models from one-off articles, plus conversations with active professionals within the industry.

Turns out, it wasn’t just me who was confused. To give you a sense of the education gap: Nikhil D’Souza, an experienced playback singer and original artist who also spoke on my non-film panel, told me that the concept of “masters” was all the rage at AAM in 2018, and that this year’s new buzzword is “publishing,” because local artists are finally learning more about these kinds of rights and splits and what they should be negotiating for in label deals.

At AAM, I did receive a helpful pamphlet on the copyright landscape in India from the folks at Anand and Anand & Khimani, a law firm that represents some of the highest-profile artists and labels in the country (including Warner Music in the recent lawsuit against Spotify’s India launch). I met many other industry stakeholders at AAM who are working to bring more of these educational resources online, so you should look out for them in the coming months.

Lack of long-term investment in emerging artists’ careers

As more and more artists demand control over their copyrights and/or their individual branding, “non-film music” — i.e. music that is produced and marketed outside of the Bollywood machine — has become perhaps the most important discussion topic in the Indian music industry today.

Importantly, “non-film” music is not the same thing as “independent” music, because some of the most aggressive investors in non-film catalog are major labels (e.g. Sony Music’s Big Bang, a new pop-oriented, non-film joint venture with talent management firm Kwan), as well as larger lifestyle brands (e.g. Allied Blenders and Distillers’ Sterling Reserve Music Project, run in partnership with Universal Music). I’ll write more in a later post about how brands tend to be involved much earlier in the creative conversation for artists in India than in Western markets, by financial necessity.

One of the most talked-about non-film music initiatives at AAM was VYRL Originals — a subsidiary of Universal Music India that launched in early 2018 and will be releasing “north of 100 [non-film] singles” in the coming year, according to Devraj Sanyal, Managing Director and CEO of Universal Music Group, India and South Asia. Sanyal also claimed during an AAM panel that each of these singles will be pushed with the same amount of resources as a mainstream Bollywood song, across TV, radio and digital channels — a commitment that, to be fair, would have been laughable even one year ago.

Local streaming services are also setting up their own original, non-film music initiatives — including JioSaavn’s label Artist Originals, Gaana’s in-house program Gaana Originals (which works with existing labels, rather than acting as a label in its own right) and Hungama’s Artist Aloud distribution and marketing platform. More than major labels, these services are arguably well-positioned to make more ambitious investments in artists with unconventional sounds and backgrounds.

This level of investment and hype seems like a step in the right direction in terms of diversifying the type of music available to everyday consumers. But I quickly realized one common handicap among almost all of these initiatives: they’re all built off of singles deals, rather than lasting more long-term.

In other words, the likes of Universal’s VYRL Originals and JioSaavn’s Artist Originals invest in just one single with a given artist, and rarely stay committed beyond that one-song threshold. Moreover, many of the artists involved in these initiatives are already mainstays of the Bollywood machine anyways, instead of being truly emerging talent.

Proponents of the singles-deal model will say that it gives both artists and labels maximum flexibility, in terms of not locking them into restrictive deals. But in reality — especially in a Bollywood-centric landscape where there are few other viable alternative routes for independent artists — relying only on singles deals will arguably lead to subpar outcomes for everyone involved. On one hand, artists don’t get the long-term support they need to develop their sound and audience in a compelling way. On the other hand, labels, brands and streaming services can’t actually take any meaningful credit in accelerating any individual artist’s growth journey, nor can they make as wide of an impact on the overall music market.

One example that came up in conversation this week was Marshmello’s one-off collaboration with famed Bollywood composer Pritam, released under JioSaavn’s Artist Originals. In theory, it was a groundbreaking collaboration, and it did generate some buzz within the music industry in how it demonstrated international demand for crossovers with Indian talent. But the resulting single, “BIBA,” didn’t actually make that much of a dent on India’s consumer-facing music market, in terms of shifting consumer demand and tastes. It particularly under-performed given the enormous audiences of both Marshmello and Pritam.

Lack of dedicated concert venues for independent and emerging artists

One of the first things I did in Mumbai was attend a concert by independent Indian artist Dhruv Visvanath at the Flea Bazaar Café. Dhruv and his bandmates did an awesome job — but most people in the venue seemed to be focused more on eating, drinking and talking with each other, instead of paying attention to the performers onstage. For any New Yorkers reading this, it would be almost akin to an artist performing an acoustic in the middle of an aisle at Canal Street Market, with the majority of people focused on downing their meal and only a few people crowding around the artist with their full attention.

Through my conversations this week, I learned that this experience is consistent with most concert experiences in India. Many popular venues for musical performances are not dedicated concert halls, but rather just glorified bars where the ancillary food and drink revenue, rather than the music itself, takes center stage.

Some underground and independent music companies do run successful, year-round live operations; for instance, electronic-focused management and booking agency UnMute books between 500 and 600 gigs a year for its artists across India. But most of these venues are in smaller clubs with up to around a 500-person capacity, with little room for upward mobility apart from one-off festivals.

Around the world, live music is such an important part of artists’ careers; this is especially the case in India where revenue from recorded music remains prohibitively low. But if this is true, there should be many more platforms for independent artists to actually develop and showcase their live craft, and develop an organic, attentive offline audience in the process.

Lack of dedicated media and editorial platforms for independent artists

On Twitter, I shared a moment of culture shock that I thought would be relevant here.

I went to a great bookstore in Mumbai called Kitab Khana, and, as I always do in any bookstore, asked staff for the music section. They pointed me to a small shelf upstairs, but I found that the vast majority of books on the “music shelf” were books about… movies. For every book about music (which usually focused on a local style, e.g. Hindustani classical music), there were roughly 25 books about classic films in Bollywood, Tollywood or another popular film scene.

I was first alarmed, but then connected the dots: if the Indian “music industry” is mostly equivalent with Bollywood, it makes sense that that equivalence would also be reflected in its media and literature.

At AAM, I had the honor of meeting lots of incredible journalists covering the Indian music industry, including but not limited to Nirmika Singh (Executive Editor of Rolling Stone India) and Amit Gurbaxani (frequent contributor for Billboard and several local Indian publications). Nearly all of them confirmed that a lot of music writing in the country is actually housed in film magazines, rather than in standalone music publications.

There are a handful of dedicated music publications, including Rolling Stone India, The Score, Wild City and Music Plus. But only one of them, The Score, is in print (Rolling Stone India shuttered their print edition in summer 2018), and not all of these publications are completely independent (e.g. Music Plus is owned by TM Talent Management, one of the country’s most influential artist-management companies). In addition, while it’s difficult but definitely plausible to make a living as a freelance music writer in the U.S., it’s nearly impossible to do the same in India.

Beyond print and digital media, radio and TV have had a rocky relationship with supporting independent music. Radio stations like Boxout.fm have fundamentally changed the local indie music landscape and served as an essential source of support; meanwhile, Pepsi MTV Indies, which at the time served as the only platform for independent artists to get airtime on national TV, lasted only for two years.

Interestingly, audio streaming may serve an important role in improving the local media equation, even if streaming services aren’t completely neutral platforms.

There’s been an ongoing conversation in Western music markets about how streaming services are arguably cannibalizing much of the traditional role of music journalists and critics — in terms of driving music discovery for consumers, while truly breaking artists and being an A&R resource for the industry. Even though there are hundreds of millions of consumers streaming music in India, that level of curation infrastructure just isn’t there yet on local streaming services.

In fact, one cliché-but-true phrase you’ll hear all the time in the local industry, and that I’ll likely cite multiple times in this series of posts, is that people don’t actually like to listen to music, but rather prefer to watch music. This means that even independent artists making original music rely heavily on video content, and hence on video channels like YouTube, to promote their music and build a fanbase, particularly if they want any chance of indirectly riding the wave of the Bollywood machine.

Yet, as Western markets are familiar with, YouTube mostly prefers to be hands-off with its curation, and intentionally wants to keep editorial activity decentralized — which ends up benefiting the music companies that can spend the most money on market and *cough cough* buy the most views.

During my non-film music panel at AAM, panelist Ankit Hanna argued that no artist in India has broken out on an audio-only streaming platform yet. The aforementioned artist Neha Bhasin agreed that there need to be stronger playlist ecosystems on local streaming services that could support independent artists on the basis on their music alone, instead of needing to focus solely on flashy visuals.

This was super interesting for me to hear, given that there seems to be growing disillusionment with the playlist ecosystem in Western markets, and that I’d already been writing about “our new post-playlist reality.” Nonetheless, given Bollywood’s dominance, it makes sense that local streaming services’ original content initiatives — along with Spotify’s entrance into the country, which now touts around 200 playlists made specifically for the Indian market — could potentially shift behavior away from merely “watching music” to appreciating songs without any visual accompaniment.

But again, this will arguably require moving beyond hype-driven singles deals, and instead encouraging projects that truly put artists and their long-term development at the forefront — a positioning that is still largely absent from India’s music industry at large, especially proportional to the amount of creative activity and innovation happening from the bottom up.