Independent music in India is having its moment

For decades, the Indian music industry operated on a single, well-worn track. Film soundtracks ruled, ghazals had their loyal following, and classical music held its cultural ground. But the business of music in India has shifted in ways that would have been difficult to predict even 15 years ago. Today, independent music is no longer the underdog genre it once was. It has grown into a mainstream force, producing more releases than Bollywood in certain segments and drawing listeners across languages, platforms and borders.

Digital technology sits at the heart of this transformation. The old gatekeepers, the studios, the label executives and the film producers who once controlled which songs the public would hear, no longer hold the same power.

“Any musician, singer or composer can now record a track, upload it to a distribution platform and have it available on major streaming services within days. There are no physical formats to manufacture, no contracts to fight over and no waiting for a film to release before a song can find its audience. The freedom available to independent creators today is of a kind that simply did not exist in earlier generations,” says Bollywood’s only PR guru Dale Bhagwagar, who invented the music PR segment in India in the nineties. As he started out in public relations and founded his PR agency Dale Bhagwagar Media Group, it became the first  entertainment PR agency to handle the media branding for independent singers, lyricists, composers, singles, music videos, music albums and music companies.

Regional music has emerged as one of the biggest growth stories within this broader shift. Independent artists singing in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali and Punjabi are finding audiences that the Hindi film industry never consistently catered to. Platforms have expanded their regional catalogues considerably in response, and the appetite for vernacular content continues to grow as smartphones reach smaller towns and rural areas, bringing both new listeners and new creators into the fold.

The COVID-19 pandemic proved to be an unlikely accelerant for independent music. With live events suspended and touring off the table, artists who had previously relied on performance income turned to digital releases. The tools were already in place. The pandemic simply pushed a far greater number of people to use them, and many of those habits have held.

Live music has also benefited from the independent wave. Artists are increasingly building fan bases through streaming platforms before converting them into concert audiences, creating a pipeline that did not exist when film music was the only reliable route to public attention.

Challenges remain. Monetisation has not kept pace with consumption, per-stream payouts stay low by global standards, and converting casual free listeners into paying subscribers continues to be a persistent difficulty for platforms. The infrastructure is still catching up with the scale of the opportunity.

Despite these structural issues, the broader direction of independent music in India remains firmly upward. The barriers to entry have come down sharply, the audiences are bigger and more diverse than at any point before, and the creative possibilities open to an independent artist today would have seemed extraordinary to musicians who were trying to break through two decades ago. The shift from a film-led model to a creator-led one is well underway, and by most indications, this is still only the beginning.