Is India's music industry hitting the right notes?

There’s a song for every moment, a memory attached to every song and it takes one down memory lane. There’s music in movies, in TV shows, on music channels, in ads and now, even on social media reels.

Unfortunately, in India, music is still not considered an independent industry yet, and very often, tends to get clubbed with films and entertainment. The music industry in India was worth Rs 1,500 crore in 2019, grew all the way to Rs 1,870 crore in 2021 and this year, is estimated to cross Rs 2,100 crore before it touches about Rs 2,800 crore by 2024.

The music industry revenue is broken down into 4 broad categories — digital, which includes streaming and all other kinds of digital music; synchronisation or “sync” for short, which is a music licence granted by the holder of the copyright of a particular composition, allowing the licensee to synchronise music with some kind of visual media output; performance rights: songwriters, composers, and music publishers have the exclusive right to play their music publicly and authorise others to do so under the copyright law; and physical, where you’d use media such as vinyl records, CDs and cassettes to listen to music.

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Ninety percent of the revenue is earned through digital media, though most of it is typically advertising-led because paid subscribers remain low. The rest is divided between sync, performance rights and physical — a very small part of the overall revenue.

Indians spend more hours listening to music than the global average. The average Indian listens to music 21.9 hours a week against the global average of 18.4 hours a week. Despite that, the Indian music industry is ranked 17 in the world. In some aspects like performance rights, physical buying etc, India is as low as 38th. The future looks bright though. We keep talking about the millennial, Gen Z opportunities here. Those between 25 and 44 listen to music for 25-28 hours a week.

Akshat Harbola, Head of Strategy and Operations at Spotify India, and Nirmika Singh, Executive Editor and Digital Director at Rolling Stone India, discuss if India’s music industry is hitting the right notes.

“Eighty-six percent of the money that has been earned, which is Rs 1,620 crore, is via streaming. So everyone is tuned into digital consumption, a bit of that revenue is coming from advertising. So we are all digitally glued in but we are not paying as much as we should be,” said Singh.

“Broadly for the music industry, the sources of revenue tend to be digital and then generated from any other rights, which are non-digital, so sync rights and performance rights,” said Harbola.

For the entire discussion, watch the accompanying video.