Spotify presses play on India’s regional music: MD Amarjit Singh Batra

What are the highlights of the Loud & Clear report?

Royalties generated by Indian artistes on Spotify grew 29 per cent in 2025, with every major Indian language contributing to that growth. Telugu royalties rose more than 120 per cent year-on-year, Marathi nearly 50 per cent, and Bengali almost 40 per cent. Indian artistes were streamed nearly 335 billion times globally. And 40 per cent of the royalties for Indian artistes came from outside India.

We were always a high-consumption market for music, but we are now becoming a large market for music trading, creation, and export. We are delighted to be key drivers of this change.

We started with four or five languages, but now we are seeing the resurgence of almost eight to 12 languages across the country. And some of them have been big surprises, like Haryanvi artistes.

When you talk of 40 per cent of royalties coming from outside India, is it largely from the diaspora market, or is some mainstreaming happening?

The diaspora is there, obviously, because they understand the language. But many of our artistes are breaking out — Prateek Kuhad in English and Diljit Dosanjh in Punjabi. When Dosanjh performs at Coachella, people don’t understand the language, but they like Punjabi music. They also like some of the other hip-hop that is coming from India.

RAP91, a playlist featuring several Indian languages, is among the 10 most-followed rap playlists on Spotify globally.

How are film and non-film music placed?

In India, 70-80 per cent of consumption is local music. Within local music, 50-70 per cent of the top 50 songs are non-film. If you look at a new song being released for a film and a non-film song, non-film sometimes drives more streams than film songs.

There is a lot of talk of moving from a music label-based ecosystem to an artiste-based ecosystem that encompasses social media, live concerts, etc. Does this help improve monetisation?

We have such big names in our minds when we talk about artistes. We don’t realise that there are millions out there aspiring to become artistes. The first part of the journey then is: can I be heard?

Being heard and being successful is what Spotify is becoming the first destination for. We are taking an artiste from a very early stage through masterclasses and programmes like Fresh Minds and putting them on the track to becoming successful.

Our job over the past few years has been to increase the number of artistes. We have trebled the number of artistes coming into this ecosystem and trying to make them successful. As they become successful and bigger on the platform, that’s where they start making money. And that’s where the royalties and other things that we’re talking about in the report happen.

But it also unlocks the next level — they go out and do events, sometimes with us. For a country our size, for the concert economy to grow big, the artiste-first culture has to become big. Somebody has to do the hard work of promoting artistes — that’s the job we have been doing.

What turned the tide for Spotify in India?

One, we came in knowing that India is not going to be like everywhere else in the world. We built listening habits and a strong, free proposition to get many people to come on to streaming. We don’t share numbers. But from when we came in to where we are now, we have learnt a lot about Indian consumers and how to make premium products relevant and desirable for them. That shift has happened.

Two, we have been working on removing any kind of friction in payments through local partnerships and UPI (Unified Payments Interface) AutoPay. More than 90 per cent of our intake now comes from UPI.

Three, we realised that India is not a one-size-fits-all market. Everybody doesn’t have the same pocket. So we have tested different levels of premium, like a Platinum plan or a Family plan.

Is advertising a larger part of your revenue or subscription? 

Sixty to 65 per cent is from premium (subscriptions). But advertising is also an amazing story. There are over 600 brands today that are not only on the platform but are also looking to do interesting things around events.

There are 270 million streaming video subscribers, but music is at just about 14 million, going by the Ficci-EY report. How does one reconcile that?

That is an underestimate. It is much higher than that. If you look at video streaming in the first five to six years, it was not as much.

What is on Spotify’s to-do list?

The first chapter was creating access and discoverability for Indian languages and different types of content. The next step is to unlock the connection between the artiste and fans. For that, we are working on a product and on the ground with our Spotify IRL (In Real Life) experiments and so on.

For example, we do meet-and-greets for premium fans. We just launched premium rewards for premium fans. Broadly, it is about how fandom could help drive value for artistes in a way that the premium business grows.

Where does India fit on Spotify’s global dashboard?

India has always been a strategic market for Spotify for two reasons.

One, it is a large source of Spotify’s future audience growth because it is the largest market in the world. More importantly, this is also a mobile-first population. That means there is an everyday relationship with music. Therefore, building a deeper play in this market and a strong paid music market is an important part of the growth of not only Spotify but also the global music economy.

Two, India is a great source of culture for the world. It is now slowly unravelling. Global listeners discovering an Indian artiste 12.8 billion times last year is a great statistic. Spotify is leading the K-pop and Latin pop story. We want to be the platform that helps India lead the global story for music.