Indian Artists Are Succeeding Across New Dimensions, Spotify’s 2026 Loud & Clear Report Shows
- Michele
- 10 September 2026, Thursday
India’s music scene is growing steadily, and Spotify’s 2026 Loud & Clear report offers insight into how exactly this growth manifests. This article takes a closer look at the numbers and what they tell us about the development of India’s music industry in 2025.
Music from India Is Reaching More Listeners
India’s music economy is experiencing growth, and recent numbers from Spotify provide insight into the different dimensions of this development. According to Spotify’s 2026 Loud & Clear report, royalties generated by Indian artists grew by 29% compared with the previous year.
Indian artists were streamed nearly 335 billion times on the platform in 2025. That adds up to more than 20 billion hours of music listening. Women artists played an important part in this growth, with their local streams up by 27% year over year.
Moreover, the report found that Indian music is reaching listeners beyond the country’s borders. More than 40% of all royalties earned by Indian artists on Spotify in 2025 came from listeners outside India. International streams of Indian women artists grew by 7%.
All Major Regional Languages Contributing to Growth
Another significant finding is that every major language spoken in the country contributed to the growth in royalties. In its report, Spotify breaks down the exact numbers for each language and how much royalties grew.
Royalties from music in Telugu were up by more than 120%, while Marathi was up by nearly 50%, making them the two languages with the highest growth. Bengali was up by nearly 40%, while Malayalam was up by more than 30% and Hindi by nearly 30%. Finally, royalties generated by music in Tamil were up by 20%. As for streams, Haryanvi was one of the fastest-growing languages on the platform, with a nearly sevenfold increase from February 2023 to February 2026.
Jayant Chaudhary, Union Minister of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, attended the event at which the data was released and commented: “The 29% growth in Spotify royalties, supported by strong gains across Indian languages, shows how digital platforms are enabling talent from every region to find audiences, build sustainable livelihoods and participate in the global creative economy.”
Indian Artists Succeeding Independently
While the Bollywood industry remains a major source of music releases in India, Indian pop music (I-Pop, as Spotify calls it) accounted for half of Spotify’s 2025 year-end Top 10 in the country. Some of the names that stood out were Kushagra, Anuv Jain, Faheem Abdullah, and Jasleen Royal, as well as Aditya Rikhari, whose track “Sahiba” held the first spot on Spotify in India for more than 11 consecutive weeks.
“Streaming changed the scale of what was possible for me as an independent artist,” Aditya told Spotify. “Songs that started from a very personal place were able to reach listeners across the country, sometimes long after they were released.”
Conclusion: India's Music Economy And Its Future
India’s music scene reflects a wide range of sounds, languages, and musical traditions, and Spotify’s newly released data reflects this variety. But it also shows that artists from different parts of the country are finding listeners far beyond their immediate surroundings, while regional music, I-Pop, and independent releases are gaining more space alongside the country’s established film-music industry.
For Indian artists, these numbers confirm that opportunities to reach audiences without being limited by geography, language, or traditional music industry structures are available and that many have taken these opportunities to turn then into success. With more listeners discovering artists from different parts of the country and taking their music beyond India, the country’s music scene continues to grow in new directions.
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Michele is a Berlin-based writer passionate about music in its many forms, from soulful house, groovy techno, and breaky jungle/drum & bass to alternative rock, dark wave, and beyond. With experience in production, journalism, and DJing, they engage with the culture of sound from multiple perspectives. Their current topics of interest include club culture, music discovery & curation, dance, and the ways music affects perception & feeling. Michele writes in English.
