Spotify has, for the first time, released India-specific data from its annual Loud & Clear report, outlining the impact of the audio streaming platform on the music industry in the country through local and global discovery and growth. Artists from India alone were discovered over 10 billion times by first-time listeners in 2023. Over the past half-decade, Spotify has been deep in localizing playlists, collaborating with industry and consumers to comms, in a bid to get India’s artists closer to their fans. This effort comes through in the report, the key highlights of which are as follows:
Spotify has been constantly raising its visibility and discoverability for the local artists.
The way India listens to music has come of age. Five years ago, Spotify in India was streaming nearly 70% international music. Cut to the present day, the number has flipped: more than 70% of streams are now of local music. That is also reflected in Spotify India’s daily Top 50 list, which, in 2023, was comprised 84 percent by artists from the country.
This rise in popularity is also matched in monetary growth, where almost two-thirds of Spotify royalties made in India last year can be credited to local artists. In that same time, Spotify added nearly 8700 Indian artists to local and global editorial playlists, opening their music up to a wider audience.
Spotify is facilitating an export success story for artists in India.
This only includes editorial playlists. Spotify is providing the means for Indian artists to be heard by listeners all across the globe. Since 2019, consumption of music by Indian artists went up manifold in international markets by more than 2000%. Earlier this year, data from the streaming platform showed that A.R. Rahman, Alka Yagnik, Anirudh Ravichander, AP Dhillon, and Arijit Singh have been the most exported local artists over the last five years. As per Loud and Clear data, almost 40% of the total royalties earned in 2023 on Spotify by artists from India were due to listeners outside the market. The export growth is essentially boosted by countries such as the US, Canada, Indonesia, UAE, Turkey, Brazil, and Italy.
This has seen immense growth, driven by local languages, thanks to curation and industry collaboration.
What really makes India an amazing music market is the number of languages. Take Punjabi, for instance: it is one of the fastest-growing languages on Spotify in India, with 87% YoY growth of Punjabi music listeners in India alone during 2023. Other than Punjabi, it is Hindi and Tamil that have registered exponential growth—_artists from these languages witnessing a collective increase in Spotify royalties by 271 percent, 390 percent, and 585 percent, respectively, since 2020. A look at the Spotify charts will indicate how artists across these languages and other languages, including Telugu and Malayalam, peak in consumption.
Watch this video in which artists Anuv Jain, Armaan Malik, Jonita Gandhi, Kabeer Kathpalia, aka OAFF, and Karan Aujla share how Spotify helped them find new audiences.
