Indian artists' Spotify royalties grew 29% in 2025, and the growth is regional

Spotify published its India edition of Loud & Clear on 2 Sep 2026. The headline: royalties generated by Indian artists on Spotify grew 29% in 2025, and Spotify says every major Indian language contributed. The more interesting story is where that growth came from, and who is positioned to collect it.

What Spotify reported

The numbers, all from Spotify's own report:

• Listeners streamed Indian artists nearly 335 billion times in 2025, more than 20 billion hours.
• Listeners played an Indian artist they had never heard before 12.8 billion times.
• The number of artists generating more than INR 10 million a year grew 21%, and the number generating more than INR 50 million has doubled since 2023.
• More than 40% of the royalties Indian artists earned on Spotify in 2025 came from listeners outside India.
• I-Pop, Spotify's term for Indian music released outside Bollywood soundtracks, made up half of its 2025 year-end top 10 in India. Aditya Rikhari's independent single "Sahiba" held No. 1 in India for more than 11 consecutive weeks.

Spotify gives no rupee total for Indian artists' royalties, so the 29% is a growth rate on a base it does not disclose.

The growth is regional

Spotify lists the biggest year-on-year royalty increases for regional-language music, measured globally: Telugu up more than 120%, Marathi nearly 50%, Bengali nearly 40%, Malayalam more than 30%, Hindi nearly 30% and Tamil 20%. Haryanvi streams rose nearly sevenfold between February 2023 and February 2026, and Spotify's RADAR emerging-artist programme is adding Malayalam after Punjabi and Tamil.

Hindi, the language most of the industry is built around, grew at roughly the national average. The languages growing fastest mostly start from smaller bases. That shift away from the Hindi centre is the real finding in the report.

The domestic market is still mostly free

Set those growth rates against EY's annual review of Indian media, published in March 2026. EY estimates paid music subscriptions grew 37% to 14.4 million in 2025, out of 178 million audio streamers. Of roughly 5.98 trillion music streams in India that year, about 5.8 trillion were free or ad-supported. EY expects paid subscribers to exceed 28 million by 2028, with subscription revenue rising from about INR 10 billion to INR 22 billion. Music Business Worldwide notes the base has more than tripled since 2022, helped by services that cut back free listening.

Put the two reports together and a pattern appears (this is our reading, not a figure either report gives): with more than 40% of the money arriving from abroad and the home market still overwhelmingly free, a large share of the 29% is likely driven by diaspora and international listeners, who mostly sit in higher-paying subscription markets. That makes "Indian music is growing" partly a story about who is listening, not only how many.

What it means for artists

Spotify does not pay artists directly. Its own explainer says recording royalties go to the licensor that delivered the music, usually a label or distributor, and publishing royalties go to publishers, collecting societies and mechanical agencies. Those rightsholders then pay artists and songwriters under their individual agreements. A 120% rise in Telugu royalties is a rise in money paid to whoever controls the recordings and songs, not a 120% raise for every Telugu artist.

So the practical questions for a regional independent are:

• Who holds your masters? If a label or a distributor deal takes a large cut, or owns the recording outright, the growth lands there first.
• Is the song registered? In India, the Indian Performing Right Society represents composers, lyricists and music publishers as a copyright society under the Copyright Act, 1957. It reported distributing more than Rs 600 crore in FY2024-25, with streaming platforms contributing more than 70% in recent years. Songwriters who never registered their works are unlikely to see their share of that.
• Are your credits clean? Publishing money follows metadata. A Marathi or Bengali writer who self-releases through a distributor and leaves the songwriter fields thin is giving up the side of the royalty that streaming growth is now feeding.

The artists Spotify put on stage made the case for going direct. Punjabi singer Simran Choudhary said streaming means artists no longer need to wait for a big label or gatekeeper, and Rikhari credited Spotify's discovery tools with taking personal songs to a national audience. Both are fair points. Direct reach is real. Direct payment is not automatic.

Artists are also competing with more than other artists. On r/BollywoodMusic, a thread about Arijit Singh's "Kairiyat" sets the original against AI versions of it, going by the thread's title. When listeners trade AI covers of India's biggest playback singer, regional artists with smaller fanbases have even less protection against cheap imitations of their voice and catalogue.

What we think

The 29% is a genuine signal, but it measures a distribution channel, not artist income. The most useful number in the report is the 40% earned abroad: it says regional Indian music is already an export product, earning in markets where subscriptions pay more, before the domestic paid base (about 8% of streamers on EY's figures) has caught up.

That creates a window and a risk. The window: a Telugu or Malayalam independent can build a paying international audience without film placement, as Spotify's own Global Impact List suggests: 11 of the 15 most exported Indian songs of 2025 came directly from artists rather than soundtracks. The risk: the people best placed to capture that money are the ones with back-office capacity, meaning labels, aggregators and publishers who register every work and chase every claim. EY notes labels' other income grew 26% as they moved into events, talent management and branded content, a sign labels are already positioning around artists' wider incomes.

Our view: the regional wave will be decided less by algorithms than by admin. Independent artists who own their masters, register with IPRS and keep their songwriter metadata complete will get most of the upside. Those who sign away recordings for a playlist push, or skip registration, will watch the growth charts from outside. Spotify could help by showing artists, in Spotify for Artists, which registered publisher or society is attached to each track. Until then, that check is the artist's job.

Production costs matter here too. Cheaper tools let more regional producers make release-ready records without a studio budget, and browser DAWs, including Veena, are part of that shift.