Raga and Roll: Inside India’s booming music market
India has been long talked about as a potential goldmine for live music – could that promise finally be set for fruition?
Feature By IQ | 1 July 2025
If you wanted to sum up the demographic in the world under the scale of the live opportunity in India in a few lines, you would struggle to do it much more economically than Ashish Hemrajani, founder and CEO of ticketing company and well-connected promoter BookMyShow, speaking at ILMC in London in February.
“I come from a country of 1.4bn people,” he said. “It has the [largest] age of 35. There are 300m Indians that speak English as their first language. Unlike in China, Spotify, Netflix, and YouTube all exist in India, and kids growing up are exposed to the same music universe.”
This picture of youth, scale, and global connection explains why, at a time when some well-established live markets are struggling to make the…
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