India is on the cusp of a live music revolution with the country’s touring scene tipped to “explode” in the near future by leading executives.

Coming on the heels of high-profile tours by Coldplay and Ed Sheeran, its emergence as a key touring market was further illustrated over the weekend with the third edition of Lollapalooza India.

Held from 8-9 March at Mumbai’s Mahalaxmi Racecourse, the festival featured performances from acts such as Green Day, Shawn Mendes, Glass Animals, Louis Tomlinson and Nothing But Thieves.

Tickets started at 5,999 rupees (€63) for the event, which was produced by India’s leading online entertainment platform BookMyShow, alongside Lollapalooza co-founder Perry Farrell and Live Nation’s C3 Presents.

Speaking at last month’s International Live Music Conference (ILMC) in London, Ashish Hemrajani, founder and CEO of Big Tree Entertainment Private Limited, which operates BookMyShow, outlined the potential of the market – predicting it will balloon “10x in the next five years”.

“I come from a country of 1.4 billion people,” he said. “It is the youngest demographic in the world under the age of 35. There are also 300 million Indians that speak English as the first language. Unlike in China, Spotify, Netflix and YouTube, all exist in India, and therefore kids growing up are exposed to same music universe.”

“India is on the cusp of becoming an essential destination for global musicians”

Hemrajani suggested festival slots can offer a useful precursor to full-scale tours of the country for international acts.

“It’s a great segue to come into a festival where you have 60,000 people and garner interest, so you know where you stand, and then come back for a tour a year or two later,” he said.

Kirk Sommer, global co-head of music at WME, which has brought acts including Coldplay, Dua Lipa and The Strokes to the region, also highlights the opportunity at play.

“Major venue investment is booming, and India will soon have world-class event spaces and financial opportunities to support international artists,” he tells local media. “It may take a few years, but India’s touring scene will soon explode.

“India’s music revolution is just beginning. With improvements in infrastructure and an expanding audience base, India is on the cusp of becoming an essential destination for global musicians, while simultaneously nurturing its own superstars.”

Indeed, Sommer stresses that spotting and developing domestic talent is an important part of WME’s strategy.

“This is a top priority for us,” says Sommer. “Many Indian artists already have global audiences without realising it. We want to help them achieve international success. In the near future, Indian artists will sell out arenas worldwide.”

“It’s a country which is steeped in music but it’s never been professionalised”

On a similar note, Hemrajani explained how festivals are helping to provide a platform for breaking local artists.

“We’ve never had grassroots venues in India, and therefore the music scene never built,” he said. “It’s a country which is steeped in music but it’s never been professionalised.

“Because we don’t have these smaller venues, the only way that we could help certain budding musicians is to put them on at festivals. So at Lollapalooza… you’ll see a Green Day, Shawn Mendes, Glass Animals, Louis Tomlinson but you’ll also see a whole bunch of Indian acts – [playing to] 60,000 people per day, and then they collaborate with some of the global artists.”

The policy extended to Ed Sheeran’s groundbreaking – +–=÷× (Mathematics) Tour, which visited six cities in India – Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru, Shillong and Delhi – in January/February, organised by BookMyShow Live and AEG Presents Asia.

“With Ed, we did the same,” said Hemrajani. “In every market, there was a new opening act, and it was a young artist who has never played before more than 4,000 or 5,000 people, but now had the chance to play to 30,000 people.”

“Infrastructure continues to be a challenge, and we’re trying to solve that”

As well as major hubs like Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, cities such as Gurgaon, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Kolkata, Shillong, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kochi, Pune and Indore are also projected to become established touring stops.

Hemrajani previously addressed the current shortcomings with India’s venue infrastructure – saying its first fully-fledged arena was in the works for Mumbai.

“Arenas is very loose word in India because we have… mostly festival grounds,” he said. “‘We don’t have arenas in India. And we have a six-month window where we can do outdoor events, because our weather permits us to do events between October to April, or at best May.

“The need of the hour is actually to have indoor venues with real air conditioning and 18-20,000 capacities.

“Infrastructure continues to be a challenge, and we’re trying to solve that as you build more routing around Middle East and Southeast Asia, because the timing works. It’s the same time of the year, from October to March, April, when you can tour in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. I think anchoring around those markets is a good segue to actually building volume into that market.”

Meanwhile, CassMae, a blind singer-songwriter from Germany, recently performed at one of the world’s largest music and meditation festivals. The 22-year-old graced the Mahashivratri celebrations in front of 600,000 people at the Isha Yoga Centre in South India.

The performance also attracted more than 140 million viewers worldwide, spanning approximately 72 countries, via a global livestream.

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If there were an award for the greatest potential touring market, India would be on that stage, brandishing the trophy, year in, year out. With a population nudging 1.4 billion and projected to surpass that of China by 2022, India is about as vast as countries get. Nonetheless, when a big band comes to town, the comparative rarity of the event still makes global headlines.

U2’s show in December at Mumbai’s DY Patil Stadium, the very last stop on the fifth leg of The Joshua Tree Tour, wasn’t the first superstar show to come to India – far from it: The Stones played Mumbai and Bangalore in 2003, while Beyoncé and Shakira came in 2007, Metallica in 2011, Coldplay in 2016, and Ed Sheeran in 2015 and 2017, with other significant visitors in between.

But each major concert fires up the expectation that India’s biggest cities could soon become routine destinations for the world’s biggest artists. And U2’s show before a crowd of 42,590, staged by local ticketing giant BookMyShow in partnership with Live Nation, got the country dreaming once more.

“There were a lot of reservations from everybody coming into India,” says BookMyShow CEO and founder Ashish Hemrajani, who freely concedes that India has failed to meet international expectations for live shows in the past. “It was the first outing for U2 here; it was the first show of this scale and magnitude; it was the last show of the tour. There was a lot riding on it and everyone was on tenterhooks.”

BookMyShow has been scaling up its promoting exploits in recent years, bringing Cirque du Soleil, NBA pre-season games, an adapted Hindi Aladdin and the Coldplay-headlined Mumbai edition of the Global Citizen festival, but Hemrajani says U2 represented a new level and a new set of pressures.

“There were a lot of reservations from everybody coming into India”

“We have got a great team in India, but nothing prepares you for dealing with Arthur Fogel, with Jake Berry and the whole team,” he says. “But if you talk to the folks that we dealt with, they were very pleasantly surprised by the level of professionalism they found.”

More than anyone else in the Indian business, Hemrajani has both a vision and a platform to bring about a revolution in the nation’s live entertainment offering. BookMyShow sells between 35% and 50% of all cinema tickets in a cinema-mad nation (“we are a hot, dusty country, which is an assault on all your senses, and cinema is the cheapest, most comfortable form of indoor entertainment,” he explains), and played a part in the massive success of the Indian Premier League (IPL) of cricket. If Hemrajani judges that India is ripe for some concert-going, the chances are he knows what he is talking about.

The same feeling has recently been in the air across the country. The preceding month, also at DY Patil Stadium, Katy Perry and Dua Lipa inaugurated the OnePlus Music Festival, along with local acts Amit Trivedi, Ritviz, as we keep searching and The Local Train. Both of the top-billers were new to the market, and again, the show was an unconventional labour of love, this time organised by the local operation of Chinese smartphone brand OnePlus, which rivals Samsung and Apple in India.

As OnePlus India general manager Vikas Agarwal told India’s The Telegraph newspaper: “[We were] not looking to organise everything by ourselves, but the country [was] not yet ready to organise such a large-scale event. [So] starting from the artist selection to the whole conceptualisation of the event, logistics – everything was done for the first time by the brand. I hope more such events will be organised in India.”

And then, of course, came Covid-19, to which we will inevitably return in a minute.

“The folks that we dealt with were very pleasantly surprised by the level of professionalism they found”

Still a mostly rural nation of numerous languages and cultures, heavily regionalised laws and huge inequality, India has always had more pressing priorities than slotting conveniently into a Western live music model. All the same, its entertainment market is highly evolved. The homegrown cinema industry enjoys a sophisticated, mostly mobile ticketing infrastructure, spearheaded by BookMyShow, with strong competition lately from Alibaba-backed Paytm. Both have diverse businesses and are busy across many sectors, including cricket, theatre, food and mobile payments.

Online ticketing was reckoned to be worth $330 million in 2017, according to Indian management consultant RedSeer, whose prediction of $580m in revenues this year has sadly been scuppered by recent events. In the past, the lion’s share of online ticket sales (55%), was for movies, with sport on 25% and events taking the remaining 20%, though both the latter categories are growing.

EDM, in particular, has found a booming home in India, where there is a large network of clubs and established festivals, from OML’s multi-city Bacardi NH7 Weekender to the monster Sunburn in Pune.

“The electronic music scene in the country has developed into its own industry and it’s spread to wider parts of the country,” says Dev Bhatia of dance music management and booking agency UnMute. “Having said that, I still feel we’re barely scratching the surface. Considering India will [soon] have five to six hundred million people under the age of 35 with cell phones and accessibility, the potential is endless.”

That potential is currently on pause. At the time of writing, India was attempting to relax its notably strict lockdown conditions even as it faced a record spike in Covid-19 infections. In a country where many millions of informal  workers live on a daily wage, the economy can’t stand idle for long.

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