The Crescendo

JANUARY 24 IS GOING TO BE A RUSHED day for Dhriti Sharma. The 28-year-old will hurry from a wedding in Igatpuri in Maharash­tra—her cousin’s, to attend which she would have travelled from Bengaluru—to catch a train that very night so she can make it to a con­cert in Ahmedabad the following day. It will be tiresome. But it will be worth it. Sharma would have finally made it to a Coldplay concert.

This seemed unlikely last year on Septem­ber 22 when she sat in front of her laptop and phone, part of a group of around 23 friends and relatives trying to get their hands on one of Coldplay’s concerts in Mumbai.

They had all logged in well before the appointed hour, but despite spending hours in digital queues, waiting for their turn to come up, and then queuing up again when a third show was added later in the day, only one of the 23 managed to secure a few tickets. Sharma was not one of them.

“It was madness,” Sharma recalls today. “We were all expecting a rush, and we were using so many phones and laptops and multiple email addresses, but just one of us managed to get some tickets.”

It wasn’t just them. Some 1.3 crore indi­viduals had logged in to buy 90,000 tickets. A third concert was added in Mumbai, and later on, two more in Ahmedabad, but all of those too disappeared in the blink of an eye. Demand often outstrips supply in India, whether it is a seat to a medical college or a secure government job. But the country had never witnessed this sort of clamour for a music concert before. And a meltdown ensued.

For the next few months, like many others who had failed to get tickets, Sharma, who works for a major e-com­merce platform in Bengaluru, spent her time trying to find one. A cottage industry of black marketeers selling Coldplay’s tickets for several times their original price had sprung up, almost as instantly as the tickets got sold out on the first day. Some tickets that originally cost between ₹2,500 and ₹12,500 were going as high as, according to reports, ₹9 lakh and more. Sharma found one which originally cost about ₹9,500 being offered to her for ₹49,000. She considered it for a moment but let it go. She began scour­ing online groups meant for employees and ex-employees of an e-commerce firm that she once worked for when she finally found a ticket, although to an Ahmedabad show, for ₹6,500. It was marked up by only ₹2,000. Given the prices the tickets were going for, it was a steal.

“I really enjoy concerts. Even more than the artist, what makes a concert fun is the vibes you get there,” she says. “And Coldplay’s concerts are known to be very good.”

Sharma is one of many youths driv­ing India’s nascent but rapidly growing music concert economy. In the past, apart from a few, no major artist in their prime ever performed in India. The size of Indian listeners of Western music was too small, and their attitudes towards spending probably too conservative, for any major artist to consider stop­ping over. But that has begun changing rapidly. A retinue of global pop stars has been trooping into the country over the last couple of years, from Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran to Alan Walker, Dua Lipa, Bryan Adams, and many more. This year is likely to be even bigger, with some bands and artists having already announced their India concerts, and a few more said to be finalising their schedules.

According to Anil Makhija, Book­MyShow’s COO, Live Entertainment and Venues, India’s music and live entertain­ment industry are going through a trans­formative trend. “2024 witnessed an ex­traordinary 30,687 live events across 319 cities, reflecting an 18 per cent growth in India’s live entertainment consumption. A defining trend has been the rapid rise of music tourism, with over 4,77,393 fans travelling beyond their cities to attend live events,” he says. “Coldplay’s ‘Music of the Spheres World Tour’ in Ahmedabad, for instance, will attract fans from over 500 cities and 28 states.”

Concerts by global pop stars in India have usually begun to generate ticket sales worth between ₹12 and 15 crore. But Ed Sheeran’s single show in Mumbai last year is believed to have generated ticket sales worth around ₹55 crore, a record for an Indian show, according to Deepak Choudhary, founder of EVA Live and a veteran in the live events scene who brought Bryan Adams to India last year. Sheeran has unsurprisingly announced a six-city tour across India for this year. This record is however going to be smashed when Coldplay takes to the stage next week. No official figures have been shared yet, but industry experts like Choudhary estimate the band will have raised at least ₹350 crore in ticket sales across its five shows in Mumbai and Ahmedabad. With an estimated one lakh fans at each concert in the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, the two concerts, it is claimed, will also be the largest stadium show of the band’s career and probably among the biggest ever hosted globally.

Sharma has been to several music concerts last year, including those of Diljit Dosanjh and Karan Aujla, which also witnessed huge demands. “I was at Sunburn [the popular electronic dance music festival] too, but I didn’t enjoy it that much, probably because I didn’t know much about the artists perform­ing. But the Diljit and Karan Aujla shows were very good. I know and follow their music, and the whole vibe of the place made the whole experience very enjoy­able,” she says.

The explosion of the whole live event and concert space however tells just one part of the story. International artists may routinely arrive on Indian shores now, but Indian and Indian-origin art­ists like Dosanjh or Aujla, or AP Dhillon, Prateek Kuhad and many others are also leaving their footprint, both on Indian and foreign soil. India today seems to be on the cusp of a new music landscape, one where desi rhythms are reverberat­ing both here and across the globe.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of the rapper Hanumankind (HMK). His ‘Big Dawgs’ became last year’s viral sensation. It went where arguably no Indian song has gone before. It soared to No 9 on the Billboard Global 200 within a month of its release, broke through on global Spotify charts, reaching No 7 on the Spotify Global Top 50, outpacing songs by many international biggies, and its official music video on YouTube has so far gener­ated close to 200 million views. These are incredible numbers, let alone one from an Indian indie musician.

It might appear that HMK, whose real name is Sooraj Cherukat, appeared out of nowhere. But he has been involved in the Indian hip-hop scene for quite some time. Born in Kerala to a father whose job in an oil company took the family to locations across the world, it was in the US, in the city of Houston, where he spent his forma­tive years, that his interest in rap first grew. HMK returned to India, where he began leading a conventional life, working at firms like Goldman Sachs at one point, before he quit to get into music full-time.

“It’s incredible what HMK managed,” says Shambhu Ajith, known by his stage name MC Couper. Couper is a popular Malayalam rapper who has collaborated with HMK in the past. “HMK always had that quality about him. And the right song came, the right video with it, and it just blew up. It shows the sheer potential of the art form of rap.”

HMK also confounds listeners. Many listeners abroad found that he did not sound Indian. There have been a few similar comments here too. But what is an Indian sound in a country made of so many regions, life experiences and tastes? Equally unusual was the setting of ‘Big Dawgs’. HMK eschewed the bling and flashy narrative of mainstream rap, whether set in the Bronx or Bhatinda, to create a video set inside a maut ka kuan (well of death), where poor stunt drivers perform dangerous stunts.

The rap songs that make the most im­pact are often viewed as those wherein the artist embraces his identity and roots, and Couper points to this as he talks about the song’s popularity. “‘[Big] Dawgs’ is also a crazy good grounded representation of the working class. The well of death is one of the things that people just do for enter­tainment in festivals and all of that here.”

For all his success, HMK is part of a larger wave of rappers emerging from Kerala. The hip-hop scene in India had largely coalesced around Punjabi music. The rise of Punjabi music on the global scene, so evident now in the rise of artists like Dosanjh, Aujla or Dhillon, had been in the works for some decades, fuelled no doubt when the Punjabi diaspora began incorporating elements of hip-hop into traditional and folk Punjabi music. It spread from there on to many other re­gions and languages. And it is in Malay­alam now where its rise seems to be par­ticularly noteworthy. Malayalam hip-hop is believed to be one of the fastest-growing genres in India, and Spotify revealed last year that Malayalam hip-hop grew by 300 per cent year-on-year in 2023.

The rise of Malayalam hip-hop is evident everywhere. It plays out at music festivals and on FM stations, blares out from tea stalls and political campaigns, and is now increasingly being incorpo­rated in Malayalam film music as well.

HE SCENE HOWEVER is very new. Couper was working as a sport jour­nalist after he completed his law degree, when he began working on his music on the side. Until a few years ago, it did not seem like it would be a viable career. “I remember around the time I was putting out my first song, jamming with a friend of mine who was also a producer. We took a break and went to the terrace and I remem­ber talking about what was going to hap­pen to us and where this was all going to lead to. We were just so apprehensive that time,” MC Couper says. “People sometimes ask me if I always thought this would work out. And I’m like, bro, I never even imag­ined I would be this big. Everything is just gravy for me.”

The boom in Malayalam rap has been fuelled by the emergence of a number of talented artists, from HMK, Dabzee, Fejo, MC Couper, MHR, Vedan to BABY JEAN, NJ, ThirumaLi, and many others. Some like HMK sing mostly in English, many others in Malayalam, and quite a few in a mixture of both. They also all have differ­ent styles and themes.

“I am not a flexing kinda rapper, I’m a political rapper in my core,” says Hirandas Murali, who goes by the name Vedan. “My music is about my people, my soil and my politics, out and out.”

Unlike other Malayalam rappers, a lot of Vedan’s music is around caste and caste oppression. His breakthrough song, ‘Voice of the Voiceless’ (2020) was an anti-caste and politically loaded song that found a lot of resonance among listeners. Vedan grew up in Thrissur, in a Harijan colony close to the railway station, and his expe­riences growing up, he says, inform his songs today. “My childhood was always on the streets, working hard to earn the meal for my family. Going to school and doing jobs was the only thing back then. This influenced me. I write my lyrics with this being the inspiration,” he says.

At one point, Vedan was working as a ‘studio boy’ in an editing studio, when he encountered the late American rap­per Tupac Shakur’s album Me Against the World. “I was instantly hooked. The lyricism, the composition, and the stories behind it, were just perfect. Then came Yogi B & Natchatra [the Malaysian band of Tamil ethnicity] with their releas­es. I was able to connect with them given my roots in Tamil culture and the kind of songs they pushed out,” he says.

Malayalam rap, although new, is constantly growing with new artists pushing the envelope. Among the group, a relatively new artist who gar­nered a lot of following in recent times is Vishnu KW, a 25-year-old who goes by the stage name GABRI. His debut single ‘KL 42’ has so far been played over 9.1 mil­lion times on Spotify. GABRI hails from Ernakulam in Kerala. He first began rapping in 2019, as the hip-hop scene in Kerala was first beginning to take shape. “I started this journey [in hip-hop] without many expectations. That’s why the cur­rent scene feels [so] promising,” he says. His songs appeal to audiences, he says, because they are personal in nature, and listeners who are going through similar experiences identify with them. “My mu­sic is my life, and more than that, it is my very soul. Through my songs, I share the life experiences I cannot express to any­one else. The pain and intense aggression that I cannot convey to anyone are what I bring out through my music,” he says.

NDIA’S INDIE MUSIC scene has always existed on the fringes. It got a bit of thrust in the 1990s with the start of MTV and other music channels, but it fizzled out quickly enough. It has sustained itself more out of the sheer will of artists than any conducive environ­ment through much of the 2000s and 2010s. It is only now that the scene appears to have become more vibrant, although challenges still remain.

HMK’s success differs from a lot of the indie successes we are seeing now in that it has found an ear outside the desi scene. The closest that comes to such at­tention, although there is nothing simi­lar to their music, is the Indian band Peter Cat Recording Co (PCRC). The band, first formed sometime around 2010, was once described as India’s best-kept music se­cret. They are hardly a secret anymore. Their music, hard to categorise under any genre, has been winning over listeners for years now, but it was during the pan­demic when their listener base in West­ern countries grew. They have since been

travelling widely across the world, and last year conducted a mammoth 78-city tour across North America and Europe (including accompanying the American funk rock band Khruangbin), culminat­ing in some shows in India—unheard of for an indie band from India.

“We always knew Peter Cat Recording Co. had a growing listener base abroad. But it was during the pandemic that we found the numbers [of listeners from North America, the UK and Europe on platforms like Spotify and YouTube] go­ing up rapidly,” says Dhruv Singh, their manager and founder of the artist man­agement agency Pagal Haina. “And all of this growth was purely organic. We didn’t spend a single dollar on marketing or running digital ads in those regions. It was all word of mouth, people discover­ing the band and recommending them to friends, family, etc.”

The band toured the US for the first time, performing 30 shows in 2023, all of which were sold out. The crowds they drew gave the band and Singh the confidence to pull off a 78-city tour the following year. “The band got a great re­ception. More than 90 per cent of the lis­teners across the shows were not diaspora. People even flew in from Europe to catch some shows in the US, and in California, there were fans following the band from show to show,” Singh says.

What lessons can other Indian art­ists draw if they want to emulate such success? This is difficult to answer, says Singh. “Patience is key. The band has been putting in the hard yards and constantly working on their craft and skills for more than 10 years now. If you want to be a ca­reer artist, if you want to have long-term impact, you have to make music that stands the test of time, which is only pos­sible if you keep your head down and chip away relentlessly till the day arrives when all the momentum you have been slowly but surely building reaches its crescendo and starts to bear real fruit. In India, there is too much focus on shortcuts and virality which results in mediocrity.” Singh says.

In Delhi, Aman Kumar, co-founder of White Fox that has organised several high-profile music concerts is tight-lipped about the artists his firm is trying to bring down for concerts later this year and the start of next year. “We have sent offers to four major international A-list artists and some of the big Indian artists. But I can’t give you names,” he says. “Because the mo­ment I do, there will be 20 offers going to that artist the next day. It has become that competitive.”

Kumar was among the earliest to bring over a big international artist when he managed to organise Justin Bieber’s first show in India in 2017. He has since organised many concerts and festivals, including AP Dhillon’s much-talked-about tour across several cities.

For him, while India’s concert econo­my is rapidly growing, many things can be improved. The infrastructure necessary to pull off big shows, he admits, has not caught up with the growth of concerts. There are not that many venues, and there are also often complaints about poor man­agement and several other hurdles. Artists have themselves complained about this on stage and sometimes even cancelled shows. Eva Live’s Choudhary is more gung-ho about the scene. “These are just teething troubles. And over time, you will see much of this will get fixed,” he says. To Choudhary the boom in concerts points to the start of a new consumer behaviour, one that privileges experiences over other forms of entertainment.

Yash Vora will probably fall in that cat­egory. A 29-year-old sales consultant from Mumbai who now works in Dublin, he has caught many music shows since he moved to the city. He missed out on Cold­play’s show there last year, something many of his friends and colleagues who made it to the show raved about. He hoped to make it to one of the band’s Mumbai shows when he would be visiting the city in January. But it appeared he was going to suffer the same fate again, when neither he nor his relatives managed to secure tickets. But then luck struck a few weeks ago. “My friends and I have been trying to find tickets on third-party websites for quite some time. And then I found one. It cost me ₹20,000, although its original price was somewhere around ₹6,500,” Vora says. “But I think it is worth it.”

Alan WalkerAP DhillonBryan AdamsDua LipaIndian marketIndian musicJustin Bieber and Ed SheeranKran AujlaPrateek KuhadsingersSooraj Cherukat