From Film Scores to Independent Stars: The Evolution of India's Music Economy

India's music market is shedding its film-score skin and tilting hard toward a personality-led, independent artist ecosystem, according to Devraj Sanyal, Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group India and South Asia, as reported by Music Business Worldwide. What I hear in that shift is bigger than a business memo — it's a wholesale re-mixing of who holds the mic, how a vocal timbre gets marketed, and which crescendo lands on a wedding playlist next quarter.

The catalog grab reshaping playback

If you want to feel where this personality pivot lands first, follow the catalogs. Times Music, under CEO Mandar Thakur, has been on a tear, snapping up Symphony Recording Co. for Tamil devotional texture, ARC Musicq to lock in pioneering Kannada recordings, and most recently Catrack Entertainment, a Punjabi specialist whose tape vault holds what the company calls a "golden era" of the genre, featuring recordings by Babbu Maan, Malkit Singh, and Channi Singh. Thakur's own description of the hunt — "rough diamonds" — tells you exactly how the new gatekeepers think: they're chasing vocal personalities, not interchangeable playback singers. The 2023 Primary Wave deal formed a joint venture valued at over USD 100 million, as The Wall Street Journal reported at the time, and Times Music now runs two sub-labels — Junglee Music for film soundtracks and ffs for independent releases — neatly splitting the old world and the new one on the same roster.

K-pop auditions, Mumbai edition

Then there's the South Korean thunderclap. As Livemint reports, HYBE — the Seoul-headquartered machine behind BTS, Le Sserafim, and Katseye, with over USD 5 billion in market cap and USD 1.8 billion in annual revenue — quietly opened a Mumbai office last September and began auditioning across 10 Indian cities plus five global ones with large Indian diaspora for a brand-new all-girl group built on K-pop principles. The last time India produced an all-girl pop act at scale was Viva! in 2002, whose eight-song debut, written by Javed Akhtar, sold over 500,000 copies before splitting. A quarter century later, the audition call sheet is itself the headline — the personalities are the product.

What to cue up next

The through-line, as Sanyal frames it, is that India was always a song-driven economy but is maturing into a show-business one where the artist is the brand and the mix serves the persona. For listeners that means more vocal-forward releases, more synth-loop-driven independent drops, and more Punjabi and Haryanvi crossover records bleeding into global playlists — Diljit Dosanjh, AP Dhillon, Karan Aujla already cracking Western markets. What I'll be tracking: whether Times Music's bet on "golden and legendary" catalogs collides with HYBE's manufactured-pop pipeline, and who gets to define the timbre of Indian pop next.