Inside India’s booming music market: Part 2

Here, IQ presents the second and final part of our India market report. Read part one here.

Festivals

While India may be bucking many international trends, the slight weakness in the global festival market is perhaps not one of them, as single-artist tours steal some of the heat from the sector.

“I think [the biggest attraction] was festivals once upon a time, but I feel that it is now more skewed towards single-artist shows with one headliner,” says Deepak Choudhary, CEO of promoter EVA Live.

“And that is where the market is working towards. Even in just the last year, if you look at the numbers, I would say international artist shows have increased significantly in India, and festivals have kind of gone down, even from an attendance point of view.”

Boutique dance music festival Magnetic Fields, which takes place in a 17th-century palace in Rajasthan, marked its tenth edition last year. Munbir Chawla, who with wife Sarah runs the festival, says the influx of major tours was felt across the festival business.

“Last year definitely felt like it was the beginning of the boom, in many ways – a lot of big artists were either announced last year or arrived last year. People only have a limited amount of finances they can put towards going out, including festivals. So I think a lot of the festivals felt that pinch off the back of that.”

India certainly has plenty of them, from BookMyShow’s rock fest Bandland in Bengaluru and other BMS-related events such as Lollapalooza and Sunburn in Goa to indigenous events such as Hornbill Festival in Nagaland, which showcases traditional Naga music and culture alongside contemporary genres.

“Last year definitely felt like it was the beginning of the boom, in many ways”

Among the highlights of the calendar are some that espouse notably progressive causes. Echoes of Earth in Bengaluru positions itself as “India’s greenest music festival.” Last December’s seventh edition featured a solar-powered stage, upcycled structures, a no-plastic policy, and waste-to-art installations promoting environmental awareness and nature conservation. As well as music from 40 international and Indian acts including Mount Kimbie, Cobblestone Jazz, French 79, Recondite, and Dam Swindle.

“Echoes of Earth is a zero-plastic, zero-waste music festival, and every person coming to the event is made aware of it,” founder Roshan Natalkar told Adgully magazine in February. “We have solar-powered spaces on site, including one of our music stages. Biogas is being introduced in our food court this year, and we have a dedicated team that ensures responsible waste management so that none of the waste generated at the event ends up in landfills.”

A second edition of the festival’s Goa spin-off, planned for February, was cancelled late last year, owing to unforeseen circumstances. In March, the festival collected the Circular Festival Award at event sustainability organisation A Greener Future’s International AGF Awards – the first Indian festival to do so.

India also gained its first-ever women-only festival last month, in the form of Sonic Tigress, a one-day event launched by media entrepreneur Darshan M, which took place at Phoenix Marketcity in Bangaluru.

Acts that performed included Su- Pra, Nikhita Gandhi, Aditi Mittal, Wild Wild Women, Meg and the Miracles, Tipriti Kharbangar & Chie Nishikori, and Niveditha Ode Linda, all of whom apparently had to divest their bands of any men.

“There is a new wave of event infrastructure that is coming”

“The whole thought behind this festival is not to give women a seat at someone else’s table but to build a full table just for them,” said Darshan M. “I have personally been to too many events where I witnessed drunk men harass women, and I hope Sonic Tigress [will] be the beginning of a new experience for women who just want to be able to enjoy themselves without unwanted attention.”

Venues
If infrastructure is the most-uttered word in conversations about the future of the Indian live business, what that usually refers to is venues.

“Organisers need to know that infrastructure is core to an experience,” Roshan Abbas, event entrepreneur and founder of Mumbai performing arts collective Kommune, recently told EVENTFAQS. “We don’t have that infrastructure thinking here. India built a couple of sports stadiums, which are used for events, but the sports people don’t like them being used for events, and the events people don’t like to use them because they are not event-friendly. We have to construct everything. And now, there is a new wave of event infrastructure that is coming.”

In February, the state government of Karnakata announced that it would subsidise the construction and development of the aerodrome arena project, announced in 2020, with a 9,000-capacity dome for concerts and large-scale events, a smaller 2,000-cap dome, and an outdoor venue.

Located at Kempegowda International Airport, the venue (developed by a consortium led by events firm Phase 1 Experiences and property developer Embassy Group, with support from Live Nation), will be the first major “experiential and entertainment destination” in Bangalore (Bengaluru), a megacity that is home to more than 10m people and currently only served by smaller sports arenas.

“If we don’t get more small, independent venues, we are not going to ever see the bigger bands break out of India”

“The venue will be on par with iconic international concert arenas such as New York’s Madison Square Garden and London’s O2 Arena, enabling us to import the biggest shows and best of global talent to India,” said Oum Pradutt, founder and managing director of Phase 1 Events & Experiences. “This will attract audiences and fans from not just across India but across south Asia and establish Bengaluru’s position as a live concert and entertainment capital globally.”

The lack of such a venue has been a sore point in Bengaluru – the third-largest city in India and one of its most economically productive and fastest-growing.

“It’s very unfortunate that just because there’s a lack of venues, concerts like Coldplay were shifted to less prominent places like Ahmedabad, and most of the people from Bangalore and around had to travel,” local politician Rizwan Arshad recently told local English-language newspaper the Deccan Herald. “[So], our reputation as an international city gets a beating, and we miss out on the economy that develops around the concert.”

Another new venue, the 22,000-cap Terraform Arena, an outdoor, 16-acre facility described as India’s first plug-and-play live entertainment arena, opened in November in Papanahalli, north of Bengaluru. It has since hosted shows by artists including Arijit Singh, Yo Yo Honey Singh, Bryan Adams, and Hukum.

But while developers are scrambling to capture the large-scale opportunity, there is less evidence of investment in smaller venues. “We still do a lot of grassroots work, and on a grassroots level, the infrastructure has a long, long way to go,” says Chawla. “Infrastructure on the larger scale is obviously where all the money is now being pushed. And the market is still pretty nascent – a lot of the smaller events still rely on outside funding, sponsorships, and corporate funding.”

“So I think there’s a lot of work that still needs to happen on that side. If we don’t get more small, independent venues, we are not going to ever see the bigger bands break out of India. The hip-hop sector is booming; I think some of the electronic news on the planet is coming out of India. Musically, it is extremely exciting.”

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