Beyond Bollywood: Why New Zealand Musicians Should Be Looking to India

New Zealand's music industry is, by most measures, a quiet success story. It contributes close to $1 billion to the country's GDP each year, $928 million in 2024, to be exact, and does more for New Zealand's international brand than most tourism campaigns. Yet according to the newly released New Zealand Music: A Manifesto for the Next Government, the sector receives less than 5% of the government's total arts funding, with the bulk of creative-sector support going elsewhere, particularly into film and screen.

It's a funding gap that has pushed the industry to look outward. And increasingly, "outward" could be Asia, a region home to roughly 60% of the world's population, and one that two of New Zealand's most experienced India-facing music professionals see as not just a growth opportunity, but a market where New Zealand artists could do more to build connections and find their place.

That was the subject of a recent Going Global 2026 panel dedicated entirely to India, moderated by the Asia New Zealand Foundation's director for arts programme, Craig Cooper. It followed a broader session the day before on opportunities across Asia, but this was the first time the discussion had zeroed in on India specifically, at a moment when, as Cooper put it, interest in the market has been steadily building.

"I don't like to reduce countries to numbers," Cooper told the audience, "but I think with India it's a good place to start, because the numbers are so huge."

Craig Cooper, Director for the Arts Programme of the Asia New Zealand Foundation, led the panel on opportunities in India at Going Global 2026 in Auckland on August 28. Photo: Carla Teng-Westergaard/AMC.

India, by the numbers

India is now the world's most populous country, at roughly 1.5 billion people, with a population that skews significantly younger than New Zealand's. There are 750 million smartphone users, and 96% of them listen to music on their phones, yet only around 14 million of them are paying music subscribers. It's a market of enormous reach and, for now, comparatively slow monetisation.

Live music tells a similar growth story. India hosted more than 14,000 live concerts in 2024, with the live entertainment sector expanding by 44%. International acts are increasingly part of that picture: Coldplay's five-date India run included two shows in the city of Ahmedabad alone that drew a combined 220,000 people.

"So you're starting to get a sense of the scale and the numbers that are involved," Cooper said. "The question becomes, where do you start if you're sitting here in New Zealand as a musician? How can you possibly make an approach? How can you get a start in such a huge, huge market?"

That question sat at the heart of the panel, which brought together two guests with very different but complementary perspectives on the Indian music market. Rafael Pereira is an intellectual property and entertainment lawyer who sits on the board of the India Music Exchange and helps produce India International Music Week in Mumbai. Pritesh Panchal of Sohum.Artist.Services is a New Zealand-based sound engineer and artist manager who spent three years living and working in Mumbai, building pathways for Kiwi artists to perform in India.

India: A Market as Diverse as Europe

The first lesson from the panel is one of framing. India isn't a single market, it's 29 states and union territories, an estimated 270 spoken languages, and a parliament that officially operates in 22 of them.

“The best advice I got was not to think of India as a single market, but to think of it more like Europe, with each state offering its own distinct market and opportunities,” Cooper said, reflecting on the challenge of approaching such a vast and diverse market. Mumbai, for example, is the capital of Maharashtra, a state of around 120 million people, roughly the population of Japan.

That scale plays out at city level, too.

India's music market is generally organised around seven "metro" cities of at least 10 million people each, Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, and a seventh recently added, spread roughly across west, north, south and east. But each has its own musical character.

Panchal offered a quick tour: Goa, for electronic music and its own homegrown "Goa trance" genre. Mumbai, fast-paced and dominated by DJs and clubs rather than bands, "I did not see a single band in Mumbai," he said, describing arriving in the city during the explosion of Indian hip-hop. Delhi, a stronghold for rock and drum and bass. Shillong and the northeast, for guitar-driven rock music. Bangalore and Kolkata, described as more genre-agnostic, "sort of more like Wellington."

Interestingly, the panel noted that the cities driving music virality aren't necessarily the biggest ones. A 2022 Chartmetric report identified a set of global "trigger cities", places where early streaming traction was most likely to predict a track's wider success. Seven of the 20 cities on that list were in India, but none of them were Mumbai or Delhi. Pereira explained the pattern comes down to smartphone-first audiences in smaller cities who are extraordinarily engaged with content, spending hours a day immersed in it, which makes them disproportionately influential to music platform algorithms.

Streaming, weddings, and the "sachet economy"

The panel spent considerable time unpacking why India's enormous audience hasn't translated into equally enormous streaming revenue, and the answer says a lot about how New Zealand artists should think about monetisation strategy in the market.

YouTube remains the dominant platform, in part because it optimised early for low-bandwidth connections, allowing people to stream music even on patchy 2G networks before India's 4G boom. Spotify has pursued a freemium strategy to chase the same mass audience, while local apps like Gaana and JioSaavn have gone premium-only, deliberately targeting a smaller, wealthier base.

Underlying all of it is a structural issue: credit card penetration in India sits at around just 2%. Pereira drew a memorable comparison to India's "sachet economy," where consumers routinely buy single-use sachets of shampoo for a couple of rupees rather than a full bottle, because they're managing cash day to day rather than budgeting monthly. A monthly streaming subscription, paid up front, simply doesn't fit that pattern for hundreds of millions of people, which is precisely why platforms and the wider industry are still working through how to convert India's enormous listening audience into paying customers.

Rafael Pereira, Managing Parter of Tinnuts India and India Music Exchange. Photo: Carla Teng-Westergaard/AMC.

Then there's a revenue stream most New Zealand artists would never think to plan for: weddings. According to the panel, India's recorded music industry is worth around US$300 million (NZ$504.5 million approx.), dwarfed by its wedding industry, valued at roughly US$50 billion (NZ$84.1 billion approx.). Even mid-sized weddings can involve thousands of guests on dedicated event grounds, and at the very top end, families have flown in artists including Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and Rihanna, with some of the country's largest weddings reportedly spending upwards of US$100 million (NZ$168 million approx.) on entertainment alone.

Live music infrastructure is also maturing quickly.

The panel pointed to festivals including Sunburn, billed as Asia's largest dance music festival, which recently relocated from Goa to Mumbai, the Mahindra Blues Festival in Mumbai, Asia's largest blues festival, Lollapalooza and Supersonic in and around Mumbai, jazz festivals in Delhi and Bangalore, metal festivals across Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi, and the Cherry Blossom Festival in Shillong in the northeast.

Beyond festivals, dedicated live venues, private events, and a rapidly growing performing arts infrastructure, one estimate cited on the panel put 17 new performing arts centres in the pipeline over the next five years, round out the picture.

Bollywood isn't the whole story, but it explains a lot

For most New Zealanders, Bollywood is the obvious entry point into Indian culture, and the panel acknowledged it can feel like a cliché. But understanding how India's recorded music industry developed through Bollywood helps explain some of the market's present-day quirks.

India's recorded music business was effectively built before its publishing industry, because, much like Māori, Samoan and other Pacific oral traditions, Indian music was historically an oral tradition, with little written composition to form the basis of a publishing market. After independence in 1947, the Indian government leaned heavily on film as a tool for social and behavioural messaging, encouraging army enlistment, promoting agricultural initiatives, and catchy music became the delivery mechanism. That gave rise to the "music director" role, akin to a music supervisor, who commissioned songs, bought out the rights outright, and handed them to the film's producer. That is, in essence, the Bollywood model, and it developed fastest in Hindi, one of India's most widely spoken languages but far from its only one.

That history also explains why India's grassroots, independent songwriting scene is comparatively young. India only changed its copyright law in 2012 to guarantee songwriters a share of royalties for the term of copyright, regardless of any upfront buyout, a shift that has, ironically, made many working songwriters more willing to sell their copyright for guaranteed upfront income, since ongoing royalty streams remain a relatively new and unfamiliar concept for many at grassroots level.

Tips for New Zealand artists: how to actually get started

Distilled from the panel discussion, here's the practical playbook for New Zealand artists eyeing India:

Start on Instagram, not with a booking agent. Indian artists are described as highly approachable and active on social media. Direct messages proposing collaboration, writing a song together, for instance, are genuinely welcomed.

Punch above your weight, respectfully. New Zealand and Western artists still carry a degree of cachet in India. Panellists were candid that this is an advantage worth using.

Don't front-load your ambitions. The advice was blunt: don't aim for stadiums on your first trip. Play the 500-capacity room first, then the 100–300-capacity rooms if the numbers work for your budget, then work toward college and community festivals, then the larger festival circuit, and only consider headlining your own India shows on your third visit. Even Ed Sheeran, panellists noted, took three attempts before successfully touring India.

Understand it's a relationship- and trust-driven market, closer to a barter system than a transactional one. Indian promoters and artists are frequently just as interested in reciprocal opportunities, getting their own artists booked into New Zealand or Australia, as they are in booking international acts. Treating the relationship as a two-way exchange, rather than a one-way ask, was repeatedly described as the difference between getting a foot in the door and being ignored.

Get specific about language and genre. In India, language functions as genre. Streaming platforms like Apple Music classify Hindi and Punjabi as genres in their own right, not just languages. Before reaching out to an artist, know whether they work in film or non-film music, which language they work in, and which genre within that language, down to India's two dominant romantic-song modes, "sad romance" and "happy romance."

New Zealand's cricket reputation is a genuine door-opener. Panellists noted that many Indians may not be able to place New Zealand on a map, but recognise the country instantly through cricket, and that a small effort to greet people in local languages, however imperfectly, goes a long way in a relationship-first business culture.

Work visas are manageable. Major promoters typically handle visa applications on an artist's behalf; for others, India's e-business visa category accepts applications directly from artists and touring parties, and panellists described the process as considerably more straightforward than in many other Commonwealth countries.

Plan your entry city around your genre. Electronic acts should look first to Goa or Mumbai's club circuit; rock and drum and bass acts to Delhi; guitar-driven rock to the northeast and Shillong; and diverse or genre-blending acts to Bangalore or Kolkata.

Pritesh Panchal of Sohum.Artist.Services NZ/IN offered a useful way to navigate India's vast music market: **know where your genre lives.** Different genres have strongholds in different parts of the country, giving New Zealand artists a more focused starting point rather than trying to tackle the entire market at once. Photo: Carla Teng-Westergaard/AMC.

Does the Free Trade Agreement actually help?

With India–New Zealand trade relations increasingly in the headlines, Asia Media Centre asked a question that rarely features in trade discussions: what does the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) actually mean for the music industry?

For Rafael Pereira, the answer is not much, at least so far.

He said creative industries had been largely overlooked in recent FTA between India and New Zealand.

One of the clearest practical barriers is India's withholding tax regime. When an Indian promoter pays an international artist more than roughly NZ$1.7 million, 40% of the payment must be withheld at source. For touring artists and promoters, that can create a substantial cash-flow burden, particularly when double taxation is also a consideration.

Pereira said the FTA presented an opportunity to address these issues, including through provisions to reduce double-taxation pressures for artists working across both markets. That opportunity, he said, was missed.

His verdict was blunt: “The flat answer is the FTA has made zero difference.” While the agreement may generate headlines and encourage greater discussion of each other's markets, Pereira argued that its benefits have yet to flow meaningfully through to the creative economy.

The gap points to a broader challenge: trade agreements can open doors, but they do not necessarily create the conditions for creative industries to walk through them. For New Zealand's music sector, that means trade policy, diplomatic engagement and export support still need to work together.

That is also a central theme of the New Zealand Music: A Manifesto for the Next Government, which argues that music needs a stronger place in trade missions, bilateral exchanges and diplomatic programming, alongside greater investment in international promotion and export initiatives such as Outward Sound.

New Zealand Music released a manifesto last week outlining seven asks for the next government. The fourth calls for music to be more deliberately included in trade missions and bilateral engagement.

The bigger picture: why this matters for New Zealand policy

None of this exists in a vacuum. Goldman Sachs projects that global music industry revenue will double to US$131 billion (NZ$174 billion approx.) by 2030, and the manifesto argues that New Zealand's slice of that growth is currently limited more by the state of its export infrastructure than by any shortage of talent. Australia has recently renewed a multi-year commitment to a national contemporary music strategy; the UK has just announced its own Music Plan tying investment to policy; and Sweden and South Korea have both built coordinated national strategies specifically to grow their music export sectors.

Against that backdrop, the manifesto's seven asks for the next government include a specific call to "treat music export with the strategic seriousness applied to primary industries", including $5 million in annual funding for the sector's export strategy, alongside asks covering a national growth strategy, copyright and AI protections, live music infrastructure, Māori music development, discoverability, and music education.

The message from the panel and from the manifesto arrives, in effect, from two directions at once: New Zealand's music industry is being asked to do more with less at home, even as it contributes close to a billion dollars to the country's economy.

Moreover, a market of 1.5 billion people is already listening. As Pritesh Panchal put it, recalling musicians he met in Mumbai: "A couple of times, some musicians did come up to me in India, and I love that, they knew Fat Freddy's and The Black Seeds. Fat Freddy's was the most popular name, and they obviously knew Lorde, and were listening to Lorde as well."

That audience is sitting largely untapped next door in Asia, provided New Zealand artists are willing to do the unglamorous work of showing up, building relationships, and playing the long game.

As Pereira put it, closing out the session: "It will pay for you to be specific and cut out the clutter." In a market this large, that might be the single most important piece of advice on offer.

-Asia Media Centre