Royalties From Indian Artists Outpaced the Global Rate in 2025
Spotify's 2025 Loud & Clear report, with India-specific figures released on September 2, 2026, shows that royalties generated by Indian artists on the platform grew 29% year-on-year, ahead of Spotify's global royalty growth of more than 10% over the same period. The number of Indian artists earning over Rs1 crore (approximately $105,400) annually in royalties rose 21% year-on-year, while the cohort earning more than Rs5 crore (approximately $526,900) doubled since 2023, according to Music Ally's reporting on the figures.
335 Billion Streams and 12.8 Billion First-Time Discoveries
Indian artists were streamed more than 335 billion times globally in 2025, including 12.8 billion plays by listeners hearing those acts for the first time, a 14% increase compared with 2024. The Times of India, summarizing the same Loud & Clear dataset, framed the figures as a 12.8 billion count of first-time discoveries. Discovery was concentrated on user-generated playlists: 112 million such playlists worldwide featured Indian artists, of which nearly 59 million were created by listeners within India. Listeners outside India contributed more than 40% of royalties earned by Indian artists on Spotify in 2025, down from close to 50% in 2024 and in line with the 40% level seen in 2023.
Chart and Linguistic Composition Skewed Local
Around 90% of tracks on Spotify India's Daily Top 50 Songs chart were by local acts, the same share as in 2024. Spotify India curates playlists across ten major Indian languages — Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, Marathi and Gujarati — and every major Indian language contributed to royalty growth in 2025. Royalties from Telugu music rose more than 120%, with Marathi and Bengali each up close to 50%, Malayalam above 30%, Hindi near 30% and Tamil up 20%; Telugu had also led language-level royalty growth in 2024 with a 39% year-on-year increase.
Female Artists and Region-Specific Strategy
Spotify, for the first time, disclosed growth figures for Indian female artists, whose streams rose 27% domestically but only 7% internationally in 2025 — a domestic-versus-international gap the company did not separately explain in the released data. Dhruvank Vaidya, head of music and podcasts at Spotify India, attributed the broad-based language growth to region- and language-specific marketing campaigns, artist partnerships and film tie-ins, and pointed to a "huge surge" in pop after hip-hop within Malayalam, while Telugu music "remains film"-driven. A standalone quote from Union Minister of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Jayant Chaudhary appeared in the report materials, framing linguistic diversity as both a cultural and economic asset. The Times of India summarized the same dataset without adding independent verification of the figures.
Open Measurement Point
The next verifiable data point will be Spotify's next annual Loud & Clear update, which typically extends the year-on-year comparisons already shown for royalties, streams and chart composition, and which would clarify whether the 7% international growth in streams of Indian female artists narrows or widens against the 27% domestic figure.
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