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‘India’s music landscape has seen meteoric growth’

India is fast becoming a global entertainment hub, according to some of the world’s leading executives.

Just as the pandemic hit, the country was on a promising upswing in its patchy live music history, having welcomed U2 to Mumbai’s DY Patil Stadium in January 2020. The show was the latest in an intermittent stream of superstar visits to Indian soil – The Stones, Sheeran, and Beyoncé have all been down, though Bieber cancelled in October – and was a collaboration between Live Nation and local ticketing giant BookMyShow, which is increasingly positioning itself as India’s foremost international promoter.

In January, the two promoters teamed up on the first Indian Lollapalooza at Mumbai’s Mahalaxmi Racecourse, featuring Imagine Dragons, The Strokes, and Diplo alongside Indian-born rapper AP Dhillon, Delhi-based singer-songwriter Prateek Kuhad and others. The event drew 60,000 fans over two days, with 40 artists performing across four stages on a 50-acre site.

James Craven, Live Nation president, Middle East, says Lollapalooza coming to Mumbai is a great example of the market’s growing importance.

“It’s really exciting to see global markets open up to music and artists from the Indian sub-continent, as well as seeing how the Indian market continues to open up for international acts,” says Craven in the IQ’s Global Promoters Report. “Expanding global touring routes for artists is key to their growth and that of the industry, and India will play a key role in that going forwards.”

“Expanding global touring routes for artists is key to their growth and that of the industry, and India will play a key role in that”

Kunal Khambhati, head of live events & IP at BookMyShow, says the entertainment and ticketing platform has worked hard to break down barriers to live shows, which included a 28% goods and services tax that now stands at 18%.

“India’s music landscape has witnessed meteoric growth in the past few years,” says Khambhati. “Slowly but steadily, the country has set the stage to become a keystone for some of the biggest music performances and markets in the world – from hosting acclaimed international and Indian independent artists at large concerts to smaller formats that are gradually shaping the music landscape in the country.

“BookMyShow’s work in this space has focused on creating exposure for both global talent to the Indian audience and Indian artists on the global stage,” he adds. “Lollapalooza is a global music phenomenon, an incomparable international experience, that will not only amplify this exposure in India but in all of Asia and put the spotlight on the country as a global entertainment hub.”

Elsewhere in the festival market, India’s biggest metal festival Bangalore Open Air sold out for the first time in its 10-year history.

“This will go down in the history books,” said Bangalore Open Air founder, Salman U Syed. “A heavy metal festival in Bangalore, India, is sold out. Thank you for your support. Ten years of hard work determination and patience.”

“The country has set the stage to become a keystone for some of the biggest music performances and markets in the world”

The 3,000-capacity event, which is produced in partnership with Germany’s marquee metal festival Wacken Open Air, will this year celebrate its 10th anniversary.

Mayhem, Pestilence, Kryptos, Godless, Born of Osiris, Dying Embrace and Amorphia will lead the celebrations at the 1 April event at Royal Orchid Resorts at Yelahanka.

It’s not just domestic executives that are touting India’s rapid growth. The likes of Wasserman Music’s Alex Hardee and ATC Live’s Alex Bruford testified to the market’s upward trajectory at the most recent International Live Music Conference (ILMC).

“I was just in India, where Lumineers headlined the NH7 Weekender and it was incredible,” said Bruford. “More than 20,000 people drove for about eight hours to get to the show – all completely local fans – and it was one of the band’s favourite gigs they’ve ever played.”

Hardee told ILMC delegates how Alan Walker (represented by Lee Anderson and Tom Schroeder at Wasserman) recently broke new ground in India: “He did ten shows in ten cities…I don’t think an international act has ever done that.”

“More than 20,000 people drove for about eight hours to get to the show”

While streaming rates point to a large pop market, challenging routing and a lack of infrastructure have hampered the development of an Indian circuit for rock and pop shows. Venues for shows typically have to be built from scratch on outdoor sites, and purpose-built venues are only a long-term prospect.

The EDM market is already creating circuits of its own. Percept Live’s three-day, 30,000-per-day Sunburn Festival in Goa returned in December, having brought many of the world’s top DJs down since 2007, and Percept has expanded into increasingly ambitious tours – including a six-city trek for DJ Snake in November, visiting Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore but also less-travelled spots such as Hyderabad and Ahmedabad.

“This is the first time we have done a six-city tour over two weekends with such a big artist,” says Percept Live COO Karan Singh, noting that DJ Snake drew anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 per city. “If you have eight or ten markets where the top international acts can play, that’s good for the industry overall.”

Other experienced electronic promoters include Mixtape Live, Submerge, and Mumbai’s Krunk Live, whose travelling Bass Camp Festival celebrated its tenth year in November. Another major player in the Indian business is payments provider Paytm, which bought OML’s ticketing arm Insider in 2017.

As well as presenting tours by artists such as Singh and Dosanjh, Paytm Insider is behind the Bacardi NH7 Weekender, which has featured Basement Jaxx, A.R. Rahman, and Megadeth and brought The Lumineers, Dirty Loops and J.I.D. back to its home city of Pune for its 11th edition in November.

 

This article contains excerpts from the Global Promoters Report, a first-of-its-kind resource that highlights the world’s leading promoters and the 40 top markets they operate in. The report is now available to subscribers of IQ.

India’s biggest metal fest sells out for first time

India’s biggest metal festival Bangalore Open Air has sold out for the first time in its 10-year history.

“This will go down in the history books,” says Bangalore Open Air founder, Salman U Syed. “A heavy metal festival in Bangalore, India, is sold out. Thank you for your support. Ten years of hard work determination and patience.”

The 3,000-capacity event, which is produced in partnership with Germany’s marquee metal festival Wacken Open Air, will this year celebrate its 10th anniversary.

“Thank you for your support. Ten years of hard work determination and patience”

Mayhem, Pestilence, Kryptos, Godless, Born of Osiris, Dying Embrace and Amorphia are among the acts lined up for the 1 April event at Royal Orchid Resorts at Yelahanka. Tickets start from ₹30,499 (€341).

In the past, the festival has hosted The Wacken Metal Battle’s Indian leg, with the winning band getting an opportunity to play at the German flagship festival, promoted by Superstuct Entertainment-backed International Concert Service (ICS).

The sell-out Bangalore Open Air comes soon after the inaugural Lollapalooza India drew 60,000 fans over two days.

 

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Inaugural Lollapalooza India draws 60,000 fans

The debut edition of Lollapalooza India drew 60,000 fans over two days, with 40 artists performing across four stages on a 50-acre site.

Held at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse Lawns in Mumbai between 28–29 January, the event saw performances from local and international artists including Imagine Dragons, The Strokes, AP Dhillon, Cigarettes After Sex, Divine, the F16s, Jackson Wang, Imanbek, Greta Van Fleet, The Wombats, and Diplo – many of whom performed in India for the first time.

The organisers arranged for a range of facilities such as sign language interpreters, disability services and support organisations, plus on-site response teams providing assistance for psychological safety and inclusivity for the LGBT+ community. There was also a distress helpline, free unlimited drinking water supply, and buses dedicated to the festival connecting all of Mumbai.

The festival also unveiled a campaign titled #LollaForChange, which aims for minimal waste, managing food wastage, and increased sustainable measures.

Lollapalooza India was produced by founder Perry Farrell, WME, C3 Presents and India’s BookMyShow, and means the brand has now grown to eight countries on four continents, including editions in the US, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, France and Sweden. The festival will return to India in 2024.

 

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40+ smartphones stolen during DJ Snake India gig

More than 40 “high end” mobile phones were stolen from revellers during a performance by French producer DJ Snake in Mumbai, India.

Police have made a series of arrests after examining CCTV footage from the “jam-packed” concert, which took place last night (27 November) at the MMRDA Grounds in the Bandra-Kurla Complex.

According to Times Now, backpacks, handbags and other baggage were not allowed inside the venue, and concert-goers were allowed to enter only after verifying their ID cards.

The Hindustan Times reports that six people were taken in for questioning and 15 phones were recovered.

“Three accused are in our custody. The case is currently under investigation and we are probing them further”

“Three accused are in our custody,” says Dikshit Gedam, deputy commissioner of police, zone 8. “The case is currently under investigation and we are probing them further. We are using all technical help to solve the case and make arrests.”

The concert was part of DJ Snake’s India tour, which also took in cities such as Ahmedabad, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad Pune and Bengaluru.

Real name William Sami Étienne Grigahcine, the artist is also set to perform at the Soundstorm Festival in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on 1 December, followed by shows in Indonesia and Thailand.

Last month, Netherlands police arrested a suspect caught with dozens of phones thought to have been stolen from the Amsterdam Music Festival at the Johan Cruijff Arena on 22 October.

 

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SteppinOut plans India’s biggest music festival

Experience curator SteppinOut has planned what it’s touting as the biggest festival in India in 2022.

Grammy Award-nominated DJ Steve Aoki heads up a bill of 50+ artists booked to perform across five stages at the 50,000-capacity event in Bangalore.

SteppinOut Music Festival will also feature performances from domestic and international artists such as Harrdy Sandhu, Offset, Solomun, TroyBoi, Divine, Anuv Jain Jasleen Royal and Lucky Ali.

Blot!, Sickflip, Kayan Live, Divine and Aswekeepsearching are also billed to perform at the festival.

The event is slated to take place on 10 and 11 December at Embassy International Riding School, and will be hosted by Indian DJ Nikhil Chinapa and Indian actor Rannvijay Singha.

“This music festival is going to be our crowning jewel”

“We are thrilled to be able to do this for our loyal customers who flock to all SteppinOut events, we love to give our patrons the opportunity to come together with their friends and loved ones to enjoy a nice day out,” says founder Safdhar Adoor.

“We are constantly evolving with extremely successful events ranging from sneaker fests to our signature flea markets. This music festival is going to be our crowning jewel. We cannot wait for people to come together and enjoy the music they love so much and get a chance to see their favourite artists live. This will definitely be the first of many!”

SteppinOut hosts around 20 events a month, ranging from night markets to concerts to comedy nights.

In August 2020, the company was acquired by India’s largest dining-out platform, DineOut. It was then acquired by Swiggy, the delivery aggregator giant, in July 2022.

 

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Lollapalooza India to debut in 2023

Lollapalooza has announced it is expanding to India, with the inaugural edition set for Mumbai from 28-29 January 2023.

Lollapalooza India will showcase both global stars and local talent and will mark the first time the event has been held in Asia.

Offering two days of music across four stages as well as culinary selections, art and fashion, line-up and ticket information will be released soon.

“The music of India is transcendental, it draws our spirits East,” says Lollapalooza founder Perry Farrell. “Lollapalooza is an instrument for unity, peace, and education utilising the universal languages of music and art to find common ground.”

Lollapalooza India is being produced by Farrell, WME, C3 Presents and India’s BookMyShow, and means the brand has now grown to eight countries on four continents, including editions in the US, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, France and Sweden.

“We are excited to introduce fans to an entirely new festival experience”

“Lollapalooza has always been about exploring boundaries, musically and geographically,” says C3 Presents partner Charlie Walker. “We are excited to introduce fans to an entirely new festival experience that has been a significant rite of passage for millions of music fans around the world for more than three decades.”

BookMyShow is owned and operated by Big Tree Entertainment and is described as “India’s leading entertainment destination”. The company has brought international stars such as U2, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Justin Bieber to the market over the past few years.

“BookMyShow is proud to bring Lollapalooza to India – making it the eighth country and the fourth continent to do so,” says the firm’s founder and CEO Ashish Hemrajani. “With a mix of some stellar Indian talent and global artists coming together on the same stage, we expect nothing short of magic.”

Launched in 2007, BookMyShow has evolved from an online ticketing platform for movies to end-to-end management of live entertainment events including concerts, theatrical productions and sport.

 

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We for India benefit show raises $5m for Covid relief

We for India, a livestreamed fundraising event featuring performances from Ed Sheeran, Nile Rodgers, Annie Lennox and AR Rahman, raised more than US$5 million for the India Covid Response Fund, organisers have announced.

Held on Sunday 15 August 2021, India’s 75th independence day, the show featured more than 100 musicians, actors, film directors, TV stars and other celebrities and was broadcast to a global audience on Facebook. Other participants included Steven Spielberg, Mick Jagger and Indian film stars Ajay Devgan, Hrithik Roshan, Nagarjuna and Arjun Kapoor.

Shibasish Sarkar, group CEO of Reliance Entertainment, which organised We for India in association with GiveIndia, Facebook and the UN platform The World We Want, says: “The honest and sincere effort of our team and our partners is the reason behind the great success of this event. I would like to extend my gratitude to all the talent, artists, philanthropists and everyone who supported this fundraiser. It is our humble contribution to our nation’s ongoing battle against the invisible enemy.”

“I would like to extend my gratitude to all the talent, artists, philanthropists and everyone who supported this fundraiser”

The money, around 370m rupees, was raised from a combination of corporate partners, philanthropic foundations and individual donors, reports IANS. It follows a similar event, I for India, which raised $7m in May 2020.

Atul Satija, CEO of GiveIndia, comments: “We are grateful for all the support we have received from each and everyone who donated and came together to make We For India such an impactful journey. Thank you for making it a success and contributing to our India Covid Response Fund. We all know that the pandemic and the suffering it has caused is far from over. We for India is a great, timely initiative to remind us of the need to continue to provide humanitarian aid and strengthen our health infrastructure.”

“The great success of this initiative is the result of the collective efforts of so many people, and truly epitomises the power of communities,” Manish Chopra, director and head of partnerships for Facebook India, adds. “As Facebook, we are proud to have supported the voice of leading artists from all over the world and partnered Give India and Reliance Entertainment in this laudable effort towards Covid relief.”

 

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BookMyShow lays off 200 as restrictions continue

Indian ticketing giant BookMyShow has laid off another 200 employees as coronavirus restrictions continue to hurt demand for live entertainment and cinema.

BookMyShow, headquartered in Mumbai (Bombay), is India’s biggest online ticket seller, shifting as much as 50% of the movie-mad country’s cinema tickets and ticketing many of its major live music events. It also operates as a co-promoter for international concerts, such as U2’s historic Mumbai show in December 2019, one of the last before the pandemic hit.

New initiatives such as the launch of livestreaming solution BookMyShow Online in mid-2020 haven’t been enough to avoid further redundancies, following an initial round of 270 lay-offs last May, according to CEO Ashish Hemrajani, who announced the redundancies on Twitter.

Hemrajani tweets that BookMyShow has been forced to let go of “200 of the most incredibly talented and performance-driven individuals” who had been been “handpicked and curated over years”, and that announcing the lay-offs was the “right thing” to do to enable them to find new jobs quickly.

“I’m sure we will all come out of this stronger”

He has asked other companies who have openings for the staff to send him a message on Twitter or email [email protected] with information.

“I had two thoughts: one of managing optics, or two just doing the right thing,” Hemrajani explains. “And for me, finding each of them a new home, where a new journey can begin, was the easy choice. So if you have leads, please DM me and we will do the needful.

“They will contribute incredibly to the growth of your wonderful firms. I’m sure we will all come out stronger.”

At press time, India had around 60,000 daily cases of Covid-19. While heavy restrictions remain in many areas, some states, such as West Bengal and the Punjab, are again opening up, with restaurants, bars and cinemas allowed to operate at 50% capacity.

 

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Covid worries as world’s biggest festival to go ahead

Authorities in Uttarakhand are ramping up Covid-19 test, trace and treatment facilities ahead of the Kumbh Mela festival, the world’s largest religious gathering, which is expected to draw millions of pilgrims to the northern Indian state next month.

Held roughly every three years, alternating between the cities of Haridwar, Nasik, Ujjain and Allahabad, Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival centred on bathing in certain sacred rivers, is one of the largest gatherings in the world, and is visible from space. The last festival, held in Allahabad in early 2019, attracted a peak single-day attendance of 50 million people.

Kumbh Mela 2021 will take place in Haridwar, Uttarakhand, on the banks of the Ganges, from 1 to 30 April. Organisers expect more than 150 million visitors from all over India across the 30 days, and the national and state governments have spent more than half a billion euros on preparing the city for the festival, including laying 300km of new roads and building car parks to accomodate over 500,000 vehicles.

Fearing a superspreader event in the Himalayan city, the Indian health ministry last week wrote to the state government of Uttarakhand to say that its daily coronavirus testing capacity of 55,000 people was not enough given the large numbers of expected attendees, and that cases were already rising as pilgrims began arriving early.

“This [virus] positivity rate has the potential to rapidly turn into an upsurge in cases, given the expected large footfall during Kumbh,” it read. “Currently more than 12 states in India have shown a surge in Covid-19 cases during the past few weeks, and pilgrims expected to visit Haridwar during the Kumbh Mela could also be from these states.”

“This positivity rate has the potential to rapidly turn into an upsurge in cases”

In response, local authorities have brought in private companies to increase Haridwar’s testing capacity, and are building field hospitals, as well as a 1,500-bed isolation facility, for those who test positive for Covid-19.

“Six temporary hospitals are being built in the [Kumbh] area,” Uttarakhand’s chief medical officer, SK Jha, tells the Hindustan Times. “Also, ashrams and medical colleges in Haridwar would also be utilised to ensure adequate beds for Covid-19 isolation during the fair, which is expected to witness millions of devotees, especially during the shahi snans [main bathing days].”

The state government, which has already made mask-wearing mandatory for pilgrims, says it will distribute millions of masks for free during the festival.

Organisers will also adhere to a number of standard operating procedures issued by the Ministry of Health, including displaying signage urging attendees to self-report any new symptoms of disease and monitoring the flow of foot traffic.

Kumbh Mela last took place in Haridwar in 2010, when it was attended by an estimated 10 million people.

 

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Indian budget “completely ignores” live events

Industry association EEMA has sharply criticised the Indian government for making no provisions in its most recent budget for the live entertainment sector, which has been devastated by the series of lockdowns and ‘unlocks’ imposed on the country since last March.

The 2021–22 Union Budget, presented to the Indian parliament by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman earlier this week, “completely ignores” the events sector, as well as hospitality, tourism and other related industries, according to Siddhartha Chaturvedi, general secretary of the Events and Entertainment Management Association.

While cinemas are permitted to reopen at 100% capacity from 1 February under so-called ‘unlock 9.0’ guidelines (ie the ninth easing of lockdown), the live events sector has had “almost nil revenue” since the first lockdown came into effect” in March 2020, said the EEMA in a letter sent to Sitharaman (pictured) last month asking for relief for the industry.

The association had asked for wage subsidies, tax relief/refunds, free venue hire and interest-free loans, among other measures, to be included in the budget.

“We were really expecting some SOS measures for our industry in particular”

Chaturvedi says the industry has been left bitterly disappointed by the lack of support for what he describes an industry that is still “bleeding” money. “The budget has been extremely disappointing for us in events. The government has completely ignored this bleeding sector, and so is the case of the entire hospitality, tourism and aviation sectors, which are all related to each other,” he comments. “We were really looking forward to a helping hand from the government in these dire times.”

While the budget shows the government’s intent to “spend a lot to infuse economic activities”, EEMA was “really expecting some SOS measures for our industry in particular, and are extremely disappointed with this lack of empathy towards us.”

“The budget largely seems progressive for the economy,” adds Samit Garg, the association’s executive vice-president. “However, there is unfortunately nothing in there for our events and experiential industry. The only silver lining is the increased government expenditure, which may yield more business opportunities for us.”

EEMA represents more than 1,000 companies, including artist managers, talent agents, event organisers and event management companies.

 

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