Festival Temp Check: What India’s Music Festivals Get Right and Wrong

For years, music festivals in India existed on the edges: sporadic, experimental, often treated as outliers rather than anchors of the live ecosystem. Today, they sit at the centre of it. Festivals have become the places where touring routes are tested, new audiences are introduced to unfamiliar sounds, and entire cities briefly reorganise themselves around music.

Their growth has been gradual, then sudden. What started as a handful of destination events has expanded into a dense, year-round calendar that stretches across regions, genres, and scales. With that expansion has come influence over who gets booked, who gets discovered, how audiences spend, and what live music in India is expected to look like. Questions around representation, access, sustainability, and scale, now more than ever, are no longer side conversations. They surface with every season, lineup announcement, and sold-out weekend, followed by vigorous online debate.

This moment calls for more than celebration or criticism. It asks for a closer look at what India’s festival circuit is actually building — the communities it nurtures, the economies it fuels, and the structural gaps it continues to expose.

PRO: GIGS & FESTIVALS BUILD ACTUAL ECONOMIES

Festivals have become confluence points for culture, with the same artists, crews, and audiences returning year after year, and in the process generating real economic ripple effects. Large-scale festivals and arena shows routinely pump hundreds of crores into host cities, filling up flights and hotels as well as local bars and restaurants with a buzz that lasts well beyond the festival gates.  

CON: FESTIVALS TAKE THEIR FANS FOR GRANTED

With multiple festivals all chasing the same weekend dates, everything is being branded as “can’t miss,” making very little actually feel that way. A sense of oversaturation has set in, especially since the purchasing power for most of India’s population has plateaued. This glut has also made some promoters complacent: reshuffling venue layouts, quietly discounting or repricing tickets when sales don’t hit targets, and tweaking experiences on the fly, treating audiences like numbers to be adjusted. 

PRO: REGIONAL STORYTELLING THAT BOOSTS TOURISM THE RIGHT WAY 

The best festivals let the region lead with intent, not merely as decoration. Often working in ways to honor the local texture, terrain, flavors, communities, and culture, regional music festivals have the potential to drive tourism without flattening the local scene. 

CON: LOCAL ARTISTS FEEL THE PINCH FIRST

As festivals grow bigger, local artists quietly get squeezed. Playing your own city’s biggest festival shouldn’t feel so financially impossible, yet these artists are often being subjected to lower fees, tighter set times, or payoffs framed as “exposure.” Meanwhile, audiences, having already spent heavily on headline tickets, are less willing to arrive early or spend more on discovering and supporting homegrown talent.

PRO: SUSTAINABILITY IS GETTING SERIOUS

It’s still uneven, but sustainability has moved off banners and into operations. More festivals are now thinking about things like recyclable glasses, energy-efficient power systems, and better waste management. Audiences are watching closely, and festivals know they can’t fake it anymore.

CON: A BROKEN TICKET RESALE SYSTEM

Ticket resale has become a largely unregulated free-for-all, with little oversight from organisers or platforms. Scarcity marketing and staggered ticket drops often push fans toward exorbitant prices in the secondary market, while recent examples have also seen resale tickets dip below original prices, undercutting both the artist’s value and the live experience itself. 

PRO: THE PROGRAMMING IS GETTING BETTER 

Festivals finally seem to be trusting their audience’s taste. Fewer filler slots, better flow, and lineups that feel considered instead of crammed, with more niche artists being welcomed into the mix, further punctuating how thoughtfully curated the programming has gotten. 

CON: NOT ENOUGH REPRESENTATION ON LINEUPS OR CURATION PANELS

This conversation hasn’t moved fast enough. Women and LGBTQIA+ artists continue to be underrepresented where it matters most: at the top of the bill and in decision-making rooms. While economic realities and ticket-selling logic often underpin these choices, the harder truth is that audiences themselves haven’t yet fully warmed to women or LGBTQIA+ artists as headline draws.

PRO: BUILDING LARGE-SCALE VENUES FROM SCRATCH

Entire festivals are built overnight and dismantled days later. It’s chaotic, impressive, and the reason live music now reaches places it never used to. Many festivals also do this with a whole lot of consideration and care to site-specific conditions, sometimes even folding it into the larger festival experience. 

CON: ROLLOUT STRATEGIES THAT KILL THE BUZZ

Lineup drops are still messy and dragged out. In an era of instant information, unclear communication kills excitement faster than you can say “festival season.”