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.”

The post Festival Temp Check: What India’s Music Festivals Get Right and Wrong appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

NAV doesn’t describe himself as mysterious. That idea was thrust on him by the outside world — a byproduct of sunglasses, silence, and a career that seemed to accumulate platinum plaques and chart numbers without ever offering much explanation. When I ask him to strip all of that away — the albums, the attention, the mythology — his answer lands with an almost confrontational honesty. 

“I’m a well-raised man. Two very good parents. And I’m a very grateful person and a quick learner,” he says, pausing briefly before adding, “A very fast learner.” 

It’s not an attempt to dodge the question, nor an exercise in humility. It’s orientation — one developed over years of watching the world as much as participating in it. And as our conversation stretches on — moving through Rexdale basements, racist slurs in suburban Canadian classrooms, months of financial pressure that pushed him to quit music altogether, and the strange normalcy of studios The Weeknd, Travis Scott and Future drifted in and out of — it becomes clear that NAV’s understanding of success has never aligned with the world’s expectations of it. In fact, visibility came later, consistency came first, and peace of mind, it turns out, was always the end goal. 

That grounding is deeply tied to his upbringing. Long before Toronto became a global music export hub, and long before NAV’s voice found a presence in modern rap, his childhood was shaped by closeness and compression. His maternal uncle left India at 13, moving first to London and then to Canada, triggering a wave that pulled the rest of the family with him. What followed wasn’t a series of individual moves, but a collective one. Parents, siblings, cousins, spouses — everyone collapsed into a single household, sharing space, responsibility, and survival. 

“We all moved into one house,” NAV tells me. “All my mom’s brothers and sisters and husbands and kids. And I was raised there until I was like three years old.” 

That early environment still influences how he moves through the world. Even now, NAV admits he feels most at ease when surrounded by people — a comfort rooted in those early years when solitude simply didn’t exist. While many artists romanticize isolation as the price of creation, NAV’s relationship with being alone has always been different. “The toughest thing for me to do is be alone,” he says. “So when I spend time alone is when I find, like, a center.” 

Music didn’t enter his life as an ambition so much as proximity. One uncle was professional singer, another played keys, and studios weren’t intimidating or inaccessible spaces — they were familiar rooms that family members moved in and out of after work. The first time NAV saw how a song came together, it didn’t feel like a dream revealing itself; it felt procedural. 

“I’d seen how the songs get made, and I told my mom I want to do it,” he recalls. His uncle bought him a small piece of equipment. 

Outside the safety of home, the difference was obvious. Growing up in predominantly white suburban Canadian schools, NAV encountered racism early and directly — not in coded language, but blunt slurs that made it clear where he stood. “When I was growing up, at first, there was a lot of racism,” he says. “It was mostly white people who were in school. The racist white kids would call us Pakis, this, this, that.” 

That changed by middle school, when immigration patterns reshaped his environment. Punjabi children, Jamaican families, and West Indian households began filling classrooms and neighborhoods, creating a more layered sense of community. “It became very multicultural,” NAV says. 

By the time he began making beats at 16, music wasn’t yet framed as escape or aspiration. It was instinct — a place his attention landed naturally. Progress, however, was slow and uneven. Well into his 20s, NAV was still recording wherever he could make it work, often in his mother’s house, surrounded by fragile equipment that barely held together. “I was recording songs at my mom’s house, like, in my bedroom,” he says. “It was a hundred-dollar microphone, a laptop. My equipment was broken.” 

This is the stretch most success narratives erase — the years where nothing clicked, when quitting felt rational, even responsible. NAV walked away from music more than once. He tried to make money in the streets, exploring stability as an alternative to obsession. “I tried to do a lot of different things,” he says. “I was running around in the streets, getting money. Then I tried to work regular jobs.” 

One of those jobs, training as an electrician, brought a sense of clarity. On site, NAV wore headphones constantly, using music to endure work that never felt like his own. When a coworker complained about a mistake, and his boss banned headphones altogether, the restriction hit harder than expected. “That’s when I knew, like, I had to quit,” he says. “Just try music again.” 

That decision didn’t arrive in a vacuum. At home, the pressure had intensified. His father lost a stable forklift job when the company shut down, plunging the family into financial uncertainty and forcing responsibilities onto NAV and his sister that they’d never carried before. “Shit got really tough on me, my sister,” he says. “With that pressure and not getting any success out of the music that I’m working on, it just made me [feel] like, fuck music. I can’t do it.” 

What ultimately pushed him back wasn’t inspiration — a concept NAV openly distrusts — but dissatisfaction with everything else. “When you try to figure what you want to do in life, you’ve got to go do stuff that you don’t want to do,” he explains. “I just didn’t like the feeling of that.” That philosophy still underpins how he operates now, prioritizing discipline over motivation and showing up over waiting. “You can’t wait for inspiration,” he says flatly. “Inspiration comes to you when you least expect it.” 

By the time NAV stepped into his first truly major studio session, he wasn’t chasing a breakthrough so much as just producing, doing what he had quietly done for years. That session happened during Starboy, with The Weeknd standing directly behind him as he worked. “He was like, make some beats,” NAV remembers. “And I made three beats really fast, and he started singing right behind me.” 

What followed was access to studios that felt communal rather than transactional. Travis Scott dropping by, songs taking shape without ceremony, music becoming work, and work becoming routine. “Travis Scott’s coming over,” NAV remembers. “He’s just coming over. Like, every artist is just coming around and casually, like, yo, this is NAV. And here’s the song and they all like my music and we all work together.” 

As labels began flying him to Los Angeles with offers, NAV said no — deliberately and repeatedly. He read, paid attention, and understood that moving too early meant losing leverage. “I just kept saying no to everybody,” he says. XO, the Canadian music label founded by The Weekend, wasn’t even on his radar at first; they didn’t sign artists at the time, at least not in the way he was imagining. So when the call finally came, it felt like the universe breaking pattern. “I never even thought of XO as an option because they don’t sign artists,” he says. “So when they called me, I knew instantly, like, this is it. That was an instant yes. Right away.” 

The partnership that followed wasn’t a conventional major-label story. Before there was a record deal on the table, there was investment — literal and emotional. “Cash [XO] was like, hey, we don’t want to go sign a record dealer and get like, shitted on,” NAV says. “So let’s build the leverage.” CashXO (co-founder of XO Records) poured his own money into visuals and infrastructure. “Cash put almost a million dollars out of his own pocket to shoot videos and whatever,” NAV says. “And then La Mar [Taylor] would be there finding the camera guy, styling me. Yeah. He did everything hands-on.” Those early years were less about aesthetics than architecture: working out how NAV should look, sound, and exist in public, while still feeling like himself. 

Today, his operation is leaner, guided more by trust than scale. The core is small now — mostly NAV and Buck$y Luchiiano — but the principle hasn’t changed. “You can’t do anything alone,” he says. “It’s impossible. Like, even like if you go work in a company, like there’s multiple employees doing different things. So it’s the same thing in music.” The job isn’t just about management or logistics; it’s about ego — or rather, the lack of it. “You need a team with no ego, no pride,” he adds. “Everybody got each other’s back, and teamwork is dream work.” 

That belief was tested most clearly on his 2025 album OMW2 Rexdale, a project he doesn’t position as his biggest or boldest, but as something else entirely. “It’s more like a passion project,” he explains. The seed for it came from a decision most artists at his level would avoid: opening up a direct channel to fans and then actually listening. NAV started a Discord server and watched it swell to around 20,000 people, many of them day-one listeners who weren’t shy about saying exactly what they wanted from him. “They would just complain, complain, complain,” he says. “Tell me they want this kind of song, they want Old NAV back.” 

What stayed with him wasn’t just the volume of those demands, but the way they began to influence his own decision-making. For an artist who had spent most of his career letting the music speak and avoiding over-explaining his choices, being pulled into that level of commentary felt disruptive. “It kind of hurt me a little bit because I listened to them too much,” he admits. The feedback began to shape how he saw himself in relation to his catalogue and his audience. 

The album that came out of it wasn’t designed to reset his career or unlock a new era. It was built to give that core section of his fanbase what they’d been asking for and, in his mind, to close a loop. “I feel like the album was conversely successful,” he says. “But for my day one fans and for, like, them, I know they were satisfied and happy, and they can move on now. No more Old NAV — Old NAV gone.” He talks about it less as a triumphant return to a sound and more as an intentional goodbye to a version of himself that fans refused to let go of. 

Not everyone around him loved it. His close friends — “mostly black, Jamaican people,” as he describes them — like him better in a heavier, more aggressive mode. “They want to hear aggressive,” he says. “They like when I go aggressive.” He found himself explaining to them that this wasn’t about chasing numbers or pleasing everyone; it was about finishing something. “I was just like explaining to them, look, like I have to close the album,” he remembers. “And the only way I can close it is by giving these kids what they want. I try my best and sacrifice myself for the kids.” The fans wanted outros, interludes, “slow stuff, dream, dream,” even when he wasn’t creatively in that space anymore. It took time to find the right beats, to get into that headspace again. “I wasn’t even in the mood to make that stuff,” he says. “And it would take me so long to find beats, and, like, the right beats took me forever.” 

When the dust settled, the numbers didn’t match his highest expectations. He doesn’t dress that up. “I didn’t do as good as I wanted to,” he says plainly. But in another way, the project did exactly what it was supposed to do. “They left me alone and let me do whatever I want to do,” he adds. The constant “Old NAV” comments have faded. The pressure to recreate a specific era has shifted off his shoulders. 

That shift has changed how he’s thinking about the next phase. With the old demands quieted, NAV is recording more freely again, leaning into whatever he feels like making instead of trying to reverse-engineer what people say they miss. “Now it’s all about my friends’ opinions for the new project,” he says. The urgency that once surrounded every release — the sense that each drop had to prove something — has softened into something more deliberate. 

The weight of other people’s opinions hasn’t been harmless over the years. When I ask if criticism has affected his mental health in a real way, he doesn’t hesitate. “Absolutely,” he says. It’s not one or two random comments that get to him, but patterns — when “more than 10, 20 people” are saying the same thing and the numbers line up with what they’re saying. That’s when he knows he has to pay attention and adjust, the way an athlete would if their weak points kept showing up on tape. At the same time, he understands when it’s time to pull back. “Therapy is good,” he says simply, as both a personal truth and a recommendation. 

His idea of success has shifted shape along the way. Earlier in his career, every new milestone seemed to immediately trigger the question of what came next. He racked up platinum singles, gold albums, and placements like “Lemonade,” climbing into the Billboard charts in ways he never expected. “I never like, I never really started enjoying the moment until now,” he admits. Even the physical proof of those achievements has begun to feel different. His house doesn’t have the wall space to keep up with the number of plaques anymore. “My house, I have no room on my walls for the plaques,” he says. “I just put them in my garage in boxes.” 

The achievements he singles out now are specific and measured: “Two Number One albums in a row,” he says, referring to Bad Habits and Good Intentions. “Top 10 on Billboard with ‘Lemonade.’” Landing a placement in a Spider-Man film with “the best radio and petrol.” “So that were like my three biggest accomplishments,” he says, half-laughing at the phrasing but fully serious about the pride behind it. 

The story that seems to move him most, though, has nothing to do with chart positions. It’s the night he finally brought his family to see him perform at an arena in Toronto — the first time they ever saw him on stage. He waited on purpose. “I wanted to wait till I did something big,” he says. He sent three or four black trucks to pick them up, had them driven through the same underground entrances reserved for basketball players, and made sure there was a private room and a suite where they could watch. His mom cried the whole time. “That’s when I feel like they understood,” he says. That show was years into his career. “That was the first show they ever saw.” 

As his touring map has widened, his understanding of the audience has evolved with it. Coachella, which was the first booking he ever got as an artist back in 2016, forced him to level up his performance early. He wasn’t ready then, by his own admission, and had to take a few shows just to practice. When he returned years later to the Sahara Tent, leaping into a crowd of tens of thousands, he felt like a different version of himself. Japan stood out because of how engaged people were, even when they didn’t know every song. “Even if they didn’t know the song that I’m performing,” he says, “they’re just jumping, excited, happy.” Rolling Loud in Thailand, a stint in Riyadh performing for a fight promotion where he was put on TV between bouts — all of it added new contexts for his music to live in. 

India, though, carries its own weight. For a long time, he genuinely didn’t know what his presence here looked like beyond social media. “Being in America all the time, I couldn’t really tell, like, if I had fans or…” he trails off. “So I had to come here.” This run isn’t about checking a box or proving a point. It’s about putting real faces and energy to numbers he’d been seeing from afar, and about understanding his place in a scene that has been building its own momentum with or without him. 

On the ground, that’s translated into both friendships and collaborations. His “Punjabi success,” as he calls it, really began with Money Musik — the producer he found at 17 who now moves in his own orbit, making records with artists like Lil Uzi Vert and AP Dhillon. “He’s my golden boy,” NAV says, proud that he doesn’t have to watch over his work anymore. “I didn’t really have to do much,” he adds. “Now I don’t even have to watch him.” 

His new song with Karan Aujla grew out of a simple internal question: who should get the first look from him in Punjabi music? He watched Aujla’s journey — “a lot of bad videos,” a long grind, the kind of consistency that turns into ubiquity — and respected what it took to get there. They eventually linked up through Ikky, the producer NAV now talks to a lot. “So, me and Ikky linked up and clicked instantly and became friends,” he recalls. “And I guess Ikky’s like, yo, Karan, we got to do something.” The result is a remix of Aujla’s track “Daytona” that the duo released during Aujla’s headliner set at Rolling Loud India. Best part? NAV only met Aujla in person the day of the show. “It’s crazy,” he says of that timing, but it feels right to him. 

Then some relationships are still in motion. He met some local rappers at events — like the night at Shah Rukh Khan’s son’s party, where “everybody was there” — and they traded numbers, even if lining up studio time across continents was complicated. NAV constantly checks in on emerging artists he likes, messages people like Cheema Y when their songs catch his ear. And he’s clear about who else he wants to eventually work with. “Of course,” he says when I ask about AP Dhillon. An entire project with Indian artists, he tells me, isn’t out of the question. “Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. In the near future. Yeah? Yeah. For sure.” 

NAV looks beyond Indian artists as a market segment, talks about them as part of a larger arc he sees himself connected to — a wave of brown artists becoming global on their own terms. “I love you guys, and I do this for us,” he says when I ask if he has a message for fans here. “And I just hope to see just more and more brown artists emerging and becoming successful and just taking over the world.” 

Looking at NAV now, it’s tempting to frame this period as a clean arrival point — the chapter where everything finally makes sense. But that would miss what he’s actually describing. What’s happening is alignment: between the kid raised in a crowded house, the artist who kept saying no until the right door opened, and the man now learning to prioritize peace over noise. The “mystery” that once got projected onto him was never distance for the sake of it; it was restraint, survival, and choice. 

Now, he doesn’t seem particularly interested in maintaining even that. He isn’t chasing anything anymore. He’s choosing carefully what, and who, he carries forward. 

NAV wears jewellery by IRIS Fine Jewels

Cover Credits
Creative Director: Peony Hirwani
Photographer: Samrat Nagar
Executive Editor: Shamani Joshi
Creative Producer: Prachee Mashru
Stylist: Rushi Honmore
Hair & Makeup: Bugz Hairmafia
Motion Cover Director & Editor: Jonathan Mathew
Production Assistant: Dalia Nouf Shaikh
Junior Editorial Associate: Sharanyaa Nair
Photography Assistants: Zahrah Vahanvaty & Suraj Seksaria
Cover Layout: AK Digitals
Styling Assistants: Shriyaa Kirdat & Pyu Mishra
Dressman: Mukhtaar Shaikh
DOP: Vivan Shukla
Colorist: Vedant Kothari
BTS: Vivan Shukla
Interactive Video: Jonathan Mathew
Editorial Intern: Shradha Paul
Brand Team: Agent, Sebastian Shaji
Head of Brand Partnerships & Experiences: Esha Singh
Business Head: Pawan Thukral
Brand Manager: Veer Mehta
Luxury Car Partner: Jaguar Land Rover
Catering Partner: Hundo Pizza
Location: Vitamin Studio, Andheri

The post COVER STORY: NAV On The Brown Boy’s Past, Present and What Comes After appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

I flew from Mumbai to Bahrain and then on to Riyadh on Gulf Air, already bracing myself for the usual festival travel chaos, but that never really came. Pick-up was smooth, hotel check-in was frictionless, and there was an underlying sense that things had been thought through before I even landed. That feeling of being taken care of stayed with me all weekend, and by the time Soundstorm began, it felt less like arriving at a massive event and more like stepping into something that was already running exactly the way it was supposed to.

I went in expecting Soundstorm to be impressive because that’s what everyone says about Soundstorm, but what I wasn’t prepared for was how easy it felt to exist inside. It sounds like a strange compliment for a festival this massive, but it matters, especially when you’re clocking multiple nights, walking kilometres without realizing it, bouncing between stages, moods, genres, and still somehow not feeling irritated or overwhelmed.

Once you’re inside the site, the scale hits you instantly, but what stands out more is how structured everything is. This isn’t one giant field with stages scattered around in the hope that people will figure it out. Soundstorm is designed to function like a city, with clear districts, pacing, and purpose, a clarity that changes the entire experience over three long nights. You don’t just scramble between performances; you move through environments, and that sense of orientation stays with you even when you’re wandering without a plan.

Downtown sits right at the heart of this layout. It’s not a headline stage zone, and it’s not something you rush to tick off, it’s the space you keep returning to between sets, moods, and energy spikes. It houses five satellite stages, Yard, Roog, Greenhouse, Swing and Mixtape, each programmed differently, which means you’re constantly stumbling into something unexpected rather than waiting for a scheduled moment. This is where you eat properly instead of panic-snacking, where you sit without guilt, where you people-watch, regroup, and recalibrate before diving back into the chaos. With over 40 food and beverage vendors spread across the area, the food feels woven into the experience rather than pushed to the edges, and that small detail ends up mattering more than you realise at 3 am.

From there, the rest of Soundstorm opens up in a way that feels deliberate. You move from open-air stages built for spectacle into enclosed, immersive spaces designed for focus, then back out again, without ever feeling like you’ve stepped outside the festival’s rhythm. The Tunnel stage, fully enclosed and weatherproof, is built around a massive sun installation behind the DJ booth, creating this almost surreal, cinematic atmosphere where the outside world disappears completely. With space for over 12,000 people and a solid concrete floor that keeps the sound tight and physical, Tunnel feels less like a festival tent and more like a warehouse dropped into the desert. 

The underground and techno-heavy zones lean even further into that idea of immersion. Soundstorm West, built using over a thousand shipping containers, becomes its own club district, packed with Plexi, Log, Port and Silk stages, plus Tunnel anchoring the area, and the Elrow-designed Port stage adds a playful, slightly chaotic edge to the otherwise dark, driving energy. This is where hours slip by without you noticing, because the environment is doing as much work as the music. 

There’s also a quieter but deeply meaningful shift when you wander toward the new 6AG stage. Designed like a modern Arabic wedding, it immediately stands out from everything else on site. Draped structures, ceremonial lighting, and a layout that encourages gathering rather than confrontation make it feel communal instead of imposing.

With a capacity of around six thousand, the space never feels like a crowd being managed. People stay longer than planned, face each other as much as the stage, and settle into the warmth of the lighting and the closeness of the sound. It’s also where Soundstorm’s commitment to local and regional artists feels the most confident, not as a cultural checkbox, but as something infused naturally into the festival’s core.

And then there’s the Big Beast main stage, which anchors everything. Towering over the site, it’s impossible to ignore, yet it never feels like it’s compensating for anything. Knowing that this stage previously broke world records for height and LED scale makes immediate sense when you’re standing in front of it, but what matters more is how well it functions. The visuals are massive, the sound travels cleanly across huge distances, and even when you’re all the way back, you don’t feel disconnected from what’s happening on stage. With a capacity of 65,000 and an overall site pixel count pushing past 90 million LEDs across stages and screens, the visual language feels continuous rather than fragmented.

Over three days, Soundstorm drew more than 500,000 people to the site, and yet still managed to feel navigable rather than overwhelming, which is no easy feat at this scale.

That’s exactly why Cardi B’s set landed as one of the most important moments of the weekend for me. She understood the scale instantly and played with it instead of attempting to overpower it. Her quips loosened the crowd, her now-viral “Assalamu alaykum” cut through the night with humor and warmth, and when she performed songs from her latest album AM I THE DRAMA? live for the first time, it felt very intentional. This wasn’t just her Saudi debut; it felt like a preview, almost a trailer for what her upcoming world tour might look like, and choosing Soundstorm for that moment felt deliberate rather than symbolic.

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Post Malone shifted the energy entirely. There was a softness to his set that landed hard in the middle of all that scale. Watching him move through older hits like “White Iverson” and “Rockstar” alongside newer material felt reflective rather than nostalgic, like someone comfortably sitting inside their catalogue instead of racing through it. It was one of those sets where the crowd didn’t feel frantic; it felt collectively present, which is rare at a festival this size.

One of the most unexpected standouts for me was Benson Boone. His set created a strange pocket of intimacy at a festival designed for tens of thousands; people were listening intently, and that shift in energy felt rare. Loyle Carner was another highlight, bringing thoughtful, grounded U.K. rap that translates beautifully live, especially if you’ve spent time with his latest release. Watching him felt like being let into his head rather than watching a performance engineered for spectacle.

Tyla was sharp, fluid, magnetic, completely comfortable in her movement and presence, and Pitbull turned his slot into a full-blown 2000s club night dropped into the desert, chaotic in the best way. Not everything worked. Young Thug felt lost on a stage this big, like the scale swallowed his energy instead of lifting it. In contrast, The Kid LAROI was surprisingly solid, emotionally present, and confident, while Davido turned his set into a celebration; you could literally see the African crowd gravitate towards his stage, the energy shifting into something communal and joyful within minutes.

The electronic programming is where Soundstorm’s creative direction really flexes. Anyma’s set felt less like a DJ performance and more like an installation, visuals and sound locking together so tightly that time started to blur. Swedish House Mafia delivered nostalgia without it feeling dated, while Steve Aoki, Afrojack, Major Lazer and DJ Snake kept the site pulsing. ARTBAT were relentless and immersive, and BLOND:ISH delivered one of those rare sets where you forget to check the time entirely because leaving feels wrong.

Ben Böhmer finally made sense to me here. I’ve seen him live multiple times in India and, if I’m being honest, it’s never quite landed for me the way I wanted it to. But this time was different. The magnitude of the stage, the restraint of the visuals, the way the crowd leaned in instead of talking over it — everything aligned. Something about Riyadh, the night air, the pacing of his set, and the audience’s chemistry made it click in a way it never had before, making it one of those performances that quietly rewires how you remember an artist, and I know I won’t forget that set anytime soon.

One of my biggest personal surprises of the weekend also came with Halsey. I’d seen her live at Lollapalooza India before and walked away underwhelmed, but this version of her felt transformed, fully charged and completely in control. Watching her now, especially after hearing her speak about creative freedom with Zane Lowe, it’s hard not to feel like her best work emerges when she’s trusted to evolve without interference.

What stayed with me most, though, was how thoughtfully the HER experience, a dedicated female-only viewing zone, was embedded into the festival rather than treated like a side note. Eight zones spread across stages, along with dedicated HER lounges and bars, clearly marked “HER” pathways running across the site. There was even a double-decker viewing platform designed specifically for women. All of these quietly changed how you move through Soundstorm. You don’t have to plan around safety or access; it’s already been planned for you, and that ease is felt constantly, not announced loudly.

The same care showed up in places you don’t always expect, especially the media centre, which was genuinely impressive. Proper media walls, real desks, catering that didn’t feel like an afterthought, and a large lounge-style setup meant journalists were treated with respect. It felt calm, functional, and generous, and after covering enough festivals to know the difference, that stood out.

Even the in-between moments felt considered. Over sixteen hundred drones lighting up the sky, massive site-wide screens stretching across thousands of square metres, lightwork that followed you even while walking between stages, so the experience never fully switched off. Sustainability efforts operated quietly in the background, water bottles recycled, cans collected, cardboard repurposed, systems in place without screaming for attention.

By the final night, I was tired, obviously, but not in that hollow, exhausted way most massive festivals often leave you with. I still wanted to wander, to discover, to catch one more set before heading out. That’s rare at this scale, and that’s why the journey from Mumbai didn’t feel indulgent or excessive; it felt justified.

Soundstorm didn’t just impress me, it held me, and that’s a much harder thing to pull off. Five stars, without hesitation.

The post I Flew From Mumbai to Riyadh to Watch Music Take Over One of the Biggest Stages in the World appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

India’s live music circuit is undeniably in the middle of its most consequential shift yet. For years, global tours treated the country as optional. That has changed. Stadium shows are selling out, multi-city runs are viable, and festivals are beginning to look outward with real intent. Coldplay, Guns N’ Roses, stadium tours, global DJs, alternative bands, and hip-hop collectives are no longer anomalies here. India is now part of the global touring conversation in a way that finally mirrors audience demand.

With that progress has come a criticism that is loud, emotive, and partially justified: that Indian festival line-ups remain overwhelmingly male. The imbalance is visible, and I agree it is frustrating. However, what is far less visible, yet far more consequential, is understanding how festival bookings actually function. Much of the discourse around representation has flattened a complex, capital-intensive ecosystem into a question of intent alone, overlooking the economics that underpin these line-ups and reducing structural decisions to moral ones.

Festivals do not operate like playlists or editorial calendars. They are financial structures built on ticketing certainty, risk mitigation, and return on investment. Live Nation has repeatedly outlined in its annual investor reports and earnings calls that major headliners drive a disproportionate share of early ticket sales and overall demand, often determining the commercial viability of large-scale live events before the undercard acts are finalized. That single booking decision shapes everything that follows, from secondary budgets to sponsor confidence to the level of financial risk a promoter can realistically absorb.

This is why headliners are not booked on the basis of cultural merit alone. They are booked on leverage. A globally dominant act that can sell tens of thousands of tickets irrespective of the undercard effectively stabilizes the entire festival. That certainty allows promoters to cap spends elsewhere, take chances on emerging acts, and survive in a market where margins are increasingly fragile. Pollstar’s year-end touring data consistently reflects this reality, showing that artists who dominate live circuits do so because of touring scale and global demand coherence rather than streaming popularity alone.

This distinction often gets lost when streaming data is pulled into the conversation without context. Spotify charts are frequently used to argue that women dominate popular music and should therefore dominate festival stages. Consumption, however, is not the same as mobilization. IFPI’s Global Music Report has repeatedly highlighted that streaming reflects listening behaviour, not the willingness of audiences to travel, commit months in advance, and pay premium ticket prices. Festival economics depend on the latter, not passive consumption.

This is where many well-meaning arguments begin to unravel. Take the frequently repeated suggestion that major Indian women artists should naturally headline large festivals. Artistic stature is not up for debate, but from a booking perspective, timing and scarcity matter. An artist who has already played 15 to 20 Indian markets in a single year is no longer a rare draw, and keeping that in mind, the urgency disappears. From a festival standpoint, that booking no longer adds incremental ticket value, especially when the audience has likely seen the same show recently at a lower price point.

Layered onto this is the way touring economics function locally. Much of India’s legacy live ecosystem still operates on fixed per-show fees rather than offer-based negotiations, while global touring decisions are shaped by routing logic, scale efficiencies, and long-term market value. If a festival internally caps a secondary headline slot at a specific figure to keep the day financially viable, exceeding that number destabilises the entire balance sheet. At that point, the decision is commercial, not ideological.

This reality is explained by Nayantara Shetty, co-founder of Misfits Inc., who notes that the absence of women headliners at large festivals is rarely a matter of unwillingness. “I think it’s important to understand that the absence of women headliners at some large festivals is rarely about a lack of intent from promoters. Whether it’s BookMyShow Live, SkillBox, District, or any of the major festival producers operating in India today, the real conversation sits around economics, risk, and scale,” she says. “Festival line-ups are shaped by ticketing expectations, sponsorship commitments, artist availability, touring costs, and the ability of a headliner to draw large crowds across markets consistently. In a price-sensitive, still-maturing live ecosystem like India, promoters have to balance representation with commercial viability.”

Shetty adds that the imbalance reflects deeper structural gaps rather than booking-stage bias. “Historically, ticket-selling power at scale hasn’t been evenly distributed across genders. That gap wasn’t created overnight, and it can’t be fixed at the booking stage alone,” adding, “If the industry genuinely wants to see more women headlining festivals, the conversation has to move beyond calling out line-ups. We need sustained investment in artist development, smarter touring strategies, long-term audience building, and brand partnerships that allow festivals to take calculated risks.”

Another assumption that rarely survives scrutiny is the idea that women are not being booked because they are not being offered slots. They are — repeatedly. What is not publicly visible are the declines. Artists turn down festivals for reasons that have little to do with gender: mismatched album cycles, inefficient Asian routing, expensive one-off travel, or prioritising solo tours. High-profile male artists make the same decisions. Touring is a logistical operation, not a cultural statement.

As Naman Pugalia, Chief Business Officer of Live Events at BookMyShow, explains, festival curation is a year-long exercise shaped by multiple variables rather than a single cultural agenda. “The curation of festivals involves numerous moving parts,” he says, including global routing feasibility, researching emerging and established artists, and mapping those names against Indian audience appetite, streaming trends, and on-ground consumption patterns. “Building a festival line-up is ultimately a synthesis of all of this.”

Where a genuine structural concern remains is further down the line-up. Large festivals require a deep, consistent mid-tier ecosystem: artists who release regularly, tour actively, grow across editions, and operate flexibly within offer-based models. India currently lacks enough women artists developed at every scalable tier to reliably populate 50 or 60-act festival line-ups year after year. This is not a reflection of talent. It highlights gaps in development pathways, management strategy, touring infrastructure, and long-term market investment.

At the same time, Indian festival audiences have consistently responded to women artists across stages. Pugalia points to performances by Halsey, Anoushka Shankar, Kayan, Dot., Japanese Breakfast, Raveena, Kehlani, Fatoumata Diawara, Aurora, Lisa Mishra, Mali, and others as moments that have actively redefined expectations and influenced how festival programming continues to evolve.

None of this is to suggest that sexism does not exist. It does — particularly in audience behaviour, online discourse, and the safety burdens women artists disproportionately carry. Ignoring those realities would be inaccurate. But assigning the full weight of structural gender imbalance to festival promoters alone oversimplifies the problem and ultimately stalls progress.

It’s possible to acknowledge the gender gap on Indian festival stages while recognising that bookings are driven by economics, routing logic, and risk management. These positions are not contradictory. They are necessary for a constructive conversation.

If the goal is to see more women headlining festivals in India, the path forward lies in building touring ecosystems that support long-term growth, flexible deal-making, sustained releases, and consistent audience development. That potential was visible in Tyla’s recent headliner set in Mumbai, where the scale of the on-ground response demonstrated what happens when the right artist, timing, and infrastructure align. A similar impact was evident during Dua Lipa’s headline performance at Zomato’s Feeding India Concert last year, which drew one of its largest turnouts and reaffirmed that global women pop acts can anchor large-format events decisively when positioned correctly.

Meaningful progress comes from collaboration across the industry and from growing the ecosystem in ways that allow headline opportunities to emerge sustainably and repeatedly rather than sporadically. Until those foundations are strengthened, demanding change at the top will continue to clash with financial reality.

Ultimately, understanding the system is not the same as defending it. But without understanding it, nothing about it truly changes.

The post The Economics Behind Why Festival Lineups Look the Way They Do appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

The temperature near the stage changed quickly when Tyla kicked off her headliner set at Indian Sneaker Festival in Mumbai on Sunday (Dec. 8), arriving on her chariot as the bass settled into a low and insistent rumble. Bodies moved closer, hips caught the rhythm instinctively, and the crowd slipped into the groove without needing any prompting. It honestly felt less like watching a performance and more like being drawn into one.

The music moved with ease and intention. Songs were given space to stretch and settle into the room, allowing the pulse of the music to do its work properly. “Truth or Dare,” “On My Body,” and “PUSH 2 START” carried more weight live, their arrangements warmer and fuller than their recorded versions suggest, with percussion landing sharply and basslines sitting steady beneath her vocals. The structure of the set encouraged immersion rather than anticipation, keeping the audience present instead of waiting for what they already knew was coming.

On stage, Tyla carried herself with an easygoing self-assurance, which translated naturally into sensuality. Her movement was relaxed, precise, and confident, never exaggerated or strained for effect. The choreography flowed with the music, and her dancers were on fire throughout the night, relentless without pulling focus away from her. Together, they created a visual language that matched the music’s heat without overwhelming it.

Midway through the set, Tyla addressed the crowd and apologized for not being able to make it to India the last time she was scheduled to perform. It was brief, but it mattered. Over the past year, a string of cancelled and postponed shows across different parts of the world had shaped a narrative around her live appearances, one that for some audiences bordered on distrust, despite Tyla revealing the reason behind the cancellations. In Mumbai, she did not shy away from that context. She acknowledged it simply, then let the performance carry the conversation forward.

From there, the set continued to open up. Changes were introduced fluidly with the help of choreography and props, responding to the energy in front of the stage rather than following a rigid structure. By the time “Water” arrived, the crowd was already deeply locked in, bodies moving together, voices rising, sweat catching the lights. The reaction was euphoric, but the song did not flatten the experience into a single defining moment. It sat comfortably within a set that had already established its own momentum.

One small visual detail spoke clearly about intent. Woven into Tyla’s wig was the word “Mumbai”, subtle and unmistakably deliberate. It was a reminder that this performance was not treated as just another stop on a global route, but as a moment worth acknowledging in its own right.

Backstage, Tyla spoke to Rolling Stone India with the same ease she carried on stage. Asked about what people often misunderstand about her, she was direct and unbothered. “I feel like my fans understand me. My fans get me,” she said, shrugging off the idea of external misreadings. “So yeah. I’m chilling.” It was a telling response, especially in light of the scrutiny that has followed her touring schedule following her injury. Where others might feel the need to over-explain, she seemed comfortable letting her audience decide for themselves.

When the conversation turned to what she protects at all costs, her answer revealed another layer entirely. “One thing I always protect about myself is my me time,” she said. Time alone mattered, she explained, whether that meant spa days, watching movies, face masks, or simply being with family. The emphasis on rest and grounding felt consistent with the way she had approached the night itself. Nothing about this performance felt hurried or overextended.

Her message to fans responding to the success of her 2025 track “Chanel”, which has been flooding social feeds with dance clips, was delivered with warmth and genuine affection. “Thank you, my Tigers,” she said, smiling. “You guys are killing it, and you guys are changing my life. So thank you so much. Keep making videos and keep tagging me.” It was less a call to promote the song and more an acknowledgement of the community that has grown around it.

Only later did it become clear how much the strength of her set stood apart from its surroundings. While the broader festival context felt disjointed, Tyla’s performance remained unaffected by it, creating its own centre of gravity and sustaining it throughout the night.

Online reactions mirrored what unfolded on the ground. Clips shared across social platforms focused on movement and atmosphere rather than polish, while comments pointed to the control in her vocals, the cohesion of her dancers, and the satisfaction of watching a set that felt complete. For many, expectations shaped by earlier cancellations gave way to reassurance earned through delivery.

Mumbai audiences are attentive and discerning. They remember absence, but they respond to commitment when it is clear. Tyla met that expectation directly, acknowledging what needed to be said and following it with a performance that was confident, fluid, and fully present.

In the end, her India debut did not feel rushed or overdue. She came when she was ready, and that readiness showed in the details, in the movement, and in the care taken to meet the moment properly. I’m glad she waited. The show benefited from it, and so did the audience.

The post Tyla’s Set Ran on Control, Confidence, and Pure Groove appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

I’ve spent enough time with Talwiinder to know that he isn’t someone who changes much. When we shot his Rolling Stone India cover last year, he sat across from me in that green vest and mask after a 12-hour day, still calm and patient, still speaking like someone who doesn’t think too much about the noise around him. A year later, he feels the same. The difference is everything happening around him.

A Rise Built Without a Breakthrough Moment

His rise in India didn’t come with a sudden breakthrough or any engineered moment. It was built steadily. The songs started showing up everywhere — in gyms in cities where Punjabi music isn’t the default, in reels from people who didn’t know his face, in restaurants playing “Khayaal” and “Haseen” as if they’d always been part of their playlists. “Wishes,” “Dhundhala,” “Nasha,” “Gallan 4,” “Gaani,” and “Unforgettable” resurfaced across 2024 and 2025 with a consistency that didn’t look like algorithmic luck. People were actively going back to his catalog.

Live shows made his growing pull obvious. At festivals, fans started showing up much earlier than necessary, already wearing their own versions of his black-and-white mask. His opening slot on G-Eazy’s India tour drew an incredible reaction that didn’t match the early billing. At Zomato’s Feeding India concert in 2024, where he performed before Dua Lipa, the crowd kept getting louder with every track. And by the time he hit the Lollapalooza India stage, it was clear they weren’t discovering him — they were already with him.

When Demand Became Impossible to Ignore

Then came the solo run. Throughout the year, his shows in Delhi, Ludhiana, Hyderabad, and Mumbai kept selling out. Some cities filled up within hours. What stood out was the crowd’s familiarity with his deeper catalog. They were singing songs from years ago, tracks without videos, album cuts that hadn’t been pushed. That kind of loyalty doesn’t form overnight.

The completed Halloween Tour cemented it. Four cities across India, all at capacity, with Mumbai’s Dome SVP Stadium night marking a clear turning point. It didn’t feel like it was about theatrics or a major production shift; it was simply an artist stepping into a larger room and carrying it with the same steady presence and terrific styling and visuals he’s always had.

Internationally, the trajectory has followed a similar pattern. His Dubai show at Zero Gravity — a space that accommodates 5,000 people — pulled a noticeably strong South Asian turnout, especially for a debut in the region. His London show at Outernet London sold out well in advance, which is uncommon for an artist who didn’t enter the market through the typical diaspora channels or heavy promotional cycles.

Numbers That Confirmed the Shift

The data backs what audiences are already feeling. On Spotify alone, Talwiinder is now pulling over 18 million monthly listeners and has crossed 1.1 billion lifetime streams, with “Haseen” past 135 million plays, “Khayaal” over 145 million, “Wishes” above 60 million and “Dhundhala” nearing the 130 million mark, while catalog cuts like “Tu,” “Nasha” and “Gallan 4” continue to quietly stack multi-million numbers. “Wishes,” his collaboration with Hasan Raheem, closed out 2024 as the second most-streamed local song in Pakistan and the fifth most-streamed track overall on Spotify in the country — a rare cross-border benchmark for an independent Punjabi artist. In India, “Khayaal,” “Dhundhala,” “Haseen,” “Gaani” and “Gallan 4” continue pulling steady daily streams, and after “Gallan” appeared in Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya, older tracks like “Tu” and “Unforgettable” found their way back into regional charts and curated playlists.

That momentum is mirrored in the way his audience has scaled online: when I interviewed him for his Rolling Stone India cover story last year, he was sitting at roughly 700,000 Instagram followers; a year later, that number has climbed to 6.4 million, with engagement hovering near 28 percent and an average of about 1.8 million likes per post — figures more typical of headline pop acts than of someone who still insists on moving quietly.

Stability at the Centre of It All

A major part of this stability comes from Misfit, the album he released via Mass Appeal India in 2024. The project, produced entirely by NDS, didn’t rely on a big rollout, but it has shaped his current phase more than anything else. NDS has been central to his sound for years, building productions that leave space for emotion rather than overwhelming it. Their process rarely comes from over-planning; most decisions are instinctual. It’s a working relationship that values trust over trend. Misfit reflects that clean, melodic, and cohesive in a way that makes listeners stay. Tracks from the album have had a surprisingly long life, finding new audiences months after release, especially in India and the Gulf, where their tone sits neatly between mainstream and alternative.

There were challenges this year, too. The removal of “Pal Pal,” his collaboration with Afusic, from Spotify India after the platform’s wider removal of Pakistani-origin tracks created a noticeable gap in his release momentum. He didn’t address it publicly — he rarely addresses anything publicly — but his listeners filled the void by circulating the song themselves in form of trendy reels, remixes etc. That response said more about his audience than any chart could.

What stands out in all of this is his consistency. He hasn’t shifted his image, he hasn’t become hyper-visible, he still protects his personal life, still writes from everyday experiences, still maintains the same boundaries. The mask remains a line he doesn’t want crossed. In larger rooms, he still carries the same measured energy he had in the small studio where we talked after the cover shoot.

If anything, this past year has only widened the world around him. The shows, the streams, the momentum — they’re all rising, but he hasn’t shifted his course. He’s just doing the work, and right now, that seems to be enough.

Read Talwiinder’s September 2024 Rolling Stone India cover story here.

The post What We Can Learn From Talwiinder’s Steady Rise appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

Rolling Loud finally arrived in India and the buzz around it felt unreal. Even before stepping into Loud Park, you could feel that the country had been waiting for a festival like this — a proper, large-scale hip-hop experience with global headliners, Indian heavyweights, and a crowd that knew every single word. And on a performance level, Rolling Loud India absolutely delivered. I just wish the logistics kept up with the magic happening on stage.

My weekend started with the kind of journey that belongs in a documentary. Gates opened at 2 p.m., we left Mumbai by 2.30, and the moment we crossed into Navi Mumbai, the traffic slowed to a crawl. At first, it felt like normal festival congestion — then it turned into a slow five-hour procession of cars barely moving while festival shuttles, locals, influencers, crew and artists all got gridlocked on the same stretch. People were stepping out of their cars, blasting music, dancing on the highway, trying to spot other festival-goers. Meanwhile, my photographer and I sat there watching updates roll in: Gurinder Gill wrapped, Robb Bank$ done, AR Paisley done, Arivu, Denzel Curry done. Every name stung a little more.

By the time we reached Loud Park at 7 p.m., the sun was gone, our backs were aching, and half the festival was already over.

But once we finally got inside, the atmosphere instantly shifted. The sound felt fuller, the crowd was already warmed up, and the whole place had that charged, slightly chaotic energy festivals are supposed to have. We walked in during the end of Swae Lee’s set, and he was everywhere at once — jumping from one end of the stage to the other, taking people’s phones to film quick clips, signing things mid-song, and keeping the crowd completely locked in. Even after the long commute, it was impossible not to wake up a little while watching him.

This was also the point where the on-ground cracks became obvious — fights were breaking out in multiple pockets of the crowd, and it wasn’t just one or two. There were a lot. During Rich The Kid’s set, a group of people literally ripped the carpet off the ground for no reason anyone could understand. Civic sense just wasn’t there. At one point, security even broke a guy’s phone while he was just standing quietly. And because manpower was thin in the right areas, GA attendees kept jumping the barricade into VIP with zero resistance. To be fair, the festival isn’t to blame for people acting out like this — but the lack of controlled zones and adequate staff made these moments way more visible than they should’ve been.

Another surprising miss was the public WiFi setup — it simply wasn’t working. For a festival of this scale, with huge crowds trying to upload stories, scan QR menus, locate friends or even pull up their tickets, having non-functional WiFi made basic movement and communication far more complicated than it needed to be.

One thing that did feel out of place for a hip hop festival was the decision to keep Rolling Loud entirely smoke-free. I get that this may not have been the organisers’ call — permissions in India can get complicated — but it still felt strange. Hip hop fans like to smoke, especially when they’re drinking, moving around, and riding that adrenaline while watching their favorite artists. Pair that with the noticeably heavy police presence — far more cops roaming around the grounds than you’d ever expect at a festival — and it created an odd kind of tension. What made it even stranger was how many fights still broke out despite so many cops being around; they just weren’t in the right places when things actually went down. It wasn’t unsafe or restrictive, just… unusual for a show built around a culture where people usually want to let loose.

Wiz Khalifa took the stage next, and his set shifted the mood again. He performed “See You Again” with this soft sincerity that made a few people near us tear up. Then he jumped into “Young, Wild & Free,” and suddenly the entire left side of the crowd had their arms around each other like they were at a college farewell. The real surprise was “The Thrill” with Empire of the Sun — that one sent a ripple through the grounds. It was nostalgic, unexpected, and honestly one of the warmest moments of the night.

Central Cee closed Day 1, and his team very kindly gave Rolling Stone India full pit access for the entire show. From that distance, you see everything — the breath control, the precision, the confidence. Cench didn’t let the backing track do the work. He rapped every word cleanly, even the collaborator verses, and he didn’t waste a single second. He kept collecting jerseys, holding up flags from the Indian diaspora, filming videos on fans’ phones, and acknowledging every corner of the crowd. It didn’t feel like he was performing in India; it felt like he was performing with India. Easily one of the sharpest, tightest headline sets I’ve seen at an Indian festival.

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Backstage was a different story entirely. Interviews were shifting every few minutes, team members couldn’t find each other, nothing was synced, and the two stages were placed so far apart that it felt like a stadium-to-stadium commute. I ended up missing Hanumankind — someone I genuinely wanted to watch — because I was stuck in the middle of conflicting backstage timings. That’s the part I wish were smoother. A festival this big can’t run on guesswork.

On Day 2, I refused to repeat the same mistake. I left early, arrived on time, and actually got to breathe. I finally caught Reble’s set, followed by Sambata, who packed the grounds harder than most international acts. It genuinely felt like watching a star in real time.

Shreyas, sadly, had the worst luck of the weekend. His set was abruptly cut due to technical issues and sound problems — a shocker at a festival with this kind of international credibility. You could see how disappointed he was, and the crowd was just as confused.

Between sets, I thoroughly explored the festival. The basketball court was buzzing — people queuing up to dunk while rappers played in the background. The skatepark had pros and kids attempting tricks side-by-side. The tattoo station had a line so long you’d think free sleeves were being handed out. The bunny beauty salon had girls walking out with glitter hair and glossy lips. The Bacardi stage had its own vibe running — more low-key but always packed. And the Valorant gaming experience by Riot was genuinely impressive, with people screaming over virtual kills while Don Toliver’s set was audible from a distance.

There were also a bunch of small things that genuinely worked well across the weekend. The F&B metal seating outside the VIP area was actually really comfortable and looked great — a simple detail, but executed nicely. The festival design, branding and overall visual build-out were strong and consistent, and the branded activities were genuinely well thought out. And that sports zone? People loved it. Every time I walked past, it was packed. It added a fun break in between sets and gave the festival a bit of personality beyond the stages.

The night sets were the real fireworks. NAV brought out Gurinder Gill for “Brown Munde,” and the crowd reacted like someone flipped a switch. People were screaming the lyrics so loudly that NAV’s mic almost didn’t matter. He also went deeper into his older catalogue — “Myself,” “Tap,” “Turks” — and held the stage with proper ease.

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Don Toliver came in smooth and vibey, a total contrast to Sheck Wes, who went full volume and kept yelling into the mic. It was chaotic, wild, and honestly too loud for me to enjoy properly. Among Indian artists, Divine brought the exact energy he’s known for — grateful, powerful, and connected. And then came the moment that defined the festival: Karan Aujla closing Rolling Loud India.

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The fact that he’s the first non-American headliner in Rolling Loud’s global history says everything. The crowd was already charged when he walked on stage, and when he debuted the “Daytona (Remix)” with NAV live — with NAV joining him on stage — it felt like something shifted. Punjabi music wasn’t just part of the lineup; it was the finale, the exclamation mark.

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But for everything the festival nailed musically, the logistics were a recurring reminder of how tough it is to pull off something this ambitious in India. The five-hour commute on Day 1, the massive walking distances between stages, the uneven carpet flooring that felt like a hazard waiting to happen, the backstage miscommunication, the technical issues and the scattered flow. It didn’t ruin the weekend, but it definitely capped how smooth it could have been.

Rolling Loud India had heart, scale, community and some of the best performances I’ve seen all year. The music rose above every shortcoming — and there were many — but when the artists deliver this hard, you can’t help but imagine how incredible this festival could be with cleaner logistics. I can’t wait for the next edition!

The post Rolling Loud India Popped Off, but Getting There Was its Own Festival appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

I landed in Dubai just as the city was lighting up. From the plane window, you could already tell this place doesn’t do quiet. A Tesla and chauffeur were waiting at the airport with my name card, and the second the doors shut, I caught that mix of perfume, air-conditioning, and faint bass bleeding from someone’s Bluetooth speaker outside. The drive to FIVE LUXE JBR was a postcard on fast-forward — the Burj Khalifa flashing in the distance, Sheikh Zayed Road buzzing beneath it, and that polished chaos that Dubai has perfected.

The check-in took all of a minute. The staff were impossibly polite but casual enough to make you feel like they’d done this a thousand times that day. The suite was spotless, the kind of clean that smells faintly of linen spray and ocean air. The balcony opened to an endless stretch of sea. Downstairs, one of the hotel floors glowed with a huge screen looping Pacha ICONS visuals, which was bright, animated, and impossible to ignore.

I didn’t have the energy to go out that first night, so I ordered in and told the kitchen to surprise me. Twenty minutes later, a knock on the door. Dumplings, a wood-fired pizza, and a perfectly chilled Chardonnay. Somehow, they’d read my mind. I ate on the balcony, listening to the sound of cars below and faint music from somewhere along the beach. The jetlag, the food, and that quiet hum of the city blended into something strangely grounding.

The next evening was when the trip really started. British DJ and record producer, PAWSA, was headlining Pacha ICONS at Playa Pacha Dubai, and by 11 pm, the property had transformed. People poured in from every direction — all black outfits, slick hair, flashes of silver jewelry. The air smelled like perfume and sea salt. We were guided to the DJ booth, and from there the view stretched across a sea of iPhone 17s and raised hands. The crowd looked straight out of a campaign– polished but not stiff, and completely in sync with the music.

PAWSA came on close to midnight, and the first drop cut clean through the air. He mixed Frank Ocean’s “Nights”, The Weeknd’s “Timeless”, and Metro Boomin monologues with his own tracks — “Dirty Cash (Money Talks)” and “Too Cool To Be Careless.” I left the booth halfway through to walk among the crowd, and the sound stayed crisp no matter where I stood. 

When the set ended, nobody moved toward the exit; another DJ took over and we drifted straight to Paradiso. It was packed but not messy, low-lit with an amber and red glow that made everyone look like they belonged there. The bartenders worked quietly and fast, mixing drinks like it was choreography. The crowd had taste — you could tell by what they ordered, how they spoke to staff, how they didn’t need to shout over the music.

The next morning came too soon, and with a slight headache. A Tesla shuttle was waiting to take us to FIVE Palm Jumeirah, and the city changed again the moment we crossed the bridge. If FIVE LUXE was adrenaline, FIVE Palm was exhale. White walls, calm water, palm trees everywhere. The property felt like an island of its own, more relaxed but just as polished.

We spent the afternoon by the pool, trading sunscreen for sunglasses every few hours, music rolling in from a nearby cabana. By sunset, we made our way to Bohemia Beach Club for Bohemia Presents and a set by German music producer Purple Disco Machine. The lighting faded into gold as cocktails landed on every table. The crowd was looser here — more laughter, more bare feet in the sand.

Dinner was at Cinque, the Italian fine-dining restaurant overlooking the pool. It smelled like truffle and fresh herbs the moment we walked in. The room glowed in warm light, and every course arrived exactly when it should — handmade pasta, grilled seafood, pizza with a crust that cracked just right.

My final night before flying back to Mumbai felt like the encore I didn’t know we needed. We started at Jade, where the bartenders turned cocktail-making into performance art — smoke, flame, infusions, tiny glass domes being lifted like a reveal. The energy there was playful and cinematic. Then came dinner at Maiden Shanghai, and it was unreal. Easily the best Asian food I’ve had — perfect dim sum, spicy noodles, balanced sauces. You could feel the precision in every dish.

We closed the night at The Penthouse Dubai, which sits high above everything else. The DJ played familiar songs stripped down and rebuilt with clean house beats. The skyline looked endless, and the air was cool enough to keep everyone outside till late.

The mornings at Numâ became a ritual. No matter how little I’d slept, I made it downstairs for breakfast — hummus, fresh fruit, good coffee, and conversations that always started with “did you sleep?” and ended with “see you at the pool.”

By the time I packed up to leave, my suitcase felt heavier, maybe from the sand I never shook out or just from how much the weekend had fit into so little time. I’d flown to Dubai for one show and ended up with a full weekend that reminded me why people travel for music in the first place. The set was unforgettable, sure. But the real memory was everything that happened around it — the laughter, the food, the mornings after, and that feeling that the city never really turns the volume down.

The post I Flew from Mumbai to Dubai to See PAWSA and Left Wanting to Do It All Over Again appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

For a few weeks in October, Travis Scott tickets were India’s hottest speculative asset. Prices doubled, tripled, and then quietly sank. Telegram groups became resale hubs; Instagram comments turned into classifieds. Fans panic-bought, panic-sold, and panic-refreshed. By the time the CIRCUS MAXIMUS tour actually hit Delhi, tickets that once symbolized exclusivity were being offered below face value.

And then, almost like none of that had ever happened, 100,000 people showed up for the two shows on Oct. 18 and 19 in New Delhi.

The CIRCUS MAXIMUS shows at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium were, without question, enormous. Pyrotechnics lit up the sky, the crowd roared every lyric back, and Delhi — for two nights — looked and sounded like any major stop on a global tour. According to promoter and producer BookMyShow Live, both nights “sold out within hours” and marked “a defining moment for India’s live entertainment sector.” Their official statement to Rolling Stone India praised the “high-impact staging, pyrotechnics and lighting design” that mirrored the artist’s global standards, adding that the shows featured “seamless entry and exit, robust security measures and a world-class production that continues to raise the benchmark for live entertainment in the country.”

It’s hard to argue with any of that. The production was airtight, the crowd energy undeniable, and we ourselves gave the Oct. 18 show a four out of five star review. But what happened before those gates opened still deserves as much scrutiny as what unfolded on stage.

So what exactly happened with the ticketing confusion that drove so many fans confused?

In the weeks leading up to the show, Delhi’s ticket market told a different story — one of confusion, overconfidence, and an unregulated secondary economy. Fans bought in bulk, convinced scarcity would drive prices higher. Sellers flooded social media with inflated listings. Then, when the hype wore off and the Mumbai leg was announced weeks later, the entire resale market collapsed. The same tickets that had caused panic earlier were now being bundled, discounted, or simply given away. The live scene, once again, had priced itself into its own corner. That cycle seems to be repeating itself: as of recently, BookMyShow Live has released new Bronze Standing tickets for the Mumbai show priced at ₹5,500, and comment sections on the brand’s social media pages are flooded with fans attempting to resell their tickets—many at less than face value.

BookMyShow Live’s full statement expands on what it takes to mount a show of that scale. It points out that “large-format events involve a meticulous science behind capacity planning and ticket category mapping,” with every zone designed around “production design, crowd management and safety protocols.” It’s an important reminder: pulling off a Travis Scott concert in India is no small feat. But it also hints at where the disconnect lies — between how precisely these events are engineered behind the scenes and how vaguely they’re communicated to the public. The statement also noted that India’s live entertainment industry is entering “an exciting phase of maturity,” where such large-scale international productions are “reshaping audience expectations, operational frameworks and market readiness.” That maturity, however, must extend beyond the stage design to how audiences are engaged and informed — because infrastructure is only as strong as the trust it earns. And that trust, as industry voices point out, now hinges on verified resale systems that protect both fans and promoters.

In a recent conversation I had with Siddhant Shetty, Senior Talent Manager at Big Bad Wolf, he said, “The immediate problem highlighted here is of verified reselling and platforms that will hopefully champion that. Ideally, the big two in the market will lead the charge on that because they see the long-term benefit of it — but even if they don’t, there are plenty of smaller players who are actively working on fixes for this.” His observation underscored a larger truth: innovation may well come from the fringes if the dominant platforms stay comfortable with the current unregulated setup.

BookMyShow Live also explained that the Mumbai show, scheduled for Nov. 19 at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse, was “added following overwhelming demand,” part of a “planned, phased rollout” coordinated with Scott’s global team. November, they said, was “the only viable window within the artist’s touring calendar.” Logistically, that makes sense. But from a fan’s point of view, the timing felt off. When the Mumbai show was announced weeks after the Delhi sale, it undercut resale prices and left early buyers wondering whether the rush to secure tickets had been necessary. If the rollout was always meant to be phased, why not say so upfront? Transparency doesn’t just prevent confusion — it helps earn that trust. According to BMS Live, transforming a venue like Mumbai’s Mahalaxmi Racecourse into a stadium-grade experience required “meticulous planning, feasibility checks and coordination with local authorities” to match the scale seen in Delhi. The spokesperson described it as “a rare instance globally where an artist of this stature returns within the same tour cycle purely to honour fan demand.”

BookMyShow Live isn’t wrong to celebrate Delhi as a milestone. In fact, we’re celebrating with them. After all, the shows were executed with world-class precision and, by all accounts, created an unforgettable experience. But a “defining moment,” as they called it, should also define what needs fixing.

In cities like London or Los Angeles, that price might be a comfortable spend for a night out; in Mumbai or Delhi, it’s about the equivalent of a week’s salary for many working professionals. Yet promoters continue to benchmark local pricing against global standards, arguing that production costs, licensing, and logistics are equally expensive in India. That’s true — freight, stage design, and artist fees don’t magically get cheaper because the show is happening in a developing market. But the economy that supports those shows is not the same, and neither is the disposable income of the audience expected to sustain them.

The result is a strange loop that keeps repeating itself. Fans stretch their budgets to secure tickets the moment they drop, fearing they’ll miss out once prices inevitably climb. Resellers exploit that urgency, pushing rates higher until the market overheats. And when the initial rush fades — or when new shows like Mumbai’s are added — everything collapses. The very enthusiasm that fuels demand ends up destabilizing it. What should be a celebration of access turns into a cautionary tale of exhaustion, where fans feel played and promoters insist they simply met the market —and neither of them are wrong.

The irony is that India’s concert culture has never been more passionate. Audiences are willing to travel, queue, and spend for live experiences. But enthusiasm isn’t infinite. Each resale fiasco chips away at trust, and every inflated ticket adds to the fatigue. Unless affordability becomes part of the conversation — not as charity, but as sustainability — the live industry will keep mistaking attendance for health. People are showing up, yes, but many are stretching beyond what they can comfortably afford to do it. A strong live market doesn’t just count how many people fill the seats; it asks how many can afford to come back the next time.

What the Travis Scott ticketing saga made clear is that India’s live industry isn’t struggling because of a lack of demand — it’s struggling under the weight of it. The appetite is there. The money, in many cases, is there. The intent, is definitely there. What’s missing is structure. The country now has the audience, the venues, and the production muscle to host the biggest artists in the world. What it doesn’t yet have is the infrastructure to match that ambition.

That’s why the resale crash around CIRCUS MAXIMUS shouldn’t be treated as a minor pre-show hiccup, but rather as a warning shot. A healthy live market doesn’t implode weeks before the gates open. It doesn’t leave fans guessing about whether “sold out” really means sold out, or if new sections will quietly appear online later. It doesn’t rely on Telegram chats for last-minute ticket transfers or make audiences feel like they’ve entered a lottery instead of a concert. As Shetty adds, fan accountability and collective demand for transparency are what will eventually push organizers toward fairer systems. The pressure to reform can’t just come from the top — it has to come from the consumer base too.

If Delhi was proof that India can deliver a global concert, it was also proof that global ambition means nothing without local responsibility. The stage looked international; the system around it didn’t. The next phase of this industry isn’t about booking bigger artists — it’s about building smarter frameworks. Transparent ticketing, verified resale, and honest communication aren’t simply luxuries anymore, but the baseline for a credible market.

What comes next isn’t just policy — it’s partnership. Platforms like BookMyShow Live, artists’ teams, and fans will all need to shape what a fairer system looks like: verified resale channels that cut out scalpers, tiered and fair pricing that acknowledges local economies, and upfront communication about show rollouts. India’s live scene doesn’t need fewer risks, it needs fewer surprises. The goal isn’t to shrink the spectacle, but to make sure everyone who builds it, buys it, or believes in it, can keep showing up.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story was temporarily taken down following requests from members of the industry. We stand by our original reporting, and the issues it raised remain relevant today.

The post What Really Happened With Travis Scott’s Ticketing Meltdown in India — and Why It Matters appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

In a greenroom in Mumbai, ten languages are being spoken at once. Tamil trades places with Malayalam; a burst of Haryanvi cuts through Hindi; Meitei, Punjabi and Telugu rode the same drum check. More than thirty artists have come in from across the map for one moment — Spotify’s Rap91 live — and the room feels charged, like a new center of gravity. You can tell by the shorthand. Someone yells “Macha,” another answers “Bhau,” a third cracks a Meitei joke that only half the room understands. The rest laugh anyway. That’s the point of Rap91: India no longer needs translation to feel connected.

Starting in the south, Kerala’s Malayalam spearhead has become impossible to ignore. ARJN, KDS, GABRI, M.H.R., and Tamil rapper JOKER390P came in like a unit — a pocket of swagger that’s already spilling out of Kochi clubs and Malappuram WhatsApp groups into national timelines. Their recent Def Jam runs have been almost territorial, proud of the cadence and wordplay that only Malayalam lets you pull off. ARJN and KDS’ back-to-back drops (“Sheriya,” “Nera”) have basically become calling cards for the scene, with YouTube titles saying the quiet part loud: “Latest Malayalam Rap Song.” GABRI’s momentum — from “Naranga Paal” to Red Bull 64 Bars — is a reminder that Kerala’s storytellers don’t need a gateway city anymore; they have their own. And when M.H.R and JOKER390P locked in for “Munthirichar,” the clip did what strong regional music always does: it traveled. Not despite the language — because of it.

Slide along the coast to Tamil Nadu, and you meet two parallel forces. There’s Asal Kolaar — Chennai’s breakout star with the kinetic hooks that made “Jorthaale” a street phrase and kept the city’s rap pulse thumping through film, cyphers, and stages. There’s also RANJ (Ranjani Ramadoss), the Chennai-bred and now Mumbai-based rapper and singer who toggles between English and Tamil like it’s muscle memory. Along with close collaborator Clifr, she represents a southern hybrid that’s comfortable in R&B, rap, and everything between.

Telugu rap’s flag is firmly planted by Dasagriva, a Gully Gang battering ram who wears his HYD loyalties on the timeline and in the tags; his Telugu staccato feels built for arena call-and-response. 

Now cut North and you hit the Hindi belt and its neighbors — the broadest, loudest, most hotly debated battleground. Start with Delhi, where Seedhe Maut showed the country a long time ago that you could build a national cult without moving to Mumbai. Calm and Encore ABJ have taken the scenic route: Azadi Records breakouts, then fully independent under their own label DL91, and now elder statesmen who still rap like the new kids are watching them. The DL91 umbrella is the clearest picture of Delhi’s current machine: Hurricane (producer-rapper, switching between English and Hindi), Ab 17, Bhaskar, Lil Bhavi, GhAatak, and OG Lucifer — a crew comfortable with mixtapes, midnight drops, and that DIY promotion grind. Their DL91FM project reads like a family photo of the capital right now.

Zoom west and the Haryanvi wave arrives with its shoulders up. KD DESIROCK is the OG reference point and remains a cultural north star for a lot of kids in Rohtak, Jind, Hisar, and across the state. Addy Nagar, who has bounced between Delhi-NCR and independent circuits, toggles Haryanvi and Hindi with ease and an ear for viral hooks. 

Punjabi rap, meanwhile, keeps multiplying formats. Jaskaran brings a contemporary Punjabi cadence that sits comfortably next to Toronto playlists yet still smells of Ludhiana studio smoke; the Mass Appeal backing has added air under those choruses without sanding off the edge. Punjab-born Param is the quieter operator on this list — less algorithm, more word-of-mouth — but her sets hit home with the diaspora in the crowd. Meanwhile, Meaow, who hails from Himachal Pradesh but has carved a lane for herself through Hindi, English, and Punjabi rap, carries that Nicki Minaj-type je ne sais quoi. Meaow may be newer to national readers than KD, but inside the belt, they’re both just as recognizable as a license plate. Meaow and KD prove something simple: if your bars feel like your district, your district will carry you.

Head due east, and the map splits again. Reble — Shillong, Meghalaya — doesn’t just represent the Northeast; she treats the mic like a place to reclaim silence, running English heavy but bending phrasing in ways that carry Khasi cadence without announcing it. Her press lately has spelled it out: Shillong-raised, Northeast-first, not here to play safe. Kim The Beloved, who has ties across Shillong and Aizawl, rides snarling club tempos and grimy pockets with straight-faced clarity; when he says “Gass Dat,” the vowels land like a hook. And then there’s Yelhomie — Manipur’s sharp conscience — who flips between Meitei and English with punchlines that feel like news tickers. If you didn’t know Imphal could produce rap like this, that’s on your algorithm —not on him. 

Some artists in this cohort live between states, streams, and screens. Vichaar was born in Uttarakhand, cut his teeth in Dehradun’s underground, writes in Hindi and English, and treats visuals like second verses; Uniyal also carries Devbhoomi in his name and references, leaning into Hindi with hints of pahadi grit; Karma is Dehradun’s export with a national footprint, a Hindi specialist whose pen keeps sharpening even as the venues get bigger. The Uttarakhand-to-Delhi pipeline is one of the scene’s least told stories — a flow of kids who grew up on mountains, learned their timing in capital-city cyphers, and now headline metros.

There’s the NCR and Hindi mainstream where anchors like Ikka still matter — a New Delhi stalwart whose career arc maps the genre’s arc, from underground to Bollywood features to rap-first albums, without losing the Delhi swagger in his delivery. Uniyal, Vichaar, Karma, Ikka, and the DL91 lot sketch a North India that’s bigger than one city and more varied than one slang.

Mumbai hasn’t gone anywhere; it just got busier. Yung DSA out of the Gully Gang system swings between Marathi and Hindi and keeps stacking live miles across Maharashtra —a reminder that 2016’s gullies now include Pune lanes and Nashik terraces. Downriver, Nagpur has skin in the game too: Naam Sujal, a Def Jam India wildcard with a Hustle-honed stage instinct, literally writes his city into the track titles — “3 AM in Nagpur” is geography as a thesis statement.

The Hindi-forward independents round out the picture. Shikriwal and Pho are the kind of names you see first on flyers and then on Discover Weekly: Bhojpuri and Hindi storytellers with different meters, bringing NCR slang and small-town detail to hooks that don’t ask for permission. Vaibhav (Hindi; Believe) is in that camp too — a streaming native with melody instincts and just enough grit to cut through the week’s new-music dump. Hurricane glues a lot of this together from the production side, and when he raps, he slips into English/Hindi fluently; on DL91FM, he’s the gravitational center more than a featured guest. 

There are cross-border and cross-format threads everywhere you look. RANJ x Clifr arrived repping Bengaluru’s live ecosystem even as RANJ’s bio keeps her Chennai roots front and center. That duality mirrors how many in this lineup move — city to city, label to label, language to language. Kim The Beloved can be in a Mumbai video cycle on Friday and back in the Northeast calendar by Tuesday. Young Aytee came up Dehradun-bred while still dropping Hindi hooks that land in Delhi clubs, proof that “regional” can be a feeling, not just a pin on Google Maps.

And then there’s the label chessboard, which, when you zoom out, looks less like rivalry and more like overlapping ecosystems. Def Jam Recordings India has clearly invested in Kerala’s ascent — that’s where a good chunk of the Malayalam surge is housed right now. Gully Gang stays busy turning local slang into national anthems (and giving Telugu a bullhorn via Dasagriva). Mass Appeal India has staked out a cross-regional lane that runs from Punjabi (Jaskaran) to North Indian hybrids (Young Aytee, vichaar, Yelhomie). Azadi Records continues to be the place where English-forward experimentation and activist roots meet — Reble, Kim The Beloved, Clifr and RANJ have all touched that orbit. DL91 feels like the capital’s independent answer to label consolidation — a hub for Seedhe Maut, Hurricane, Ab 17, Bhaskar, Lil Bhavi, GhAatak, and OG Lucifer to move like a unit while keeping their solo identities.

What threads this lineup together, beyond geography and streaming numbers, is the decision to build identity into the music. ARJN, KDS, GABRI, M.H.R., JOKER390P don’t treat Malayalam as a constraint; they treat it like a superpower. Asal Kolaar’s Tamil is its own instrument. Dasagriva turns Telugu consonants into percussion. Yelhomie uses Meitei to carry the weight English can’t. Jaskaran and Param carry Punjabi with an eye on global stages without outsourcing flavor. The Hindi field — from Seedhe Maut, Karma, Ikka, Ab 17, Bhaskar, Lil Bhavi, GhAatak, OG Lucifer, Shikriwal, Pho, Vaibhav, Uniyal (Garhwali, Hindi, and English), Vichaar, Young Aytee, Yung DSA (Marathi and Hindi) — is not one thing. It’s a dozen micro-dialects, a dozen social contexts, a dozen ways to make a crowd lean in.

On stage, that diversity hits like a reflex. A Tamil hook melts into a Delhi double-time, which spills into a Punjabi chant, and drops out so a Meitei bar can ring for a beat longer than usual. You see it in the pits too: a Haryanvi chorus yelled by kids from Andheri; a Malayalam punchline caught by a Shillong crew who learned it from reels. The old fear that language would keep Indian rap segmented feels laughable in a room like this.

Spotify’s Rap91 journey mirrors that same expansion. What began as a flagship playlist spotlighting Indian hip hop’s multilingual heartbeat has evolved into one of the 10 most-followed rap playlists on Spotify globally — proof that the genre’s reach is no longer confined to cities or languages. In just the past year, Rap91’s audience has grown by more than 60 per cent, adding over 150,000 new followers, with its regional offshoots — from Haryanvi and Malayalam to Punjabi and Marathi — collectively crossing 1.5 million followers. That kind of growth doesn’t just reflect a fandom; it signals a culture that’s now being streamed, shared, and staged at scale.

None of this says the job is done. Regional touring still needs routes. Brand money still favors metros. Too many artists have to design their own rollouts, book their own videographers, and argue for their own fees. But this Rap91 frame — one photo, dozens of stories — is proof that the talent isn’t scattered anymore; it’s networked. Spotify’s own arc with Rap91 backs that up: from playlist to platform to a live movement that deliberately lifts languages most mainstream calendars overlook. And the press tells the same story if you’re paying attention.

If you want to understand this moment, stop asking which city “owns” Indian hip-hop. The answer, finally, is boring and perfect: everyone. Tamil. Malayalam. Haryanvi. Hindi. Punjabi. Telugu. Meitei. English. The point isn’t that they share a stage. The point is that the stage sounds like them.

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Executive Editor: Shamani Joshi
Creative Director: Peony Hirwani
Creative & Executive Producer: Dushyant Tak
Production Manager: Lakshay Malik
Art Director: Apoorva Singh
First Videographer: Gaurav Kumar
Second Videographer: Dhruv Tiwari
Video edit (Offline + Online): Gaurav Kumar
Designer: Ryan Chatterjee
Editorial Interns: Sharanyaa Nair and Shrada Raul
Production House: Dushyant&Co.

The post COVER STORY: The Future of Indian Hip Hop Speaks Every Language appeared first on Rolling Stone India.