India
South Asia
India's music market runs on three layers stacked on top of each other: Bollywood film music led by playback singers like Arijit Singh and composers like Pritam; Punjabi pop and hip-hop with Karan Aujla, Diljit Dosanjh, AP Dhillon and the late Sidhu Moose Wala; and the regional-language film-music economies in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam cinema. Arijit Singh's monthly Spotify listener counts at home regularly exceed the entire population of smaller countries. The three layers don't really compete โ they coexist in different rooms of the same house.
Top domestic tracks
- Tum Hi Ho โ Arijit Singh ยท 2013
Tum hi ho, ab tum hi ho, zindagi ab tum hi ho
Top foreign tracks
Generational / regional / economic split
Younger listeners in North India trend toward Punjabi hip-hop; in the South, Tamil and Telugu film music holds the same role. Bollywood ballads from Arijit Singh and Jubin Nautiyal function as the lingua franca that everyone โ old, young, urban, rural โ still recognizes. Big cities absorb more K-pop and Western pop than they used to, but rural India still runs almost entirely on film music. Language and region matter far more than class for predicting what someone listens to.
Sources
Source citations are currently in Japanese only. View on the Japanese page โ