Touring

Delhi, a city of 34 million people, was the obvious setting for Indian pop star Diljit Dosanjh to open his home-country tour last October — and he quickly sold out Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium and added a second date. But after that, Dosanjh wanted to plunge deeper into India, performing in Lucknow, Indore, Guwahati and other areas with a mere 1 million to 4 million residents. “We actually got to cities where there wasn’t any big concert, ever,” says Sonali Singh, Dosanjh’s business manager and tour producer. “When we started off, it was kind of an experiment.”
Dasanjh’s tour, which sold 200,000 tickets across its initial 10 venues in less than 10 minutes when it went on sale last September, showed not only the Punjab native’s star power but the massive potential of India as a concert market. In January, Coldplay broke a global attendance record with 223,000 fans at two shows in Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India; in February, Ed Sheeran closed a six-city tour of the country with 120,000 ticket sales. (By contrast, Zach Bryan sold out the biggest stadium in the U.S., Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich., with 112,000 tickets for a show this coming September.)

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“We are at the cusp of hockey-stick growth, as far as this market is concerned,” says Naman Pugalia, chief business officer of live events for BookMyShow, the Indian entertainment platform that promoted the Sheeran dates with AEG.

For decades, India’s demand for large music concerts has outstripped its capacity: Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, and The Police, played what Rolling Stone India called “niche, often low-key shows” in Mumbai in the ‘70s and ‘80s, in part because local officials considered Western music “anti-Indian.” Although local bands played hotel clubs and pubs and developed rock scenes in Mumbai and elsewhere over the years, it wasn’t until the early 2010s that promoters put on larger electronic dance music, blues and rock festivals, such as the Bacardi NH7 Weekender (at a Pune wedding venue) and the VH1 Supersonic (on a beach in Goa). By 2017, Justin Bieber was playing to 56,000 fans at a Mumbai stadium.

Coldplay perform at Narendra Modi Stadium on Jan. 25, 2025 in Ahmedabad, India.

Anna Lee

A 2024 BookMyShow report suggests India’s international concert market of 1.4 billion people is no longer untapped — live entertainment grew 18% compared to the previous year, live events in “Tier 2” cities such as Kanpur and Shillong grew 682%, and more than 477,000 fans traveled to shows outside their hometowns. In March 2024, after Sheeran sold out Mumbai’s Mahalaxmi Racecourse (which BookMyShow had helped revitalize into a large-scale concert venue), the British singer-songwriter asked his team to return this year and “go deep into India and cover as much ground as possible,” according to Simon Jones, senior vp of international touring for AEG.

That was a challenge. “Landing a spaceship in the middle of nowhere in India is tough, and it’s not the same as doing it in America, Europe or even South America,” Jones says. “But the infrastructure in India is certainly getting a lot better, and the country, in terms of its touring future, will be very, very different in five years’ time, and especially 10 years’ time.”

In recent years, stars such as Post Malone, Imagine Dragons and Dua Lipa have sold out shows in the country; Lollapalooza India reportedly drew 60,000 fans in 2023, and a rep for promoter Live Nation said the 2025 festival last month, starring Green Day and Shawn Mendes, scored its highest attendance ever. Cigarettes After Sex sold out two large India shows in January; Guns N’ Roses will perform at Mahalaxmi Racecourse next month; and Travis Scott plays Delhi in October. 

The recent concert boom is due, in part, to the boom in India’s middle-class population over the last two decades. “India’s disposable income is growing day by day, and the audience is seeking more experiences to spend their money on,” says Bhavya Anand, manager of rapper King and co-founder of talent agency Bluprint. “We see that there will eventually be a lot of clout in ticket buyers — but it’s also scary, because it’s not possible for everyone to attend everything.”

Since the pandemic, social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram have taken off in India, and residents have been “going out with a vengeance,” according to Jay Mehta, managing director of Warner Music India and SAARC. As recently as 2018, he adds, international touring artists were largely limited as far as how many fans they could draw — Bryan Adams, a huge regional star who has played India since the ’90s, sold out a Mumbai concert with just 10,000 people that year. 

But promoters have been methodically building production systems and ticket-selling technology to prepare for an expected entertainment boom. Since then, governments have become more sophisticated in adapting cricket stadiums and other large venues to concerts and providing public transportation. “There were a lot of struggles, from bureaucracy to permissions,” Mehta says. “In the past, the production costs were so high, you’d have only 10,000 people coming, you’d have a massive loss.” More recently, he adds, promoters who’ve “gone through this pain for the last 10 years finally enjoy the fruits of the concert ecosystem.”

One of those early companies was Only Much Louder, a 22-year-old promoter that initially focused on concerts and managed Indian music stars but has shifted into comedy and other non-music entertainment. Until recently, says Tusharr Kumar, the company’s CEO, it was impossible to fund large concerts without significant corporate sponsorship, but given newly built stadiums and arenas, as well as prominent financial successes such as Coldplay’s shows and the Dosanjh and Sheeran tours, that is starting to change. “We’ve been having so many conversations: ‘Did we exist at the wrong time? Because it’s suddenly getting interesting in India.’ It feels good to know all the hard work we did back then is paying off in a big way.”

From a concert-business point of view, India still has work to do, regional sources say. The country’s club circuit remains modest, with electronic-music stars such as Kasablanca and MissMonique as top headliners, due to low production costs, compared to full bands. And while Dosanjh’s 2024 success speaks to the potential for country-wide touring, and India is producing global stars such as King and singer-rapper Karan Aujla, the biggest artists still tend to do just a date or two in big cities like Mumbai and Delhi. “We’ve just had the initial spark,” Warner’s Mehta says. “Imagine once we see the complete picture.”