The Concert Tech Revolution: Behind the Innovations Powering India’s Live Music Economy

When Coldplay mounted their Music of the Spheres tour in India last year, the numbers alone were enough to grab headlines. But a moment that truly defined the night came from the audience, or more specifically, from the thousands of LED wristbands strapped to their wrists. As the stadium lights dimmed and the opening chords spilled out, the crowd lit up as one, a rippling galaxy of blinking colors moving in perfect sync with every chorus and crescendo. In videos that have since gone viral, it’s the sight of this pulsing sea of bands that captures the feeling of the night more than any camera pointed towards the stage. The Xylobands, powered by RFID technology, effectively became a dopamine hit that dissolved the space between the artist and their audience, making thousands of passive viewers feel like locked-in participants. 

India’s live music circuit is bursting at the seams, with a steady stream of international acts clamoring for attention in the country’s packed concert calendar, and homegrown heavyweights like Sunidhi Chauhan and A.R. Rahman dialling up their touring production values. With the organised live-events sector growing 15 percent in 2024 and crossing ₹100 billion in value, according to the latest FICCI–EY Shape the Future report, the infusion of technology into the live experience has emerged as one of the industry’s most visible shifts.

Tech is no longer an add-on, but rather the engine driving the scale and spectacle that makes an experience worth the hype and steep ticket prices. Nowhere has that been more visible than in the industry’s break from traditional stage design, from Lollapalooza India’s VerTech modular stage setup, to Echoes of Earth experimenting with sustainably-built dynamic stage structures. 

When Sara Awwad, the Creative Director and co-founder of Studio Majimé, set out to build India’s first 360-degree levitation stage for AP Dhillon’s 2024 Brownprint tour, it was a mammoth undertaking that required a structural reset. Safety protocols, rigging systems, and engineering workflows had to be reimagined and rebuilt piece by piece. And with a 360 layout offering nowhere to hide clutter, cables, or mistakes, every detail needed to hold up. “We had to switch to mesh screens to make sure the weight was lighter, customize rigging clasps, and understand every detail of the security aspect, just to ensure that nothing collapsed during the show,” Awwad tells Rolling Stone India, recalling the months of effort that went into putting together a production of this scale in a country where it virtually didn’t exist. 

Describing the stage as “emotion meeting engineering,” Awwad explained how this format allowed the “Brown Munde” hitmaker to feed off the audience’s energy from all sides, making the show truly immersive. “When you’re designing something like that, it psychologically breaks down barriers, because the crowd becomes part of the set,” she says. She adds that a 360-degree setup also democratizes the experience, giving fans at every price point an unobstructed view. “When you’re buying a ticket, you walk in with a perception of how good or bad your view will be. But with a 360, every category of ticket holder gets the full experience.”

Above the stage, another frontier has opened up. Drone light shows are quickly becoming one of the most in-demand additions to major concerts and festivals, with a rising trend of artists and sponsors tapping into novelty sequences that hover, morph and pulsate in sync with the music, pyrotechnics and lasers. 

“It’s a new technology that people haven’t experienced yet, so they go crazy for it,” says Neha Verma, the communication lead at Botlab Dynamics, which builds large-scale drone light shows for live events. Having curated custom drone shows for the likes of Alan Walker, Arijit Singh, and Karan Aujla, Verma notes that artists are increasingly turning to these spectacles to amplify the live experience in a way that lets audiences fully sink into the moment, especially in an era where everything feels fleetingly engineered for Instagram. 

“When a drone show is happening, everybody is watching that,” she says. “It lasts long enough to tell a story, and watching it live is a different experience altogether.” For artists, drone formations offer something pyrotechnics can’t: a highly customizable visual narrative that takes their stories, hooks and visual motifs to the skies. Verma also points out how these have become a marketing tool for brand sponsors to subtly plug in their messaging without force-fitting it. Especially in an era where every live moment finds a new life cycle online, drone shows give artists a way to command attention, both during the performance and in the media. “Artists can probably explore using drone shows to beat Guinness World Records when they want to get more media attention for an upcoming album or release because it’s fairly easy to do,” Verma adds. 

Even more experimental ideas are beginning to surface. Gesture-powered installations, interactive visuals, and holographic displays are slowly finding their way into Indian concerts. In 2024, Emergence, the crew behind the secret-location rave Those Who Know They Know, built what they billed as India’s first holographic 3D stage. Drawing from the visual worlds of Anyma’s sets and Eric Prydz’s Holosphere, the structure used layered transparent mesh LED screens to create layers of depth, dimension, and a sense of kinetic motion. Co-founder Akash Kothari says this wasn’t just done for ornamental flourish, but as a way to keep the crowd engaged without relying on marquee headliners. “We don’t require a name; What we require is good music,” he says.

In an oversaturated market obsessed with buzzy names, Kothari stresses that an immersive, thoughtfully engineered experience can still be the main event. He adds that while the “technology was always available”, promoters rarely invested in it because of the “low margins and uncertainty around ticket sales.” But as India’s live music market matures, those barriers are finally beginning to get dismantled.

Sustainability-focused tech is also slipping into the mix, with festivals like Echoes of Earth integrating solar-powered stage lighting and energy-efficient rigs into recent editions. The shift reflects a deeper evolution in how concerts are being conceived. For audiences accustomed to streaming and endless digital content, artists know that the live show must offer something irreplaceable. “Artists have now become aware that they need to create a thoroughly designed experience that gives [their audience something beyond what they get from] listening to their songs or watching their music videos,” reiterates Awwad. The visuals, staging, effects and technology must express personality as strongly as the music itself. A concert must become a statement, not just a setlist. 

Moving beyond visual firepower, technology is also rejigging how live-event mechanics work behind the scenes, with companies like Dreamcast reworking core infrastructure such as festival entry and on-ground purchasing. Having worked with Ziro Festival, Bangalore Open Air, and Echoes of Earth in recent years, product head Apoorv Rajawat says the focus is now shifting beyond RFID-enabled wristbands and tap-based touchpoints.

While many large festivals already operate without WiFi or internet to ensure uninterrupted attendee flow, Rajawat says the company is now “aggressively working on facial recognition” as a potential next step. He compares it to the DigiYatra system deployed at Indian airports, adding that similar models can be adapted for live events. “Anybody who’s tech savvy in the Indian ecosystem, there should be a possibility for them to just pass on with the right speed and ease.” As with DigiYatra, however, the shift raises questions around privacy, particularly since attendee data is often stored with festival promoters and event operators. If facial recognition is moving to the forefront, it may be time to read the fine print before buying tickets to your next concert.

Globally, the idea of what a “live” concert even means is being stretched in new directions. ABBA’s Voyage in London uses motion-captured, hyper-real digital avatars to perform without the band ever stepping onstage, while virtual performers like Hatsune Miku have long drawn arena-sized crowds through holographic concerts. Together, these shifts point to a future where concerts are no longer just about sound and sight, but about systems, data, and design working in tandem. India’s rapid adoption of RFID, drones, and immersive stage builds suggests a market quick to absorb these changes, even as it learns to negotiate their trade-offs. As audiences demand more and artists dream bigger, the technology powering India’s concerts may well become its most defining force.