Malayalam Music is the World’s Fastest Growing Category from India on Spotify

Local languages are ruling trends on Spotify in India and globally. Music in Malayalam is reported by the streaming platform to become the “fastest growing” among Indian languages for consumption worldwide. The growth stat is pegged at 5,300 percent, followed by music in Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi and Hindi.

Spotify’s India-specific editorial playlists like Hot Hits Punjabi and Punjabi 101 have had the most growth and following exponentially worldwide, followed by playlists like Hot Hits Hindi and Bollywood Mush.

The latest statistics and trends were provided by Spotify India to mark its fifth anniversary in the country. Five years ago, Spotify was launched in India, becoming the 78th market that the music streaming giant traveled to provide free and premium plans and a large catalog.

Since then, not only have more music listeners in the country gravitated towards Spotify, but there’s also been a global shift. Spotify says that it has seen an 85 percent year-on-year growth in consumption of music from India, internationally.

At the time of launching in 2019, Spotify in India had about 70 percent of its streams coming from international music. Now, it says more than 70 percent is music local to the country.

The Indian and Indian-origin artists in the driver’s seat in India are also loved around the world now. Spotify India says the “most exported artists” streamed globally include composer-singer A.R. Rahman, vocalist Alka Yagnik, singer-composer Anirudh Ravichander, Punjabi artist AP Dhillon and singer-composer Arijit Singh. While Singh was recently unseated from second place by Taylor Swift, he’s still the third most followed artist on Spotify worldwide.

On the local ecosystem front, there are over 28,000 artists from India who use Spotify For Artists, which has doubled compared to last year. Other stats also note that over 2 lakh podcasts were created using Spotify in 2023.