Artists Are Thinking Like Entrepreneurs and Want More Live Performances

Launched in 2020, TuneCore’s India operations turned four years old as of July. Its parent company Believe too has been steadily making moves in the subcontinent, specifically with Believe Artist Services who have worked with everyone from Lucky Ali and MC Stan to Arivu, KR$NA to Brodha V and All Ok, among several others.

TuneCore’s chief executive officer Andreea Gleeson says in a video call, “It’s one of our fastest growing markets, so it was really, really important that we came and we’ve had just a wonderful time and been learning a lot.” Gleeson was also part of the music conference All About Music in early August and that’s where TuneCore and Believe could imprint upon the Indian market the kind of impact that they were seeing with their digital-first approach to artist development. She name-checks everyone from singer-producer Ritviz to singer-songwriter Anuv Jain as success stories.

Year on year, English music has seen a 64 percent growth, while Hindi music’s growth has been 71 percent year on year. Punjabi music remains a steady favorite, growing 51 percent year on year, according to stats provided by TuneCore. In terms of new artists joining the fold and releasing music, Kannada artists have been a huge part of TuneCore’s user base, accounting for a 103 percent growth this year. In terms of the number of releases Bhojpuri (with a whopping 665 percent increase), Kannada (270 percent),  and Bengali (161 percent) are leading the way, year on year.

Gleeson, who has traveled around the world to keep an eye on music markets, shares how she’s seen artists realize that they can make money from streaming where they would previously rely on live performances. Out in markets like India, however, TuneCore’s head of South Asia Akhila Shankar says artists want to perform live more after seeing streaming numbers. “We know, for independent artists in India, that performing live is a part of their ambition. The feedback that we got from our artists is that they actually don’t get an opportunity because they’re at quite an early stage in their career,” she says.

That’s where TuneCore’s plans to partner with music festivals and offer up grants or perform at nearby showcase festivals like Music Matters in Singapore have come in. “What we do is we share that music with the [festival] promoter. Of course, ultimately, it’s their festival, so they have a certain sound in mind, so then they pick one winner,” Shankar adds. In addition to Hyderabad artist Peekay performing at Music Matters earlier this year, TuneCore also helped place Arunachal singer-songwriter Chorun Mogli at Bloomverse Festival in Guwahati in early 2024.

One of the biggest questions that TuneCore say they receive from artists is, ‘How does this make money?’ Shankar says, “Increasingly, artists are thinking more like entrepreneurs, and they actually do want to know a little bit more about how exactly their revenue is decided. These are not questions I heard four to five years ago.” Believe India & South Asia’s managing director Vivek Raina adds that “ambitions have gone up” and now, artists want to know how to crack charts like Spotify’s Top 50 and plot out a marketing budget that gives them the maximum return on investment. “It’s no longer a commerce discussion. That’s there, but it’s also about the service angle,” he adds.

Gleeson says on a global level, they’re hearing from artists asking about how they can “cut through” the clutter of hundreds of thousands of daily song uploads on streaming services. Her advice is pretty straightforward, in terms of making sure one’s music is good, but also acknowledging that they need to be “digital-first artists.” She adds, “They’ve cut the cord with cable and traditional media, and they’re in digital. So we need to build the same ecosystem of how you would develop an artist before, but in the digital world, and that’s where we’ve been really focused.”

Raina’s bet is on artist development as well. Where film soundtracks are a “cash intensive” exercise with very little scope for a “development story,” Raina points to how they’ve employed more “traditional A&R approaches” with their label Think Indie for Tamil artists like Sai Abhyankkar to score hits including “Katchi Sera” and “Aasa Kooda.” Raina says, “We want to give ambition to the artist.” The goal for TuneCore and Believe in the next two years, according to Raina is to become “the best artist development company.” Gleeson points to how that involves “building up the right solutions at the local level” but also keep an eye on international markets for Indian artists, through moves like making their music available on TikTok even though it’s banned in India. “This is a very big priority market for me. It obviously has a lot of potential locally, but also externally,” she adds.