dj5rivers - Digital Feature - August 29, 2025
Toronto, ON, Canada

I’m sitting in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Mumbai after All About Music (AAM) 2025, a long-standing B2B conference and festival that feels like it arrived at the perfect time. This was my first time attending, and I couldn’t help but notice the energy in the air.

Normally, I’m the one who attends events when they’re still underground, niche, raw, and right before they blow up. That’s where much of my work lives: on the fringes of the majors, aligned with the masses, rooted in the heart of underground sound and culture.

What I witnessed in Mumbai confirmed what I’ve been sensing for years: India is on the brink of a musical rebirth, one that could redefine what “world music” means in the Western hemisphere. The numbers back this up. In 2024 alone, India’s music royalty collections crossed $112 million CAD, a 42% year-on-year jump and nearly 4× growth over five years. Daily streams now hover around 460 million, with vernacular content making up more than a third of all listens, led by Punjabi. By 2030, the streaming market is expected to balloon from 1.8 billion CAD to nearly 5 billion CAD. On the live side, India hosted about 27,000 events in 2024, a 35% jump, with projections crossing 1.7 billion CAD in concert revenues by 2026.

Hard economics. 

But alongside this optimism, I saw something else: the replication of Western industry frameworks. And with that comes one of the biggest missed opportunities of the modern musical era.

Learning from Hip Hop

As a Canadian born Panjabi kid who grew up in the 90s, I witnessed the rise of Hip Hop culture. It raised me; the Mos Def-truth telling, Dave Chappelle Block Party-shuffling, Wu-Tang Clan-ain’t-nothing-to-fuck-with Hip Hop. That world taught me what it means to be politicized, rooted in community, and part of “the culture.” I am forever indebted to the Jamaican and African diaspora for their gifts to music.

I also saw what happens when raw, undeniable talent falls prey to bad record deals and publishing theft. Artists lost their masters while executives flew private, reaping profits from ownership they never earned.

When I managed Canada’s first women-led Indigenous record label, my boss, Shoshona Kish, called this process “mining music.” It’s cultural extraction disguised as opportunity.

Majors step in, exploit and acquire music, and in many cases, strip it of its community context. It doesn’t always translate to cultural progress. Often, it mirrors politics: grand promises followed by token support and curated narratives of inclusion. India’s market feels eerily familiar.

A False Picture of Success

Around the world, music “circuits” often fail to reflect blue-collar reality. Instead, they present a polished, hyper-capitalistic version of success, Instagram-perfect lives that mask debt, exploitation, and creative compromise.

I remember chatting with a non-Indian friend about Canadian Pop artists and the lack of South Asian voices in those conversations. I brought up AP Dhillon, an Indian Canadian artist whose Punjabi-infused trap and R&B has sold out arenas across North America and redefined what global Punjabi music sounds like. For many young Canadians of colour, Dhillon is a cultural icon. But for others outside the diaspora, his name barely registers. The blank look on my friend’s face said it all: for us, he’s shifting culture; for them, invisible.

This is the reality of narrative control in music. It determines who gets seen, who gets paid, and who gets erased. And it’s not always the artist who shifts culture, moves youth, the largest market, or who we’ll remember years down the line.

Patterns Repeating in India

After attending AAM 2025, I’m both grateful and cautious. Grateful to witness India’s evolution on a global stage and hopeful for non-film music to thrive without tokenization or the white gaze. But I’m not overly optimistic.

The same patterns are emerging: Sony, Warner, and Universal are here, mining talent in a market expected to top $1.74 billion CAD (nearly 1.3 bn in CAD) by 2028. Western validation still outweighs homegrown brilliance. New deals mirror the same traps Hip Hop fell into decades ago. Bollywood still accounts for nearly 80% of music revenue, while labels like T-Series control nearly 35% of the market with more than 300 million YouTube subscribers. The imbalance is massive, and it’s already happening in folk music.

The Folk Catalogue Problem: Surinder Kaur as a Case Study

India’s copyright system has long favored labels. Historically, companies owned both masters and publishing by default, leaving artists without leverage. Even after the 2012 Copyright Amendment, which theoretically gave singers a share in royalties, enforcement is weak and opaque. Legacy contracts remain unchallenged, and families of legendary artists struggle to claim even basic recognition.

Meanwhile, companies profit endlessly from cultural works that should belong to the people. Waris Shah’s verses, Surinder Kaur’s songs; these aren’t just IP assets, they are our collective cultural histories as Panjabi people, part of our cultural DNA. Surinder Kaur, also known as the “Nightingale of Punjab” shaped modern Punjabi folk with songs like Madhaniyan and Kaliyan, anthems of cultural identity and oral history. Today, her entire catalog sits under the control of Saregama.

These recordings are monetized globally. They appear in Bollywood films, advertisements, and OTT platforms, licensed and streamed across international markets. But Surinder Kaur’s estate and the communities from which these songs emerged see nothing. This is cultural dispossession and theft, dressed in legality.

Why This Matters Now

On paper, these major deals may look fair, but behind closed doors, the real cost can stretch far beyond those years. While explicit reporting on scammy long-tail clauses in Indian publishing deals is limited, the broader picture tells a cautionary story: music publishing revenues in India remain disproportionately low compared to recording revenues, signaling systemic imbalance and limited leverage for creators. For instance, India’s music publishing revenue was just $141.4 million CAD in 2022–2023, and while it’s growing, it still lags behind the $400–$576 million CAD being pulled in by recorded music labels and both pale compared to the $1.92 billion total revenue generated by creators overall.

These skewed economics suggest that many emerging artists, especially those signing mid-length deals, lack bargaining power to retain meaningful ownership or negotiate equitable splits. The industry’s exploitative legacy is also echoed in artist experiences. 

Meanwhile, the Indian market is clearly primed for explosive growth: recorded music revenues doubled from $386.6 million CAD in 2019 to $1.07 billion CAD in 2023, and are projected to reach $1.74 billion CAD by 2028. Yet as the economy expands, powered by streaming, live entertainment, and digital platforms, the lack of ownership infrastructure threatens to turn a cultural renaissance into another cycle of creative exploitation.

A Call to Action

When ownership and agency are stripped from artists and communities, culture suffers. What begins as rich, rooted storytelling turns into commercial wallpaper, music designed for algorithms, not people. This is a dissolution. Folk traditions become branding exercises and tokens for world markets. Hip Hop becomes a marketing slogan. Genres that once carried political resistance and social truth are repackaged into formulaic content for maximum profit.

Artists must understand the value of their intellectual property (IP) and resist signing away rights without independent legal counsel. Ownership is a financial asset and the foundation of creative sovereignty.

Publishers and labels have a responsibility to design transparent frameworks that prioritize fair splits and honor cultural origins. Profit cannot come at the cost of erasure. If this industry wants to thrive, it must stop repeating the same exploitative patterns that gutted entire genres in the West.

Policymakers, too, have a critical role to play. Stronger copyright enforcement, mandatory royalty compliance, and artist-friendly dispute mechanisms are essential if India hopes to lead a fair global music economy. Without these measures, we will continue to watch legacies like Surinder Kaur’s be stripped from their rightful heirs, commodified for generations without accountability.

Canada can’t sit on the sidelines of this conversation either. 

We are both consumers and exporters of diasporic Indian music, Punjabi, Bollywood, fusion, and yet the industry infrastructure here lags far behind demand. Over 1.8 million Punjabi speakers live in Canada, but we don’t have the INDEPENDENT labels, music supervisors, or publishing houses that could equitably support and scale their output. The pattern is familiar: just as Black and Indigenous artists were sidelined by majors in the past, South Asian Canadian artists now face the same erasure, even as their music packs arenas worldwide. Meanwhile, Canadian funding bodies like FACTOR and the Canada Council continue to privilege English and French, ignoring the reality that Punjabi trap and Bollywood pop are now Canada’s biggest cultural exports after Drake and Bieber. If Canada wants to remain relevant in the global music economy, it must stop marginalizing the very sounds that are shaping it. India’s music renaissance deserves better. Ownership matters. Cultural sovereignty matters. If history has taught us anything, it’s this: fight for both or watch your art become another line item in someone else’s portfolio. India must seize this opportunity; adapt it's strategy and innovate new pathways to success for musicians around the world.