The overseas listener is already part of the Indian artist’s royalty story, but the export number needs a careful label. In its 2 September 2026 India edition of Loud & Clear, Spotify said more than 40% of royalties generated by Indian artists on its service in 2025 came from listeners outside India. That is a finding about where the listening that generated royalties occurred. It is neither a measure of every Indian music service nor a statement of what artists personally took home. For a label or distributor selling repertoire into India, it suggests a more useful question than how many Indian streams a track attracted: where, on which tier, and for whose rights did the money arise?
This is a different question from our recent examination of India’s small paying listener pool. The earlier piece asked what the domestic audience can fund. Spotify’s September figures raise the other side of the account: Indian repertoire can earn from listeners beyond that domestic pool, and the territory of each play matters to the resulting statement. The two observations should be held together, without treating Spotify’s artist cohort as a proxy for all Indian music or assuming that every exported track follows the same pattern.
What the overseas share does, and does not, measure
Spotify’s 2 September 2026 release says Indian artists generated nearly 335 billion streams on its service in 2025, while their generated royalties grew 29% from 2024. The same release puts the overseas share of those royalties above 40%. It does not provide a matching overseas share of streams. Dividing an export royalty share by the total stream count would therefore produce an invented payout per play. Nor does the release give a rupee total for the cohort, a breakdown by destination country, or the share held by any one label. The reported percentage establishes that foreign listening is material to this particular pool. It cannot price a new release.
Spotify’s own Loud & Clear explanation makes another distinction explicit. Its artist figures describe royalties generated for both recordings and publishing. Spotify says it pays the relevant rights holders and cannot see what an artist or songwriter ultimately receives under private agreements. A headline about an artist’s generated royalties should therefore not be entered as that artist’s personal income. Between the listening and the bank account sit the recording and song rights, the parties who control them, and the splits in their contracts.
The distinction is useful for an independent act in Lagos, Nairobi or Accra studying an Indian release. An artist’s location, a track’s language and a listener’s country are three different fields. The first two can help explain an audience; the third helps identify the market in which a stream contributes to a royalty pool. Spotify’s royalties guide says it allocates recording royalties by a rights holder’s share of streams within a country and month. It also says the value can vary with the listener’s country and subscription plan. None of that yields a universal India rate, still less a universal rate for Indian-language music heard abroad.
The domestic baseline is still small
The Indian Music Industry (IMI) and EY report published in 2026 estimated about 14.4 million paying music subscriptions at the end of 2025. Its authors say streaming platforms do not release subscriber counts and that their estimate draws on industry discussions and dashboard reviews. The report also says the overall music-streaming audience could not be measured accurately from public platform data. This is a qualified market estimate, not a count of paying Spotify accounts or of buyers for a particular catalogue.
That domestic baseline helps explain why an export share deserves attention, but it does not explain the share by itself. Spotify’s number concerns royalties generated by a defined artist group on one platform; the IMI and EY number concerns paid subscriptions across the Indian market. They are different denominators. A listener abroad might be paying for a subscription, using a free tier, or using a bundle. The public figures do not give that mix for Indian repertoire. They cannot support a claim that foreign plays automatically pay more than Indian plays. What they do support is a discipline: keep domestic reach, domestic paid demand and overseas royalty generation as separate lines in the commercial model.
Spotify’s royalties guide describes why the tier matters. Premium subscriptions and advertising fund separate contributions to the royalty pool, and a Premium stream may contribute more value, while outcomes still vary by territory, plan and streamshare. A catalogue owner forecasting from an aggregate play total has lost the fields needed to interpret it. Even a rising play count can coexist with a different revenue outcome if the new listening is concentrated in a different plan or market. That is an accounting possibility, not a claim about any particular Indian label’s receipts.
Language growth is a lead, not a price list
Spotify’s 2 September 2026 India release reports that royalties generated by Telugu music globally grew by more than 120% year on year in 2025. It lists increases of nearly 50% for Marathi, nearly 40% for Bengali, more than 30% for Malayalam, nearly 30% for Hindi and 20% for Tamil. These are growth rates from undisclosed bases. Telugu’s larger percentage does not prove it produced more money than Hindi, and none of the percentages states what a stream in either language paid. The platform also reports that Haryanvi streams increased nearly sevenfold between February 2023 and February 2026. That is a different metric over a different period, so it should not be ranked against the one-year royalty changes.
For a rights buyer, those language figures are leads for due diligence. They justify asking which markets produced the increase and whether the gains came from repeat listening, new listeners, paid plans or a release with an unusually strong cycle. Spotify has not published those answers in its September summary. A contract priced on a genre-wide growth rate would assign the average momentum of a language to a specific catalogue without showing that the catalogue earned it. A contract priced on the catalogue’s own territory and plan statements would at least start from its actual commercial footprint.
Language also cannot substitute for a rights inventory. A recording may travel internationally while its composition has separate writers, publishers and collection mandates. Spotify’s royalty explanation includes both recording and publishing in the artist-level figure, yet those amounts can move through different rights holders. The Indian Performing Right Society (IPRS) says it pays authors, composers and music publishers, as well as affiliated overseas societies for songs played in India. It says distribution depends on both money collected from licensed users and usage data. That description concerns the composition side of the chain, not a promise that delivering a master to a store will settle every songwriter claim.
Build the statement around the listener’s territory
A practical review starts with the master statement for each service and release. Preserve the listener territory, period, plan or product where shown, stream count, currency, gross amount, deductions and net amount received. Keep the recording agreement beside that record. Then maintain a separate register of songwriters, their shares, the publisher or administrator, and the society or other collection route that actually handles each territory. Spotify tells rights holders to expect statement details such as service, territory, usage and period, and warns that missing writer names or splits can delay songwriter payments. IPRS likewise identifies usage data as a requirement for distribution. Those two primary descriptions converge on the same operational point: a play cannot be audited properly if the parties and the place of use are missing.
For an African label entering India, this can change the investment decision. A campaign may succeed in India as an audience-building exercise while a meaningful part of its Spotify royalties comes from people listening elsewhere. Conversely, a large export audience can hide a thin domestic paid base. The public Spotify and IMI figures cannot tell an individual label which outcome it will get. Only its own statements and rights agreements can. Ask for the territory split before renewing a marketing commitment, and calculate the return against the money spent in each market rather than against one global stream total.
The useful finding is therefore bounded but substantial. Spotify’s September 2026 report establishes that overseas listeners generated more than 40% of Indian artists’ Spotify royalties in 2025. IMI and EY’s 2026 report establishes that India’s paid subscription base remains modest and estimated. Read together, they describe a business in which the audience’s location can matter as much as its size. They do not set a price per stream. The next step for a distributor is to obtain a territory-level statement for its own repertoire, reconcile recording and composition rights separately, and let those records, rather than an export headline, determine what the catalogue is worth.
