In November 2025, fifteen singer-songwriters gathered at the Yamaha Flagship Center in Tejgaon, Dhaka, for a concert with an unusual rule: no covers allowed. The audience would hear original songs by musicians including Joy Shahriar, Aseer Arman, Imtiaz Barshon and Mumtahina Mehzabin, who performs as Modernotaku. Some of the performers were familiar names; others were still introducing themselves to the city. Tickets cost five hundred taka. The event, organised by the Songwriters’ Collective, was called 15 Stories.
The rule was simple enough: to sound almost unremarkable.
Yet it proposed a different way of thinking about a music scene in which audiences have long gathered around familiar songs, celebrated bands, and the repertoire of established stars. Here, the point was to listen to people making music of their own, including musicians a listener might have encountered only recently, perhaps through a phone screen or a recommendation from a friend. The concert was an attempt to give those songs a room of their own.
It was also a useful place to consider a question that has reshaped music consumption across South Asia: what happens when the distance between hearing a song and finding the person who made it becomes almost negligible?
Spotify is one answer, though not the whole one. Its arrival in India in 2019, and in Bangladesh and Pakistan in 2021, came after years in which YouTube, piracy, cheap mobile data and social media had already changed how people encountered music. Spotify did not invent the independent musician, the fan with an eclectic taste, or the pleasure of discovering something obscure. It gave these habits a more durable system. A song could now lead to an artist’s catalogue, a playlist, a listener in another country, and perhaps, eventually, a ticket.
For listeners, this altered not only where music came from but also what listening itself could become.
For much of the previous century, South Asian popular music had been organised around institutions with fairly clear boundaries. Hindi film music travelled through cinema, radio, cassettes, and television. Pakistani pop and rock had its own history of television appearances, albums, and live performances. Bangladesh had a rich band culture, from the long reach of Ayub Bachchu and LRB to the more recent audiences built by bands such as Shironamhin, Artcell, and Nemesis. Bengali film songs, modern songs, folk traditions, and the music of the diaspora followed their own routes. These histories were never as tidy as a list of gatekeepers suggests, but access to a large audience often depended on finding a place within an established system.
The Internet made the boundaries porous. YouTube could keep a song alive long after its release. A teenager could download an album without buying it, discover a band through a fan-uploaded video, or share a link with someone who lived several time zones away. Facebook pages and Instagram accounts gave musicians a direct line to listeners. Long before streaming became the default, young people were already assembling private musical worlds from whatever they could find.
Spotify entered this culture with a particular advantage: it made the next song part of the product. When the service launched in India in February 2019, it introduced playlists such as Indiestan and Rap 91 alongside Bollywood and regional-language selections, and tailored recommendations to listeners’ language preferences. The catalogue mattered, but so did the arrangement of the catalogue. Music was no longer merely available; it was placed beside other music, sorted by mood, genre, popularity and the habits of people who had listened before you. Spotify’s own launch announcement described this localised approach. This is an easy distinction to underestimate. A search engine gives you what you know enough to look for. A recommendation system can take you somewhere you had not thought to search.
For a listener who began with Anuv Jain, that might mean finding Prateek Kuhad. A song by Ritviz might lead to electronic music drawing on Indian sounds; a playlist of contemporary Punjabi tracks might eventually open onto hip-hop or older folk recordings. The precise route varies, and the algorithm’s idea of similarity is not necessarily a musician’s idea of influence. Still, the friction of discovery falls away. You do not have to know an artist’s name, recognize the album cover, or ask a friend where they found the song. The platform can make the introduction for you.
The careers of Anuv Jain and Ritviz are useful precisely because neither began with Spotify’s Indian launch. Jain’s early songs circulated online before 2019; Ritviz’s “Udd Gaye” had already become a breakthrough. Their trajectories complicate the tempting story that Spotify created a new generation of independent Indian musicians. The artists and audiences were already there. What streaming offered was a way for attention to persist beyond a viral moment. A listener who found one song could save it, return to it, explore the catalogue, and encounter the artist again without having to reconstruct the original path of discovery.
That repeated contact can be more consequential than a single burst of popularity. A song that catches on through a video may be heard for a week and forgotten. A song that settles into someone’s regular listening can become part of the private furniture of their life: the walk to class, a late ride home, the hour spent pretending to study. Streaming makes that kind of recurrence effortless. It also makes the listener’s relationship with music unusually measurable.
Spotify Wrapped, the platform’s annual summary of listening habits, turns those measurements into a social ritual. People share their most-played artists, songs and genres, sometimes with pride and sometimes with the embarrassment of discovering how often they have played a song they claim not to like. Playlists do similar work on a smaller scale. They are practical collections, but also gifts, declarations, and attempts at self-portraiture. A playlist can communicate an affection that would sound awkward in a message or establish a musical identity that is more aspirational than accurate.
There is a small comedy in all this. The listener who once prided themselves on finding an obscure artist may discover that the artist has appeared in thousands of other people’s playlists. “Underrated” becomes a kind of social credential, even as recommendation systems make obscurity harder to preserve. The music feels personal, but the route to it may be shared by millions.
The system has also helped make South Asian music more legible across borders. The word Desi is convenient here, if imperfect. It can make the music of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan sound like a single market, when their languages, histories, industries and political circumstances are distinct. A Bengali rock listener in Dhaka does not necessarily share the habits of a Punjabi pop fan in Delhi, and neither is simply interchangeable with a listener of Urdu rap in Lahore. Yet streaming has made it easier for these audiences to encounter one another without waiting for a film, television programme or record label to act as an intermediary.
Pakistan offers a particularly revealing example. When Spotify launched there in 2021, artists including Talha Anjum, Hasan Raheem and Abdul Hannan were part of a younger musical culture already circulating through digital platforms. The rise of Pakistani rap and pop did not begin with Spotify, nor can its success be credited to a single service.
But streaming helped give this music a more continuous life among listeners at home and abroad. In 2026, Spotify reported that listening in Pakistan had grown by more than 750% since launch and that streams of Pakistani artists had increased more than sevenfold. These are the company’s own platform figures, not a complete measure of the country’s music industry, but they indicate the scale of the change taking place within its service. Spotify’s five-year account of Pakistan’s streaming scene describes a listening culture spanning contemporary pop and hip-hop as well as older artists such as Atif Aslam and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
The most interesting crossings are not necessarily the ones the industry predicts. Anuv Jain’s “Husn” became a major streaming song in Pakistan despite being by an Indian artist. “Pasoori,” Ali Sethi and Shae Gill’s contribution to Coke Studio, travelled through streaming, YouTube and social media, carrying Punjabi language and musical references into an international pop conversation. Its success did not require the song to conceal where it came from. Listeners could enjoy its specificity without needing a full explanation of it.
There is a difference between music travelling and music being made generic for export.
Streaming can encourage the latter, particularly when artists are pushed towards sounds that fit established playlists or short-form video trends. But it can also reward listeners’ curiosity about music they would not otherwise have encountered. A song can cross a border without ceasing to belong to the place that produced it.
India’s recent streaming figures suggest how far local music has moved into the centre of the listening economy. According to Spotify’s 2026 report, Indian artists were streamed nearly 335 billion times on the platform in 2025, and listeners pressed play on an Indian artist they had never heard before 12.8 billion times. The company also reported that I-Pop, or Indian popular music released outside film soundtracks, accounted for half of its Indian year-end top ten. These figures come from Spotify and should be read as a portrait of activity on its own service, rather than a census of Indian musical life. Even with that qualification, the direction is striking: music no longer needs to arrive through a film to become part of the mainstream. Spotify’s 2026 Loud & Clear report offers one view of that shift.
The category of “independent music” has consequently become harder to define. An artist may release songs without a major label, build an audience on social media, use a distributor to reach streaming services, and still rely on professional management and commercial partnerships. Another may be signed to a label while retaining considerable control over the music. The distinction between indie and mainstream now has less to do with the sound of a song than with the routes through which it is financed, promoted and heard.
Spotify has its own influence on those routes. Editorial playlists can introduce a song to listeners who might never have searched for it; algorithmic recommendations can extend that discovery. But a playlist is also a decision about what deserves attention. Artists and managers watch saves, monthly listeners, completion rates and audience locations, learning to interpret the same figures that determine how their work is presented to others. A musician may now have access to an audience in several countries while also feeling pressure to make the opening seconds of a track immediately persuasive.
The old gatekeepers have not vanished so much as acquired new interfaces.
Nor does a large audience necessarily translate into a sustainable living. Spotify does not pay a fixed amount for each stream. Its royalty pool is allocated according to streamshare, with money passing to rights holders, labels, publishers and distributors before reaching artists according to their agreements. A million streams can look impressive on a screen while concealing how little the individual musician receives. The platform’s scale creates opportunities, but the distribution of the resulting income remains uneven. Spotify’s royalty guide explains the system and its limits.
For artists, however, streaming data can be useful in ways that extend beyond royalty payments. It offers a view of where listeners are located, which songs have found an audience, and whether that audience is growing outside the artist’s home market. Such information can inform touring plans, publicity and release strategies. It does not guarantee that a concert will sell, but it can help a musician decide where a concert might make sense.
This is one connection between streaming and the growth of live music. India’s organised live-events sector exceeded ₹12,000 crore in 2024, according to an EY-Parthenon and BookMyShow report, which attributed the growth to a wider expansion of ticketed events and large concerts. That figure covers a broader industry than music alone, and the boom has several causes, including rising incomes, event promotion and the return of large gatherings after the pandemic. Streaming is only one part of the story. Still, it has helped create listeners who can follow an artist long before the artist comes to their city. The report on India’s concert economy documents the larger commercial shift.
In Dhaka, the relationship between online listening and live performance is particularly complicated. The city has its own long history of bands, concerts and devoted audiences, so it would be wrong to suggest that streaming taught Bangladeshis to attend gigs. What has changed is the range of music available to discover, and the speed with which a following can form around artists whose careers do not depend on conventional broadcast exposure. There is also a practical limit to the idea of a borderless scene: international concerts can be postponed or cancelled over permissions and security concerns, while the costs of tickets, transport and venues determine who can participate. A song may cross a border in seconds. Bringing the artist across it is another matter.
The contrast was visible around Dhaka’s 2026 Indie Fest, which brought together Pakistani singer Abdul Hannan and the band Bayaan, India’s Talpatar Shepai, and Bangladesh’s Level Five. The concert was postponed before eventually being rescheduled, a reminder that the cultural circulation of music can be far easier than the logistics of staging it. The audience’s interest in artists from neighbouring countries was real, but interest alone could not guarantee the event. The Daily Star reported on the rescheduled concert in May 2026.
The listener’s relationship with an artist has changed in another way, too. Social media has made musicians more continuously visible between releases. A song might be discovered on Spotify, then followed by a studio clip, an interview, a joke posted to Instagram, or a video from a concert. Listeners encounter not only the recorded work but a running account of the person who made it. For some artists, this intimacy is part of the appeal. For others, it becomes another kind of labour: the expectation that they must remain visible even when they have nothing new to say.
Sometimes the algorithm revives a song that seems to have been waiting patiently for another life. The British band Cornershop’s “Brimful of Asha,” released in the late nineteen-nineties, has found new circulation through online clips and short-form video. Its return illustrates a feature of streaming culture that is easy to overlook: the past is not arranged in a stable archive. Old music can reappear beside new releases, and younger listeners can adopt a song without sharing the original context in which it became popular. A track that once belonged to a particular moment can acquire a second, stranger life as background music for a video made decades later.
The result is a music culture in which discovery is both more democratic and more managed than it first appears. Listeners have access to more music than any previous generation, including recordings from scenes they may never encounter in person. They also depend on platforms whose recommendations are shaped by commercial priorities and patterns of previous behavior. Spotify can make a musician easier to find; it cannot make every listener attentive, or every song memorable. It can widen the doorway without deciding what happens after someone enters.
This is the more useful way to understand its effect on Desi music. Spotify did not replace Bollywood, erase national markets, or invent South Asian indie music. It changed the conditions under which music could circulate and remain in a listener’s life. The service made it easier to move between languages and genres, gave independent artists another route to sustained audiences, and turned listening habits into data that could be shared, marketed and used to plan a career. It also introduced new forms of dependence, from playlist placement to the pressure of constant measurement.
At 15 Stories, the no-covers rule offered a modest test of what that change might mean in practice. A roomful of songwriters had been invited to play their own work, and an audience had come to hear it. The concert did not prove that Spotify had created a new music culture; no single venue or platform could. But it belonged to a moment in which a song could find its first listeners online, acquire a life in their headphones, and eventually bring them into the same room as the person who wrote it.
The most consequential change may be less romantic than the idea of music without borders, and more durable.
Listeners have gained a greater say in what reaches them, even as platforms have acquired new power over what they hear next. Between those two facts lies the contemporary Desi music scene: restless, commercially entangled, full of local histories, and increasingly difficult to contain within the old divisions between film and indie, home and diaspora, discovery and fandom. Spotify did not settle those tensions. It made them part of everyday listening.
