Indie and hip-hop
For most of the last century, "Indian popular music" meant film music. That monopoly has genuinely broken — streaming let artists reach audiences without a film attached, and what emerged sounds nothing like playback.
Gully rap
Hip-hop in Hindi, Marathi and street Mumbai slang, made in the chawls and bastis of Mumbai from around 2010. DIVINE and Naezy are the origin point; the 2019 film Gully Boy was loosely built on their story and pushed the scene into the mainstream overnight. The content is what hip-hop content usually is — class, place, money, exclusion — and it lands with unusual force in a country with India's inequality.
- Delhi — Prabh Deep, Seedhe Maut: denser, more technical, Punjabi and Hindi mixed.
- Mumbai — DIVINE, Naezy, MC Altaf: the gully sound proper.
- South — Tamil and Malayalam rap, including Hanumankind, whose 2024 breakout put Kerala on international playlists.
Indie and singer-songwriter
| Prateek Kuhad | Quiet English-and-Hindi songwriting; the artist who proved an indie musician could sell out halls in India |
| Indian Ocean | The elders — fusion rock with folk and classical structure, going since the early 1990s |
| The Local Train, When Chai Met Toast | Hindi rock and cheerful English-Malayalam folk-pop respectively; both festival mainstays |
| Nucleya | Bass music built on Indian folk samples — the sound of a decade of Indian festivals |
| Ritviz | Electronic production with classical-derived vocal lines |
Film production houses controlled distribution, radio and money, and playback singers were contracted through them. There was no independent touring circuit and no way to be paid without a film. Streaming removed the distribution bottleneck, and the festival circuit — NH7 Weekender and its successors — supplied the stage. See film music for the system it grew out from.
If you know only Bollywood, listen to DIVINE's Mere Gully Mein, then Prateek Kuhad's cold/mess, then anything by Indian Ocean. Those three cover most of the distance between film music and what young India actually has on in the background.
See also: film music and playback singing · punjabi pop · desi comedy: stand-up, sketch and the internet
Last updated: 2026-08-12
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