For Indian music fans, 2025 will be remembered as the year from when we could confidently say that our country was no longer relegated to the nostalgia section of the global touring circuit. Coldplay is, by some accounts, the biggest band in the world—and they broke attendance records while visiting here, which meant that India is now on the radar of booking agents everywhere.
International artists are visiting India with increasing regularity. They’ve been here so often that we suspect both Ed Sheeran and Alan Walker own properties in Bandra or BKC. If they did the Mumbai-Bengaluru-Delhi circuit the first time around, they came back to play in places like Shillong, which boasts one of the largest audiences for English-language music in the country but has for long been starved of major foreign acts. That’s changing thanks to festivals such as Cherry Blossom, which took place last month and saw acts like Diplo and The Script.
Among others who returned to India in 2025 were Akon, Enrique Iglesias, and Guns N’ Roses—who qualify for nostalgia—but we also saw the likes of Cigarettes After Sex, Glass Beams, and Jacob Collier, acts who now know they have a dedicated audience here. That wide range of tastes is why Lollapalooza India can programme Green Day and Shawn Mendes in the same year and both can draw the largest crowds the festival has seen until date.
Hip-hop fans had a particularly good last quarter with Travis Scott staging his debut gigs and the inaugural Indian edition of Rolling Loud. There are now also two K-Pop festivals in the country, and the recent arrival of HYBE means it’s only a matter of time before BTS finally visits.
While concert-goers of a certain vintage are chuffed by India’s new status as a serious touring destination, they also wistfully remember the days when all you had to do was line up outside your neighbourhood music store to buy a ticket. Now they have to open every available electronic device and wait endlessly in online “queues” where even though they logged on 10 minutes before the appointment hour that tickets went live, they’re somehow 3,45,678 in line.
Meanwhile, resale sites are already peddling tickets for 10x the original prices, which seem to have risen faster than the inflation anyway. If you fail to snap up a ticket, you can only take comfort in the fact that many of your friends couldn’t either and then share your sorrows by swapping the countless memes you find on Instagram.
Not that there isn’t enough IRL content to go around, but your feed is now flooded with videos of everything from fights breaking out at gigs and sexagenarian rockers tripping on stage to artists dodging UFOs while performing and, in the case of Akon, pants allegedly being pulled down at his Bengaluru show. (He took precautions in Mumbai by crowd-surfing in a Zorb ball.)
At times, it feels like the infrastructure—most concerts are held on open grounds as opposed to stadiums or arenas—and organisation (women’s safety, as highlighted by Post Malone’s recent show in Guwahati, remains a concern) need to desperately play catch-up. Given that “concert economy” is the live music industry’s favourite new phase, we can only hope that soon the overall experience is as pleasing as the performances. There are quite a few things we’ve all come to expect to see and hear at every show. You’ll find them all in our bingo card. Tick them as you go from grid to grid and relive your year in gigs.
