‘We’re going to change the economics of the Indian publishing business.’ – Music Business Worldwide

Trailblazers is an MBW interview series that turns the spotlight on music entrepreneurs with the potential to become the global business power players of tomorrow. This time, we meet Aayushman Sinha, founder of India-based management company, REPRESENT. Trailblazers is supported by TuneCore.

Aayushman Sinha, who helms prominent India-headquartered management company, REPRESENT, is on a mission to transform the country’s publishing sector.

As he tells us, a host of issues have led to songwriters missing out on income. Fixing that, Sinha says, is key to growing a sustainable ecosystem in a market that is otherwise showing strong potential for growth.

With Grammy-winning songwriter and producer Savan Kotecha by their sides as co-founder, Sinha and songwriter and REPRESENT A&R, Murtuza Gadiwala, are embarking on that mission with the launch of songwriter incubator, Outwrite.

The company will start off managing India-based writers, “helping them get their due credits, scale better and bring them more global opportunities,” Sinha says. In the near future, he promises that Outwrite will be transformed into a fully fledged publishing business that aims to improve the economics for all songwriters in the country.

“Things will only change once there is a strong publisher going in and protecting rights for writers, as well as helping them exploit them. That’s where Outwrite is going to come in,” he says.

Sinha, who grew up in Mumbai, started his music business career early by selling tickets to his school friends for local shows around the age of 13/14. That transformed into becoming a nightlife promoter and then manager, when a friend, DJ Chetas, wanted representation for what was then a burgeoning career.

“I didn’t know what management meant, I didn’t know what it would look like, I didn’t know how it’s supposed to be done, but he thought that this is something I would do well because I was a marketing student and I had this bent for events and experiences,” Sinha remembers.

Together, Sinha and Chetas put on a national TV and radio show together and booked him to play “some of the coolest parties in the country.” Sinha continues: “He really blew up from there and that’s how a lot more people started noticing the kind of work we were doing together. From thereon, Sinha signed a number of other artists and formally founded REPRESENT in 2019.

Running a new company during the Covid-19 pandemic was a challenge, especially as 90% of revenue for an Indian artist before that time came from live events, Sinha says. “Very few artists were making any money out of their music or their royalties. The other 10% was income that would come through different kinds of endorsements.”

COVID arrived, and Sinha had to pivot quickly. The company renewed its focus on music and released around 90 records from six artists during 2020 to 2021 — a revolutionary move in a market that had previously been ruled by film music.

“During that time, we ended up getting around a 30 to 40% share of the independent music market for pop in India, and we saw a huge revenue jump for the first time in the form of royalties, sync, and licensing deals,” he explains.

Now, Sinha says his artists make around 40% of their money from live events, another 30 to 40% from music and the rest through branded projects. Last year, REPRESENT is said to have reached 11 billion+ streams and views, 500+ live shows and 250+ brand deals.

Sinha adds: “Opening up that revenue stream was one of our most important learnings that changed our focus to signing and building more artists who can write incredible music.”

Today, REPRESENT works with acts including singer/songwriter Anuv Jain, who has had multiple No.1 singles in his home country, and Arman Malik, who Sinha predicts will be one of the “strongest” exports outside of India. One of his newer signings is South Asian artist, Jonita Gandhi.

“We’re working with really exciting artists that are very unique in what they’re doing and all of them have really strong global ambitions,” Sinha says. “I’m very confident that we’re going to see a strong crossover from India coming from our roster.”

Here, we chat with Sinha about Outwrite, the issues that exist in India’s music market, and its global potential.

How have you seen the Indian music market evolve across your time working within it?

During Covid, there were a few outlier artists from my own roster who changed the economics of how the music industry works. There’s an artist called Anuv Jain who blew up on streaming and inspired more artists to start putting their own music out. Similarly, there was another artist at that time called AP Dhillon, who’s one of the biggest Canadian Indian artists right now in the country. He’s just signed a deal with Republic Records. Both of them were independent artists and a lot of artists have since then decided to take the plunge and stay independent.

Artists understood that they no longer needed to invest in really expensive music videos. India has always been a video market and YouTube is massive. Everyone thought that if you don’t have a music video for your song, it’s not going to get any kind of visibility. These guys really changed that thought process for the industry as a whole. Earlier, India only had festivals or really small club shows which would accommodate about 500 people. But these two artists went out for the first time and showed they could pull in close to 10,000, 15,000 people for solo headline shows. Now, it’s happening across the board.

“There was a lot of dependence on films. No one thought you could release a song that could become a commercial hit until it was synced into a film or was part of a film soundtrack.”

There was a lot of dependence on films. No one thought you could release a song that could become a commercial hit until it was synced into a film or was part of a film soundtrack. People were using a lot of film stars in their music videos and thought that’s the only way you’ll get visibility. We’ve seen that change as well. Also, you used to think that your song is not going to work unless a label is going to pour in close to $100,000 but a lot of these $0 marketing artists came out and changed the overall economics and way people were perceiving things.

Another brilliant thing to happen at this time was Spotify entering into the market around 2019. That opened up a plethora of global listeners who started consuming Indian music and also just the stronger curation of music as a whole. With them championing pop music a lot more, there was more visibility across the board for this kind of music and new, undiscovered artists.

Can you tell us more about how the Outwrite project came to be?

When pop started blowing up in India, that gave space for a lot more songwriters to come into prominence. You would consistently see a certain type of producer and writer working on various records that ended up becoming gigantic hits. For the first time, songwriting culture actually became a thing. Publishing is still very new and it’s very complicated in India. A lot of artists are not understanding it and a lot of labels are gatekeeping it as well. But these songwriters were starting to do extremely well, which is when Murtuza, who’s my A&R at Represent, came to me and said, ‘I’m working with these 15 songwriters very regularly, I absolutely love the work they’re doing, and they need support from us to be able to scale, to be better represented and to get credits on the projects that they do’.

“India is very poorly served on the publishing side of things and we want to change that.”

Savan Kotecha, who’s a friend of mine, has been saying to me that he really wants to do something for songwriters from India. For the longest time, in the West, he’s been the only Indian guy in the room, be it when he’s writing for Ariana [Grande] or The Weeknd. He wants to change that and bring more opportunities for Indian writers to work with global stars and become more prominent in their own territory.

I was at an intersection where I was able to get these things to marry and that’s where the idea of Outwrite came from. It took Savan a second to say yes and that’s how we started off. We’re an incubator right now and we’re first going to start managing these writers, helping them get their due credits, scale better and bring them more global opportunities. In the very near future, we’re going to convert this into a fully fledged publishing business. Like I mentioned, India is very poorly served on the publishing side of things and we want to change that.

Can you explain what you mean when you say that publishing is complicated in India?

Indian copyright law is one of the most advanced copyright laws in the world. It protects songwriters on the songwriter’s share of publishing for any records that are put out. So no matter how much a label tries, they can never buy out the songwriter’s share of publishing, which is one-half of the publishing revenue that comes in. That side is protected. But a lot of these writers don’t know how to register their works. The [main] collection society has become super active now but for a very long time it was very dormant in its way of collection and the way it would pay out.

“These things need to be fixed and changed. That’ll only happen once there is a strong publisher going in and protecting those rights for writers, as well as helping them exploit them.”

The second issue, which is where things get slightly more complicated, is on the publisher side of things. Almost 99% of Indian songwriters are unpublished right now and for that reason, labels end up acquiring 100% of the publishing when they do song deals and they do it without offering any kind of advance, they just do it as a mandate. If the lead artist has decided to release with the music label, they’re going to control 100% of the publisher’s share of rights. They end up making hundreds of adaptations of these songs but they never go in for approval and songwriters never end up seeing the revenue from those.

These things need to be fixed and changed. That’ll only happen once there is a strong publisher going in and protecting those rights for writers, as well as helping them exploit them. That’s where I feel Outwrite is going to come in. The labels here respect us and understand that this is something that needs to be fixed, but they need stronger representation to actually have these conversations. I don’t feel like they’re doing it purposely. I don’t feel like they’re doing it because they don’t want to give [that control] away. I just feel like no one’s ever asked them, and no one’s talked to them about the right way to structure these deals. We are much better suited to be able to do that.

Can you give us a current overview of the state of the Indian music market generally and if anything else needs to change in order for it to become stronger?

A lot of us keep saying we’re in the golden era of music for India. We’re finally seeing a lot of conversations happening on the live event side and we’re seeing a lot of independent artists taking top chart positions. But I still feel like we’ve got a long way to go before we make that claim.

There’s a few things that have gone really well for us and a few things that have gone really wrong. A lot of the smaller, homegrown Indian DSPs have shut down in the last eight to nine months, like Wynk Music, Gaana and Resso. That has been a gigantic loss of revenue for the industry.

“We’re in the golden era of music for India.”

At the same time, I don’t feel there’s ever been a stronger moment when it comes to overall national sentiment for Indian music. Fans are going out and supporting Indian artists. They’re buying tickets, they’re championing them, they’re streaming them. They’re giving them the best social engagement one could expect. So overall revenue for an artist has gone up in terms of live events, brand deals and how much they get paid for a song. The economy and artists are doing well, but on the back end, the business side of things is still looking tricky.

Another big problem in India right now is the lack of TikTok, which would have been a very strong marketing machine to export Indian music globally. That’s one place we’re really losing out and we’re hopeful that Instagram Reels and Shorts is what’s going to cut it. But some kind of presence on TikTok is going to be key for any kind of global crossover.

The second thing that’s really positive right now is a lot of international tours are hitting India, which is opening up doors for artists to open for these acts, witness different layers of production and get consumers to start spending more money on a single ticket. Coldplay have sold out three shows [in Mumbai], Lollapalooza is doing extremely well in India and Bryan Adams is doing a sold-out tour. Dua Lipa sold 30,000 tickets in under 24 hours in India. That’s given us hope that consumers are ready to pay top dollar to watch good entertainment. We’re championing hard so they start doing the same thing for Indian artists.

Why did those local streaming services get shut down?

The problem is they all work on a freemium model and advertisers aren’t spending that much with these DSPs. At the same time, labels are taking minimum guarantees. So the content is high but the revenue coming in from advertising alone is so low that it kept them in the red for almost a decade and that’s very difficult to bounce back from. Unless we see more users going premium, this is going to continue to be a problem.

Spotify has multiple premium offerings in the country. They even offer seven day premium packages, which they probably don’t do anywhere else in the world. They are currently in the process of acquiring more premium users but the Indian consumer has been so used to getting free music because of YouTube, that that shift in positioning is taking a lot of time. It’s something the entire industry is going to have to solve together very soon. We can’t have more money leaving the table for reasons like this.

Despite all of those issues, you’re still finding that the acts that you’re working with are able to make a living from music.

They are very profitable but they are also outliers. They might be seeing great momentum right now but is this going to be sustainable for them in 10 years? That’s something I’m finding very difficult to answer because a lot of these things need to be fixed before it becomes a really sustainable economy for any kind of artist and creator.

Right now, they’re living in a golden phase where they’re making more money than any Indian artist ever has. They’re getting more opportunities than anyone else has. But we need to tighten and fix the foundation to be able to make this a sustainable long term journey.

What, in your eyes, makes a good music manager?

The first thing is, of course, having a great ear and being able to understand whether a song is a hit or not and what needs to change. Being a good A&R is very important for anyone who wants to be a good music manager. You need to be very empathetic because you’re working with people. You need to be super thick-skinned, especially in a market like India, where there are tons of people waiting to pull you down. You need to be a great marketer to make all of this come together. You need to be able to sell more than just a song or a show, you need to be able to sell the artist.

What are the biggest misconceptions that people working in developed markets like the US or the UK have about the Indian music market?

There’s a few things. The first is, they’ve tried to enter India for the longest time through various different outfits but they’ve done it at a time when the market was not ready. The market is ripe and ready for action right now and if investments are made during this time, that’s when you will see a real kind of return happening.

The second thing that a lot of developed markets think is that Hindi or Punjabi might be the language that will cross over. That’s going to be really difficult because they are not languages that are spoken globally. It’s going to be an Indian singing in English that is going to cross over. I feel like a lot of people in the West are not able to imagine that an Indian can speak fluent English although the majority of our country speaks in English, almost 90%.

The third is, because they’ve had limited access to people from the Indian market to educate them, there’s been a perception of, ‘We don’t know anyone here, we don’t know what’s happening and we don’t know whether we’re getting the right kind of information’. A lot of the conferences and different meetings that keep happening have changed that in the very recent past. We’re on the right track, but there are a few inhibitions that people need to let go of to see the true potential of a market like India.

If you could change one thing about the music industry, whether that’s globally or within India, what would it be and why?

A lot of the ways the rights and fundamentals of the music business have been structured has been very complicated. We have over complicated that entire piece, where you have multiple collection societies and multiple stakeholders. We’ve added red tape to something that could have been done easier or that can still be solved with stronger digitisation in any form.

Waiting almost three to six months for a royalty statement… that’s data that should be available in almost real time for artists. If the red tape that the music industry has consciously created around itself, and resulted in the over-complication of a lot of things, could be fixed or undone, that would make for a much stronger, more robust industry, which is a lot more transparent as well.

What’s your future plans and ambitions for Outwrite as well as Represent? Where would you like to see both companies in five to 10 years time?

With Outwrite, we’re looking to become a publishing superpower in India. I feel like Indian music is going to have a very strong global moment very soon and a lot of artists are going to want to understand how to get the Indian song right, how to work with Indian melodies, instrumentals, etc. Outwrite will be at the forefront of that. We’re going to change the way publishing has been thought of in India and the way writers and creators have been paid. We’re going to change the economics of that overall business as a whole, really soon. That is what we want to do over the next five years. We want Indian artists to be in the top five hits in the world and Outwrite is going to be the portal that’s going to make that happen.

With Represent, we are focused on making India a superpower when it comes to soft power. I feel like Korea has done an incredible job with K-pop and K-Culture in general and we at Represent are going to be able to do the same, and more, for India on a global as well as national level. We’re very deep into pop culture. This is beyond just music, this includes creators and D2C products. Represent is going to be at the forefront of pop culture in India and at the forefront of exporting pop culture from India internationally.

Trailblazers is supported by TuneCore. TuneCore provides self-releasing artists with technology and services across distribution, publishing administration, and a range of promotional services. TuneCore is part of Believe.

Music Business Worldwide