For decades, an independent musician’s road to listeners ran through a record label’s door — and the toll was steep, often the ownership of the music itself. A new crop of music-tech startups is now dismantling that toll booth.
Platforms such as Madverse and Damroo are building, brick by digital brick, the infrastructure that labels once monopolised — pushing indie tracks onto Spotify, Apple Music, JioSaavn and YouTube, while handling everything from royalty collection and rights administration to marketing and audience-building. The pitch is simple and seductive: label-grade muscle, without signing away your masters or your creative soul.
The opportunity springs from India’s exploding independent music scene. Hindi film music still towers over streaming with an 80% share, but non-film artists are closing the gap fast — their slice is projected to swell to 30-40% in the coming years. More than 40,000 active music creators now churn out tens of thousands of original non-film tracks every year, powered by cheap data, affordable production tools and listeners hungry for regional and independent sounds.
“The rise of music-tech platforms like Madverse and Damroo reflects a shift by which independent artists no longer need a traditional label to reach audiences at scale,” said Rajesh Sethi, partner and leader-media, entertainment and sports, PwC India.
What artists do need is a professional support system that guards their rights — and that, until recently, barely existed. “It became obvious to us early on that the tools available to these artists were obsolete,” Rohan Jain, founder and CEO of Madverse Music Group, an AI-first platform, told FE. Royalty collection was broken or simply missing for most independent creators, he said, while sync and OTT opportunities went only to those who knew the right people at a label. “Going the traditional label route meant signing away ownership of your work,” Jain said.
The growth curve tells its own story. Madverse crossed 100,000 artists within two years of launch, topped 150,000 by early 2026, and has now onboarded over 200,000 independent artists and labels across more than 45 countries. It releases music on all major platforms worldwide — Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music — and lets musicians keep up to 100% ownership of their masters.
Distribution is just the opening act. The platform also collects royalties from streaming and public performances, administers music publishing, and opens doors to sync licensing across films, advertising and OTT. Marketing firepower — playlist pitching, pre-save campaigns, performance marketing — comes bundled with AI-powered guidance on distribution, royalties and career calls. Labels and artist managers get their own dashboard to run multiple artists, catalogue operations and analytics.
The money flows in from several directions: subscription fees, a share of royalties, and value-added services spanning marketing, analytics, content monetisation and rights management. Musicians sign up for creator and professional plans to distribute their music and unlock tools for rights management, analytics and promotion.
Publishing administration — registering works globally and collecting royalties — brings in more, as does sync licensing, where platforms broker placements in films, advertising and OTT content and share the licensing revenue. Artist and label services round it off, marketing releases through growth funding and brand and sync partnerships.
Damroo plays a similar tune, offering digital distribution, publishing administration, YouTube growth management, marketing support, artist collaborations, royalty collection support and financial assistance for content production. Founder Ram Mishra believes that for all the incredible rise in independent and regional talent, many artists still wrestle with visibility, monetisation and long-term career support.
The Indian upstarts aren’t alone on stage — global B2B players TuneCore, DistroKid and CD Baby are also working the same crowd.