CultureCon 2026: 'India’s live music infrastructure is still catching up…"

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India is currently seeing a boom in music concerts over the last few years, and it is only going to build from here as festival organisers and event management companies come together along with artists to produce unique experiences. 

While the concerts are taking place across the country like Gurugram, Bengaluru and Kolkata, Mumbai is often at the centre of it all as it is often the start or end if not a pitstop for many Indian and international musicians and bands. 

Even as this music concert tourism evolves, and the economy flourishes, there are many challenges that loom over them – often making the experiences unsatisfactory. While for some it is the cancellations of concerts, for others it is the ticketing, and for more it is the logistics that often dissuade them or leave them half convinced about spending money on the concerts. 

Earlier this August, Mumbai hosted CultureCon 2026 at the NCPA with engaging discussions on India’s creative economy. The two-day event saw artists, entrepreneurs, cultural practitioners and sector leaders to debate ideas, careers, capital and cultural infrastructure defining the future of the sector. One of the many interesting sessions ‘FISHBOWL – Building a Music Venue Circuit’ and had the likes of Girish ‘Bobby’ Talwar, Dev Bhatia, Dipti Rao, Jishnu Dasgupta, Mahesh Mathai, Rafael Pereira, Aparajita Mukherjee and Roydon Bangera.
 
Ahead of the music festival season in the country, we asked them about the challenges faced by organisers, and how can attendees have a better experience, and they had some very interesting insights.

‘India’s festival culture is still young’

Dev Bhatia, COO, Big Bad Wolf, shared, “Venues far from the city is largely a cost and availability problem. Large-capacity venues close to city centres are scarce, expensive, and often come with noise and licensing restrictions that push organisers to the outskirts. It’s cheaper and easier to get permissions farther away, but it pushes the commute and transport burden entirely onto the fan.”

He added, “Movement within large festival venues comes down to crowd planning that hasn’t caught up with the scale of these events. India’s festival culture is still young compared to markets like Europe, so a lot of organisers are learning crowd flow, signage, and zoning in real time rather than working off years of accumulated data.”

‘India’s live music infrastructure is still catching up’

On the other hand, Girish ‘Bobby’ Talwar, founder of Rebellion Management & Entertainment, gives a reality check, saying, “Most of these come down to one thing. India’s live music infrastructure is still catching up with the ambition of its event calendar. We’re booking world-class acts and selling out shows, but the ecosystem around the show is still being built. Venues close to town can’t hold large crowds, so organisers go to the outskirts. And even when venues can handle the capacity, the surrounding infrastructure, roads, transit, entry and exit points, aren’t built to manage the sudden surge of thousands of people arriving and leaving at the same time. Delays are rarely about poor planning. They’re technical realities, a sound check that ran long, a changeover that hit a snag, and real-time communication with audiences isn’t always possible. Pricing isn’t expensive or cheap. It’s based on the economics of each concert, artist fees, production, marketing, logistics. Every show has a different cost structure, which determines the ticket price. These challenges exist even in mature concert economies. It takes growth and development on both sides, from an infrastructure and organisers’ perspective as well as from an audience perspective in terms of their understanding and expectations of a concert experience. The best live experiences happen when both develop together, moving towards a better experience all around.” 

‘There needs to be a greater spread of festival or concert formats’

Speaking from the lens of a musician, Jishnu Dasgupta, who is the bass guitarist and artist manager with Swarathma, shares, “Swarathma has performed at festivals all over the country and we’ve observed up close the challenges that promoters face in putting a concert together. My heart goes out to the organisers for whom it’s quite literally a superhuman task to jump through the regulatory hoops, meet the expectations of the artists, do justice to the required production quality, and after all that be at the receiving end of flak from the fans who feel that the experience left much to be desired. As artists, we believe there needs to be a greater spread of festival or concert formats. We now see only two ends of the spectrum: either a small club or a mega multi-stage festival, or a marquee international act. There is room for more formats and experiences: ones around sustainability, regional identities or genre-based explorations are some that come to mind.” 

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