Apna Sangeet, Apni Azaadi
India’s connection with music goes back thousands of years. Long before most cultures even defined music as an art, the subcontinent was treating it as science, philosophy and spiritual practice. Yet today, in the global music industry, Indian music often sits at the edges of a system it quietly influenced for centuries.
From the Sama Veda to Saptaswara, we built some of the world’s earliest ideas of musical structure. Our seven notes, our raga system, our rhythmic cycles they weren’t just sounds. They were emotional maps, rules of expression and complete worlds of their own.
These ideas didn’t remain here. Over the last few centuries, Western composers and musicians from Holst to Messiaen, Coltrane to The Beatles borrowed deeply from Indian melodic and rhythmic thinking. Our music reshaped their sound. But most of the profits, the copyrights, the industry power flowed elsewhere.
History repeated itself. When the West industrialized music through vinyl, cassettes, radio and record labels, we were still passing down knowledge orally through guru–shishya traditions and baithaks. They treated art as an asset. We treated it as sacred. And in business, the asset mindset won.
Today India is one of the biggest streaming markets on the planet. Our listeners stream endlessly and our creators work in every language and style you can imagine. But our global revenue footprint is still small. Not because the talent is lacking, but because the structure is stacked against us labels that dominate, royalty systems that are vague, rights data that is hard to access or prove.
We are not behind in creativity. We’re behind in organization.
The West built a machine for documentation, rights, distribution and monetization. We built depth, improvisation and musical complexity. Both matter, but one turns art into power and income.
That’s where things are shifting now.
Independent artists across India are finally asking the questions we avoided for decades. Who owns my work? Where is my money going? Why are the systems so hard to navigate? And most importantly which platforms actually value me?
Technology has made it easier than ever to create and release. But the bigger decision is invisible: every time an Indian artist chooses a platform, they choose which economy they support. An expensive, opaque, foreign-first system drains value out of our ecosystem. A transparent, Indian-first platform keeps that value here.
Your platform choice is no longer just a technical call. It’s cultural.
India won political freedom in 1947. Cultural and economic freedom in music is the next step. It means fair royalties, honest reporting, simple rights documentation, and supporting Indian tools that genuinely care about creators.
That’s the spirit behind Swatantra Sangeet.
Our music should stay ours. Our earnings should stay ours. The world learned from Indian music. Now Indian artists must learn the world’s business - without giving up ownership again.
Apna Sangeet, Apni Azaadi.
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