Text: Ari Stein

Photo: Via MySapce

Most people don’t associate dance music with the sub-continent of India, but a recent article published in the Economic Times in India highlighted the rising popularity and growth of electronic music in the country.

The music industry in India is worth about 70 million rupees (15 million USD), but the Indian electronic music market accounts for roughly three to four percent of that total, as compared to eight percent in the UK and one percent in the US. These healthy figures show that more and more people are taking notice of the genre. With UK-based Indian electronic music artists like Mercury Award winner Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney and ragga-pop group Asian Dub Foundation filtering out to the world, indigenous Indian electronic music has quietly crept through the backdoor, finding a comfortable place in clubs and festivals.

The progress is slow but notable: BASSFoundation has set up a monthly drum & bass and dubstep night in New Delhi, Udyan Sagar‘s minimal electro sounds are gaining recognition, online radio station Radio79 mainly broadcasts indigenous electronic music, and the soon-to-be-published Ggrunt magazine will cover electronic culture in India.

Although Bollywood, trance and Goa are the dominant stereotypes, this developing nation of one billion people might eventually bring us some of the biggest electronic names of the next decade.

(Source: http://www.electronicbeats.net/News/Music/India-warms-to-electronic-music )