How BookMyShow Is Helping Turn India Into A Global Concert Market
There are no words to describe the emotional and spiritual experience that was Lollapalooza India 2026. Talking about the festival, its magic, its role as a gateway for international artists into the world of some of their most loyal fans, isn’t the hard part. Nor is talking about the invaluable amount of business that could be unlocked for both domestic and foreign tours across this vast country. That’s all backed by facts and numbers. The impossible part is talking about the place all of this is happening in: India. The beauty. The chaos. The food. The mind-boggling wealth and poverty. The ambition. The spirit. The intensity. The pure joy.
It hits you the moment you exit the plane: heat and moisture. Before you see anything of India, you feel it. As you leave the terminal, hundreds of people waiting, waving hands and signs, expecting loved ones and clients, shouting words in Marathi, Hindi, Urdu. Before you see anything of the city, you hear it.
Lollapalooza India takes place in Mumbai, the capital of the state of Maharashtra, formerly known as Bombay, which is how many locals still refer to it. Here, the journey from the airport to the city center is slow, noisy, and nothing for the faint-hearted – or the claustrophobic. At times, you’ll find yourself wedged between giant trucks, huffing and puffing, their colorful handwritten warnings, greetings, bible verses or letters in the Devanagari script right up against your window. Looking out front and back, more cars, trucks, rickshaws, and the odd cart pulled by a mule. When people cross these roads, they hold out their arms in a confident plea that somehow never gets ignored. Pedestrians inching across the streets between vehicles that are inching along past them: that’s the common sight on India’s city roads, and the manner in which most people arrived at Lollapalooza on both days.
Calum Scott, one of this year’s main stage performers from Britain, sums it up, “India is chaos, and there’s beauty in that. It takes you an hour to get anywhere, but it’s always worth it. Every time you arrive somewhere and get out of the car, you’re amazed. When we were in Delhi, we got to go to the Akshardham Temple. Stunning. You leave your phone behind, take off your shoes, and you walk around this temple, take in the magnificent artworks, and get a sense of how deeply Indian people care about their country, their people, their religion. It makes me want to spend more time here. If I did, I’d be the size of a house. I love Gulab Jamun, I love Pani Puri, I love Samosa. And having my collaboration with (Indian artist) Armaan Malik, it just connected me even deeper to India.”
Scott is the type of artist who’s made for this journey: dedicated to going deep into the country, meeting his fans in places that have never seen an international tour come through before, and taking a cut on profits, because the venue infrastructure for most of these concerts has to be transported and built from scratch each time. It would be way more sustainable for an artist of his caliber to tour the UK and Europe, given the inflationary cost of touring in general, even without the added logistical challenge of visiting remote locations.
He doesn’t care, though. “To know that somebody has connected with your music, maybe to commemorate a huge life moment, is the highest honor. When you go to see people in their home cities, and you sing your songs, and see all those people singing them back, it’s as close to magic as I think you can get. So, touring, for me, is much more than going from city to city and singing songs. It’s going and visiting the hearts that have let you in.”
It’s not his first visit to India. “It was a lovely ginger-head fella named Ed Sheeran that brought me here for the first time in 2024,” Scott recalls, “Mumbai was the first show. I walked on stage, and they erupted. Their reaction caught me off guard, because, first time in India, I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know if people know me here.’ And I was welcomed so warmly. So this is my second time in Mumbai, and this is what it’s all about: come in, make my claim, create a buzz, come back, and people come to see your shows. Hopefully, this is something I can build on throughout India.”
The night Scott supported Ed Sheeran in Mumbai was March 16, 2024. Sheeran had been to India several times by that point, but this was his biggest headline show to date in front of almost 50,000 fans at Mahalaxmi Racecourse, the same site that also hosts Lollapalooza. And just like the festival, where Pollstar met Scott and everybody else that has their say in this story, the concert was produced by BookMyShow Live, the international touring and live events arm of BookMyShow.
BookMyShow grew out of Big Tree Entertainment, founded by Ashish Hemrajani, Parikshit Dar and Rajesh Balpande in 1999, initially as a platform for movie ticketing solutions. Indians are cinema lovers. Most foreigners think of Bollywood, but India is a patchwork of multiple states and cultures, and the movie industry reflects that. There’s the Tamil movie industry, the Telugu industry, the Malayalam industry, etc., which are just as big, if not larger than, Bollywood. Big Tree Entertainment was catering to each, with staff understanding the regional language and culture. BookMyShow launched in 2007 and took this business online.
When the pandemic hit, BookMyShow was employing some 1,600 people. During the lockdowns, that number went down to around 600. The dev team used the forced two-year break to rewrite the entire product software, making the business so much more efficient that it is now “three times the size, two times more complex, two times more profitable, but with around 600 people,” according to founder & CEO Ashish Hemrajani.
BookMyShow Live is the name for that part of the business that represents the next phase of evolution, extending the company’s role from ticketing into full-scale live entertainment production and promotion. Operating in a market where venue infrastructure is still catching up with demand, the business has taken on the task of enabling touring at scale by investing in production capabilities, standardizing execution, and building the backbone required to host global acts.
Speaking with Pollstar on site at Lolla India, Hemrajani recalls meeting Sheeran in 2024: “He said he wanted to go deep. I said, ‘I can’t go deep and take a risk unless you do a versus deal.’ He said, ‘Done,’ and that was it. We first went to Bhutan, and then did Pune, Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Shillong in the northeast of the country, which is a huge music market. It was the first full Indian tour leg by an international artist in our history.”
Sheeran brought his full “+ – = ÷ x” production to almost 130,000 fans in India between Jan. 30 and Feb. 15, 2025. Yet, it wasn’t the first international superstar to make history in India that year. Coldplay gave what became the world’s largest ticketed stadium concert in history: more than 111,000 tickets per show across two nights at Ahmedabad’s Narendra Modi Stadium, Jan 25-26, 2025, and 54,000 people per show across three nights at Mumbai’s DY Patil Stadium, Jan. 18-21. The shows, promoted by BookMyShow Live, grossed $15,696,814 and $12,819,848, respectively, according to the box office reports submitted to Pollstar.
“We could have sold 10 or 20 dates more in each location,” says Hemrajani. And that’s not even touching on the economic impact the Coldplay shows had on the local market, including tourism effects, reported to be INR642 crores [$75 million], as well as INR72 crores [$8 million] in tax contributions.
BookMyShow’s Chief Business Officer – Live Events, Naman Pugalia, says, “Ed and Coldplay are unique in the sense that India is not a touring stop for them, but an idea, a culture, a musical heritage that is deeply embedded in their journeys. They’ve been coming here for many years, and you hear a lot of Indian elements in their sound. We were extremely fortunate to work with them.”
See: Inside Ed Sheeran’s “Mathematics” Run In India With BookMyShow’s Naman Pugalia
The remainder of 2025 held several more company milestones in store for BookMyShow Live, including the third edition of Lollapalooza headlined by Green Day and Shawn Mendes; the first concert in India as a full band by Guns N’ Roses, who sold almost 50,000 tickets for their May 17 performance at Mahalaxmi Racecourse; Travis Scott, closing the “Circus Maximus Tour” after two years on the road in a run anchored by India; plus Jon Batiste, Post Malone, and AP Dhillon.
Via its sister company Sunburn, BookMyShow moved the famous electronic music festival by the same name from Goa to Mumbai for the first time in its 18-year history, and also brought Keinemusik to India, who returned last March. TribeVibe, the name of BookMyShow’s domestic business, promoted several iconic Indian acts, including Zakir Khan, Samay Raina, Vishal–Shekhar, Armaan Malik, and the list goes on.
The story of BookMyShow is remarkable considering that the company was never founded to get into the promoter’s game. “We didn’t want to be in this business,” recalls Hemrajani, “We were up-fronting guarantees to other promoters, which is when we realized the reason the market wasn’t scaling was because they didn’t focus on the fans. From the toilets to ingress, egress, safety standards, barricading, staging, lighting – everything was a mess. It was a gold rush, promoters were waving a lot of money, doing one-offs, under-declaring ticket sales to the talent, as well as the government, and cutting corners wherever possible. Artists didn’t have a great experience, and neither did the fans, who would rather go to see shows outside of India. This prevented India from becoming a real market. Fans always remember the guy who took their money, which used to be BookMyShow, therefore we had no option other than to begin taking care of the whole value chain. That’s how we got into this business: reluctantly.”
BookMyShow invested in everything from barricading, cable ramps, stages, decking, to bleachers, scaffolding and corner blocks, ordering all of it from Europe and America. Artists do not have to compromise on production, according to Pugalia, who explains, “Everybody who’s come here thus far has traveled with their full tour kit. We not only are able to address their touring requirements in a manner that speaks to their full rider, but are often able to provide infrastructure support on ground that sometimes does away with the need of traveling with everything. That’s a sure sign of maturity. The shows by Coldplay, Guns N’ Roses or Travis Scott in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad are equivalent to the shows they would do at Wembley or The O2 or Madison Square Garden. And I promise you that this market is only going to get better as we, as a company, and the broader ecosystem invest in all the things that are needed to ensure that touring standards are defined in the future.”
According to Hemrajani, artists are returning home with an experience that “wasn’t just good enough for India. It was good enough, period. Artists started connecting with their fans, and that’s what opened up the market. By the end of this year, 50 international artists will have come through and done tours with us in India. And this number will keep doubling.”
In many ways, Lollapalooza India epitomizes the work BookMyShow Live has been doing. Here, you see it all on full display: the stages, the barriers, the stalls, the concessions, the decorations, and, of course, the food. Every part of India seems to be represented across the countless stalls and bars, so incredibly rich in spice and flavor, there is simply no other cuisine like it on earth.
Like all other Lollas across the world, the festival is the brainchild of Perry Farrell and promoted by C3 Presents, which integrates with the local promoter partner from day one across every department, developing best practices and setting the expectations for what the festival experience should be. The local promoter then executes the show and, alongside the audience arriving from all parts of the country, infuses it with its unique culture and soul. “Geographically,” says Pugalia, “this is one of Mumbai’s biggest moments. This is as much a celebration of the diversity of food that India has to offer as it is a celebration of music.”
This year’s headliner was a real statement to how far the market has come: Linkin Park, who’ve had a huge Indian fanbase for decades, but wanted to wait for the right time, seeing that “the live show is something we put a lot of thought, energy and love into,” as the band’s co-founder Mike Shinoda tells Pollstar, “When we create a show, I want people to have a-one-of-a-kind experience. When we were getting started, I was only half-joking when I said I wanted these shows to be a life-changing chapter for people. When you come see the show, and you walk out of it, I want you to go, ‘Oh my god, the world is different now.’ It’s a high bar to create something that does that for people, but the only way to get there is to shoot for it.”
Shinoda is deeply involved in every show Linkin Park take on the road. “I love all of it,” he says, “from little post-its sitting on a table to the first concept on paper to renderings of the production, and details like where to stage the lasers, the smoke, etc., making it fit into different rooms, all of that stuff. It’s a lot of fun to build a show. And shout out to our (project manager and tour director) Jim Digby, but also (director and designer) Mike Carson and his team, who was at the top of our list of people we wanted to work with, ever since seeing the Kendrick Lamar show.”
In order to make sure fans got the exact show as envisioned by the band, the market had to be ready. “We’ve been hearing from fans for 15, 20 years, that they wanted us to come play. So why didn’t we show up earlier? We were waiting until we had enough confidence that all of the little details of the infrastructure were ready to support the scale of the show we like to put on. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen bigger shows than ours, but there’s technical requirements. The question always was, ‘Will the fans get what we intend to present, at the level of quality we want to give them?’ Our team has been watching the market closely, Jim in particular. He’s been going to watch shows in India over the past two years, and he came in with a glowing report of what he saw with BookMyShow Live. That’s when we knew the time was right,” Shinoda explains.
Production-wise, you really couldn’t tell in which part of the world you were watching two full hours of Linkin Park’s hits, anthems, and new material. By the time they took the stage at 7 p.m., the heavy heat from the day had evaporated and given way to a light breeze. The lit-up skyscrapers of Downtown Mumbai rose up in the distance just like in any other modern metropolis. What gave it away was the construction dust in the air, which made the lasers look extra vivid; eagles soaring instead of pigeons; and the kind of energy you only get from a crowd that’s been waiting for their favorite band for decades.
When Linkin Park walked out to their epic “Inception”-inspired intro leading into “Somewhere I Belong,” and Shinoda rapped the opening lines, “When this began,” the audience took over. For the next two hours, the band could have switched off the mics, and every single lyric would have still echoed across Mumbai’s night sky, because the fans didn’t let up.
They had been arriving the moment the gates opened on day two, some jogging, some running, steadily filling up the space in front of the main stage. They saw performances by Trance Effect, Gaff x Savera, Calum Scott, and Bloodywood, before Linkin Park came on, just after the sun had set over the Arabian Sea. A white wall, positioned in the middle of the festival site for people to leave messages, was covered in Chester Bennington tributes and other expressions of love for Linkin Park.
When the band finally met these old and new fans, it really felt magical. From a business perspective, it felt like a temporary pinnacle to what Pugalia describes as “a landmark year for us. When we look back many years later, we will regard this moment in time as the inflection point for India’s live entertainment.”
With The Lumineers, John Mayer, Def Leppard, Scorpions, Calvin Harris all in the books for the first half of 2026, this year is already on track to be significantly bigger than 2025. “We’re seeing a strong response to everything we throw at the market. There are a few genres we haven’t tried, like Country or Latin. But we’re adventurous, happy to experiment, and I feel like Indian audiences and their listening preferences are evolving in a faster and more sophisticated manner than we as promoters can imagine,” says Pugalia, adding, “We’ve yet to announce some of the folks we’ve already signed up for our next season.”
The seasonality of India’s outdoor touring is a consequence of its hot summer and wet monsoon period, during which it’s impossible to host outdoor events. It’s clear that indoor venues are the next piece in the puzzle. Right now, the team at BookMyShow Live is lugging around copious amounts of materials in order to bring all of the aforementioned spectacle to the people. “It takes me six to, in some cases, 16 trucks of steel to move my stage around the country. Last night, Linkin Park played in Bangalore. I had a stage plonked down, and set up this whole city for 40,000 people, just to tear it down again a few hours later. By the time I put up a show and tear it back down, I’m down by a million bucks. It’s stupid.”
BookMyShow has started to store infrastructure permanently at strategic locations around the country to simplify logistics, but it’s a temporary solution. Arenas are the way to go, and, according to Pugalia, “there are teams figuring out our venue play as we speak. We’re looking at most major cities in the country, whether it’s BookMyShow by itself, whether through our partners, we’re developing venues of all types, permanent, semi-permanent, which are able to extend the touring window and ensure that we’re able to grow our supply as fast as demand is growing. Over your next few trips, we’ll be having a conversation which will already involve an annual calendar, as opposed to the semi-annual one we currently have to work with.”
Hemrajani is a son of Bombay through and through. He’s grown up and lived in a 500-meter radius right in the heart of this concrete jungle all his life. He travels a lot, but when he returns home, that 500-meter radius becomes his entire world. It’s not hard to believe from personal experience: there wasn’t much ground to cover between the hotel and the festival, maybe a three-mile stretch. Yet, it felt like one lifetime wasn’t enough to explore, let alone understand and appreciate, even this little piece of India. Mom-and-pop shops everywhere selling everything, in-between supermarkets and megastores, churches, schools, and thousands of food trucks, snack and sweet stalls, machines that squeeze juice out of sugar cane, flats stacked on top of each other, forming a gigantic maze. Its alleys look impenetrable, a mass of people spilling in and out non-stop. Beggars, bankers, students, rickshaw drivers, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, brown, white, Black, all becoming one in the flow of this most wondrous part of the world.
Hemrajani grew up right in the thick of it. He’s fully aware of the immense discrepancies in spending power between the top two million people, who are “among the richest in the world,” a cohort of some 30 million in “control of about 70% of the wealth of the country,” a fast-emerging middle class of about 400 to 500 million people that “didn’t exist until 15 years ago,” and about 400 million of “underserved, undernourished, and over-exploited” people mostly reliant on charity. BookMyShow’s international business caters mostly to the wealthiest two demographics, while the movies are the go-to form of entertainment for almost everybody else. And through its charity Book A Change, “we put 2% of our profits back to serve the underserved with sport, music, art, and theater programs. We deliver musical instruments to municipal schools, as well as teachers to train students.”
According to Hemrajani, India was never poor. “The wealth was just concentrated in the years after we gained our independence, when the country was very socialistic. Few people could abuse the system and corner the money.” That changed with what he describes as “a stable democratic government elected by the people, now in its third term and likely to win a fourth. With stability in government came a few defining moments. One was the goods and services tax (introduced in 2017), which got a lot of people into the tax code. The other thing was the world’s most audacious, unique identification scheme, the Aadhaar (launched in 2009). 95% of Indians didn’t have a passport; they were nameless, faceless. Today, 1.3 billion Indians carry a unique identification number, all digitized, including facial recognition. There were only 200 million people who had a bank account. Today, anybody with an Aadhaar ID can start a bank account in under five minutes on their mobile. 10, 15 years ago, there were only 25 million credit cards in this country. Today, a billion-plus people can make a payment in various ways through India’s Unified Payments Interface. Everybody has come into the fold of the economy. The intersection of these three things changed the game. The economy is growing at 8%, it’s the world’s fourth largest GDP, and one of the youngest demographics with an average age of 27.”
And Puglaia urges “all of your readers, listeners, viewers, to make their way to India to understand what the future holds for them, for music, for culture at large, because this is a market of 1.4 billion people that is going to define the future of everything live.”
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