Concerts emerge as high-impact brand platform in India in 2025

New Delhi: In 2025, India didn’t just attend concerts. It moved to them. From stadiums packed with screaming fans in Delhi and Mumbai, to cities shutting down traffic for Punjabi rap nights, to sitar-led mental health evenings and yoga-infused bhajan concerts selling out silently, but completely! India witnessed a cultural shift. 

Concerts were no longer “events.” They became platforms. And for brands, they became one of the most effective BTL-led revenue and visibility engines of the year. What changed in 2025 was not just scale; it was structure.

Live music took multiple avatars: mass-pop frenzy, spiritual wellness gatherings, indie showcases, global crossover tours, and even purpose-driven performances. Together, they created a year-round, multi-city ecosystem that brands could no longer afford to ignore.

The frenzy

The most visible proof of the concert boom came from headline tours. Diljit Dosanjh’s Dil-Luminati tour turned into a nationwide cultural moment. International artists like Travis Scott, Tyla, and Dua Lipa’s India tour in 2025 elevated concerts into global advertising magnets. Their performances pulled premium brands, international sponsors, and luxury advertisers. Even nostalgia had scale. Himesh Reshammiya’s live performances tapped into millennial recall, pulling massive crowds and unlocking a different advertiser demographic.

What stood out was not just attendance, but repeatability. These were not one-off gigs. Artists planned multi-city, tightly produced tours, often spanning 8–12 cities, offering brands consistent exposure over weeks.

Beyond Pop, 2025 also expanded the definition of what a “concert” meant. At one end was Rishabh Sharma, whose sitar-led performances positioned music as a mental health and mindfulness experience. On the spiritual-cultural spectrum, Krishna Das and Acyuta Gopi’s kirtan concerts gained momentum, reflecting how devotional and conscious music carved its own commercial lane. Together, these formats proved one thing: live music wasn’t one market, it was multiple overlapping consumer tribes.

Why brands followed the crowd

For years, concerts sat under “experiential,” often the first line item to be cut during budget tightening. That changed decisively in 2025. As Rupali Chavan, SVP & Head of Business, Mudramax, put it:

“As live music becomes a year-round phenomenon across metros and Tier 2 markets, brands now see concerts not merely as entertainment events but as high-impact consumer access points. The ability to reach hyper-engaged audiences, generate real-time content, and create brand moments that travel online has made concerts a part of integrated media plans rather than optional add-ons. They now sit closer to large-format impact platforms like sports and marquee reality shows.”

“Concerts have moved out of the 'nice-to-have' zone. While they still sit under experiential marketing, concerts are now planned much earlier in the media cycle and are often treated as big brand moments rather than one-off activations,” Yogendra Vishwakaarma, Asst. Vice-President - Brand Operations, AGENCY09 added.

“Concerts are not yet at the scale of TV or digital, but here's what's changed: concerts are increasingly being planned alongside core media rather than as an afterthought. For brands targeting Gen Z and millennials, concerts have moved from being a one-off experiential activity to a strategic engagement layer that sits within the broader media plan,” Manish Solanki, COO and Co-founder, TheSmallBigIdea, highlighted.

Budgets follow impact

The money followed quickly. “Brands are steadily increasing allocation toward live events. While the share varies by category, we’re seeing 5–10% of annual marketing budgets for specific categories being earmarked for concert-led activations, compared to 2–3% three years ago. For youth-focused categories, this number can go up to 15%,” Chavan noted.

“Concert budget isn’t impulsive anymore; it’s planned, measured, and expected to deliver both experience and visibility,” Vishwakaarma underscored.

Amita Srivastava, Senior Vice President, Account Management, Carat India noted that while overall marketing budgets are expanding, allocation towards concerts is becoming increasingly strategic, “Budgets have grown meaningfully, but not uniformly. For brands that actively lean into culture-driven engagement, youth platforms, digital-first brands, beverages, smartphones, audio-tech, and fintech, concert investments now account for 3–7% of annual marketing spends, compared to 1–2% just a few years ago. For brands with deeper experiential strategies, the share can go up to 10% for the year, particularly when integrated with influencer, content, and retail amplification. The shift mirrors the broader cultural relevance of live events rather than being a universal reallocation.”

“While live events and concert-led activations typically account for a modest share of overall brand budgets, surrogate brands allocate a significantly higher proportion of their marketing spend to this channel compared to most other categories. For brands operating under advertising restrictions, live events, music properties, and cultural platforms are not peripheral spends but core visibility drivers,” said Solanki.

Categories leading the charge

The advertiser mix diversified rapidly. “The biggest momentum is coming from FMCG, beverages, tech, telecom, fashion, and new-age fintech/BFSI players,” said Chavan.

“FMCG and beverages see concerts as a youth loyalty and sampling engine. Tech and telecom brands leverage them for product trials, AR/VR experiences, and community building. BFSI and fintech are using concerts as a way to humanise their brand and tap into upwardly mobile audiences. Punjabi music, indie artists, and international tours have widened the category appeal significantly,” she explained.

“BFSI brands are also entering the space, though not for scale, they're using concerts for brand rejuvenation and emotional connection, particularly with younger audiences who otherwise see banks and financial services as transactional, not experiential. These categories see concerts as a way to humanize the brand and build cultural relevance. It's not about reach alone; it's about creating associations that matter to audiences who value experiences over advertising,” Solanki explained.

Where does the concert sit in the media mix?

One of the biggest shifts of 2025 was where concerts sat in the media mix. “Concerts now operate as a hybrid impact platform, not strictly ATL or BTL,” Chavan explained.

“They deliver deep engagement like experiential and mass visibility like ATL, thanks to digital/social spillover,” she added.

“In practice, concerts now sit alongside IPL-like properties at the awareness layer, with influencer marketing at the engagement layer and on-ground sampling at the conversion layer. This multi-layer value makes concerts a multi-touchpoint vehicle rather than a siloed activation,” said Chavan.  That’s what makes them unique; they compress the funnel.

“The way brands see it today, the ATL spend isn’t promoting the concert; it’s amplifying the brand’s presence within a cultural moment. The concert may be experienced by thousands, but ATL and digital push that association to millions. If a brand has already invested in exclusive rights, not amplifying it would mean under-leveraging the opportunity,” Vishwakaarma explained.

Paying the premium for culture

Brands are no longer hesitant to pay top dollar for exclusivity. “brands are increasingly willing to pay premium rates for exclusive rights, stage branding, VIP lounges, meet-and-greets, and content IP. The rationale is simple: exclusive assets lead to exclusive attention,” said Chavan.

Addressing the rising cost of premium concert partnerships, Srivastava explained, “brands are increasingly paying premiums for stage rights, IP ownership, VIP zones, broadcast extensions, and content exclusivity. The justification rests on two pillars: cultural ownership and content flywheel. The former gives the brand a role in shaping the cultural moment; the latter ensures months of high-performance content, creator collabs, social amplification, and retail integration. When the concert becomes a content engine rather than a one-night event, the ROI improves significantly.”

Further she pointed out that while concerts have emerged as powerful cultural platforms, their effectiveness depends on brand-context fit: Concerts today function as a cultural anchor around which multiple touchpoints orbit. But they are still used by specific brands, not universally across categories.

For example, we’ve seen brands like boAt, JBL, Spotify, Budweiser, Kingfisher, HSBC, Kotak, Croma integrate concerts as part of their broader ecosystem, combining influencer content, digital storytelling, retail activation, and OOH visibility. So while concerts are powerful, they work best for brands for whom music is a natural adjacency and cultural capital is a strategic priority. They complement TV and digital but do not replace them; instead, they deliver the emotional intensity that mass media cannot.

“Agencies justify the investment through guaranteed on-ground impressions, which is the footfall across multi-city tours. Digital content multipliers, for example: Reels, YouTube recaps, behind-the-scenes and Brand IP creation that lasts beyond the event. Premium audience quality, high-spend, high-social-sharing consumers also play a part,” Chavan added.

“When viewed through that lens, not just as 'we sponsored a concert,' but as 'we created a content ecosystem and cultural association,' the cost per impression and cost per engagement often compare favourably with traditional premium media. The key is treating the concert as a brand asset, not just an event,” Solanki explained

Measuring what once felt intangible

Concert ROI has also matured. “ROI for concerts is now measured using a combination of on-ground, digital, and brand-lift metrics,” Chavan explained.

This includes footfall, QR scans, sampling conversions, social engagement, sentiment, and creator amplification. Furthermore, brand recall, favourability studies, promo codes and geo-targeted retargeting also got added to the bouquet of deliverables for marketers, she noted.

“Agencies are increasingly using AI-led social listening, heat-mapping tools, and mobile audience retargeting to complete the loop between experience and online behaviour,” she added.

“It’s no longer about 'vibes alone. ' Brands want numbers, and today, those numbers are very much available,” Vishwakaarma put it bluntly.

Why ATL still matters

Despite being BTL at heart, concerts leaned heavily on ATL in 2025. “While concerts are inherently BTL, promoting them through ATL-OOH, radio, digital, influencers, creates a funnel effect that maximises ROI,” Chavan noted. A brand that has already invested in concert rights needs to amplify awareness to unlock the full value of that exclusivity.

The ATL layer helps:

• Build momentum and anticipation

• Deliver mass reach, which BTL alone cannot provide

• Boost event attendance, driving more on-ground interactions

• Creating a halo effect that feeds into brand campaigns even after the concert, Chavan explained. Wrapping up, she said, “The ATL amplification unlocks the value of the BTL investment. Without awareness, the sponsorship sits underleveraged.”

Meanwhile, Srivastava, highlighted a growing challenge brands face when investing in live entertainment partnerships. “This tension is real and growing. Brands often secure expensive concert rights and then face the need to invest again in ATL to amplify the event. The justification lies in treating the ATL not as an add-on but as the multiplier. ATL builds scale, drives attendance, fuels FOMO, and ensures that the brand’s cultural moment reaches far beyond the venue.

Agencies usually plan the two spends as a single ecosystem rather than separate line items. The concert delivers the deep emotional experience; ATL delivers the reach, ensuring the investment pays back across brand-building and performance pipelines.”

All in all, 2025 proved that concerts are no longer side bets in marketing plans but a main stage addition.