Rohan Nesho Jain set out to build the company he believes India’s independent artists should have had years ago.
“These are artists who just need infrastructure, not gatekeepers,” says Jain, Founder and CEO of Madverse Music Group.
He started the company in New Delhi in 2023, in a market still dominated by film music. Film-based releases accounted for 57% of music consumption in 2025, according to the FICCI-EY India media and entertainment report.
The options available to independent acts at the time, Jain says, came down to global platforms that weren’t built for India, or local operators running opaque systems without the technology to back them up.
Madverse now says it represents over 200,000 independent artists and labels across more than 45 countries, who have cumulatively surpassed 3 billion streams.
In June, Willard Ahdritz agreed to lead Madverse’s first institutional funding round, a Series Seed of undisclosed size, via his personal investment vehicle Ahdritz Capital, with participation from SumoSan Ventures, 10X Global, and Marigold Capital.
Ahdritz founded Kobalt Music Group in 2000 and chaired it until July, when Primary Wave Music‘s acquisition of the company closed. On October 1, he formalized that vehicle as Ahdritz Capital Partners, a music and media technology investment firm.
He will join the Madverse board once the investment completes. Madverse’s publishing administration operation already runs in partnership with Kobalt, under a global deal struck in January. Having Ahdritz on the board, says Jain, means “we get to draw from his institutional knowledge while remaining sharp on what India actually needs.”
The investment lands in a market where the ground is shifting under the long-dominant film music sector.
Spotify‘s most recent India edition of Loud & Clear reported that royalties generated by Indian artists rose 29% year-over-year in 2025, with non-film I-Pop taking half of the platform’s year-end Top 10 in India.
Below, Jain talks MBW through Madverse’s positioning in the independent music space, his predictions for the local market, and more…
Could you tell our readers a bit about your background in the music business?
Before starting Madverse, I spent time in Los Angeles studying the music business and working directly with artists on the ground, understanding how the industry actually functions from the inside: how rights flow, how deals get structured, and frankly, how fragmented it is. That experience in LA shaped everything. I saw what a mature, well-resourced music ecosystem looks like, and came back to India knowing exactly what was missing here.
“The existing options were either global platforms not built for India’s complexity, or local operators with opaque systems and no real tech backbone.”
I started Madverse about three years ago with a clear mission: build the infrastructure that Indian independent artists were being denied. The existing options were either global platforms not built for India’s complexity, or local operators with opaque systems and no real tech backbone. We now manage a catalog of over 40,000 tracks and have grown into what I believe is India’s first truly full-stack independent music infrastructure company, spanning distribution, royalty management, data and analytics, publishing administration, marketing, and artist services under one roof.
What drives me is the belief that independent artists in India deserve the same infrastructure access, royalty transparency, and global reach that Western artists have been exposed to. That conviction is what Madverse is built on.
Willard Ahdritz built Kobalt around transparent, tech-driven royalty infrastructure. How closely is Madverse modeled on that, and where does it diverge?
Kobalt was a revelation for the Western market. It proved that transparency and technology could replace the black box. That philosophy is deeply embedded in how we’ve built Madverse.
Where we align: real-time royalty reporting, rights-first thinking, treating data as an asset for the artist rather than the platform. We’ve built our own proprietary tech layers precisely because we refuse to tell an artist “your money is coming” without being able to show them exactly where from.
Where we diverge: India is a fundamentally different market. You’re dealing with fragmented DSPs, a publishing administration system that’s still nascent, multiple languages, a film music dominance that shapes every platform deal, and an independent ecosystem that’s underserved at every layer. Kobalt was built for a mature Western rights infrastructure. We’re building the infrastructure itself. That’s a different problem, and in some ways a more foundational one.
Having Willard as a strategic investor and board member means we get to draw from his institutional knowledge while remaining sharp on what India actually needs.
The funding announcement mentions AI-enabled infrastructure. What specifically does AI power inside the platform today?
We’re deliberate about this. AI isn’t a marketing label for us. It’s applied to specific problems.
Today, AI powers three core areas. First, royalty and metadata anomaly detection. Our system flags inconsistencies in DSP reporting, which is a real and persistent problem in markets where education around metadata is scarce and data pipelines aren’t always clean.
Second, a 24/7 quality control center. When a track is uploaded, our system cross-checks it across multiple layers within three to five minutes. It starts with existing global catalog data, to surface potential duplication or rights overlap before it becomes a claim issue downstream.
It then identifies whether any AI tool was used in making the song, to help flag licensing requirements. The final check is against DSP content guidelines. That saves a lot of back-and-forth between artists and our backend team.
Third is Auxy, our AI navigator. We learned early on that artists often feel overwhelmed by the features and need guidance through their journey. The tool is installed across the platform user journey and educates artists step by step, feature by feature, on how to run their career with us and make the most of our platform.
We’re building toward AI-assisted publishing administration, specifically around matching compositions to master recordings across international CMO data. That’s the next layer.
How are you positioned in the market in India and South Asia today?
We’re the first Indian-branded, full-stack music infrastructure company, meaning we cover distribution, royalty analytics, publishing administration, and artist services under one roof. Every other significant player in this space is either a Western platform operating in India, or a local operator that does distribution without the rights, publishing, or artist services layer.
“We’re the first Indian-branded, full-stack music infrastructure company, meaning we cover distribution, royalty analytics, publishing administration, and artist services under one roof.”
That positioning matters. Artists and labels want to work with someone who understands the Indian market structurally: the right relationships, the publishing nuances, the fact that royalties behave differently here, and that regional artists need more than just another platform. We’ve spent three years building those relationships and that institutional knowledge on the ground.
We’re present across India and have catalog spanning multiple South Asian territories. The infrastructure we’ve built, our own royalty analytics system and our publishing administration capabilities, positions us not just as a distributor but as a rights management and growth partner.
India’s market is still dominated by film music and label catalogs. How large is the independent creator segment you’re targeting, and how fast is it growing?
Film music and major label catalog still account for the majority of streams. That’s true. But the independent segment is growing at a rate that’s structurally irreversible.
India now has over 200 million music listeners on streaming platforms. Independent music’s share of streams has been growing consistently, and industry estimates put independent catalog growth in India at 30–40% year-over-year over the last three years, driven by a generation of artists who never needed a label deal to distribute globally.
“Film music and major label catalog still account for the majority of streams. That’s true. But the independent segment is growing at a rate that’s structurally irreversible.”
The data tells the story plainly: Bollywood’s share of streams keeps declining as independent artists claim a growing percentage of listening time. Artists like Rishab Rikhiram Sharma, Banjaare, and Hanumankind have broken through on the back of streaming. That shift is structural, not cyclical.
The creator economy tail is long here. We’re seeing growth in regional-language independent music, in Punjabi, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, and Haryanvi, where artists are building real fanbases outside the film ecosystem as discovery has been democratized by social media and the internet reaches the last mile in India. These are artists who just need infrastructure, not gatekeepers. That’s our market.
The total addressable base in India alone is in the hundreds of thousands of independent creators.Music Business Worldwide