While Bollywood remains the biggest segment in India, its growth is slowing down, revealed Luminate last week. According to the entertainment data company, in the first half of 2026, streams of Hindi film music within India grew only 5.1% over H1 2025. This was smaller than the 8.2% rise in the plays of Bollywood music outside of the country over the corresponding periods.
An analysis of Spotify’s Weekly Top Songs chart for India by Music Ally South Asia showed that Hindi film soundtracks are increasingly ceding space to pop, which is the second most-streamed genre in the country as per Luminate. After studying the list of tracks to have peaked inside the top ten of this chart between the beginning of January and the end of September (we didn’t count hits from previous years unless they reached a new high), we found that there were as many pop tunes as Hindi movie smashes, 13 each.
In fact, out of the four No.1s in 2026, three are pop — Banjaare’s “Bairan” and “Barsaat” and Anuv Jain’s “Arz Kiya Hai” — and one is from a film — “Gehra Hua” from Dhurandar. Notably, the pop hits span a variety of local languages, from Hindi to Haryanvi, from Urdu to Malayalam, and from Tamil to Punjabi. Equally significant is that just six or only a third of the Hindi soundtrack hits were from movies actually released in 2026, and three of them were from Dhurandhar—The Revenge.
As highlighted in Luminate’s half-yearly report about India, more than 75% of plays of Bollywood music during H1 2026 was of deep catalogue, which is defined as tracks put out more than five years ago. Indeed, five out of the 13 Hindi film songs to scale new peaks this year are classified as deep catalogue. Incidentally, they were all from movies released in the 2010s, namely Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania (2014), Table No.21 (2013), Fukrey Returns (2017), Prince (2010) and Half Girlfriend (2017).
Source: musically.com
