Kobalt and Madverse Forge New Path for Indian Music in Global Publishing Landscape 

Kobalt’s global publishing partnership with India’s Madverse Music represents a strategic move to bridge a critical gap in the music industry, connecting Madverse’s network of over 150,000 independent artists and labels with Kobalt’s sophisticated royalty collection infrastructure across 180+ territories. The alliance directly tackles the longstanding problem where Indian creators have missed out on substantial global publishing royalties—income vital for sustainable careers—due to a fragmented and inefficient collection system. By combining Madverse’s local, creator-first ecosystem with Kobalt’s global technology and reach, the partnership aims to transform these uncollected royalties into a reliable financial foundation for artists, ensuring they are properly compensated whenever their music is played worldwide and empowering the diverse independent music community of India and South Asia on the international stage.

Kobalt and Madverse Forge New Path for Indian Music in Global Publishing Landscape 

A groundbreaking partnership between music industry giant Kobalt and India’s Madverse Music Group is set to redefine how Indian independent artists navigate the global music business. Announced in January 2026, this alliance connects Madverse’s network of over 150,000 independent artists and labels with Kobalt’s sophisticated global publishing infrastructure across more than 180 territories. More than a simple business deal, this collaboration represents a strategic effort to solve a longstanding problem: the massive amount of uncollected publishing royalties that Indian creators have historically been unable to access due to a fragmented and underdeveloped global collection system. 

For artists across India and South Asia, this partnership could transform publishing royalties from a mysterious, often missed income stream into what Madverse CEO Rohan Nesho Jain calls “a musician’s pension fund”—a source of generational income that supports sustainable creative careers. 

Kobalt’s Strategic Play: Building a Global Creator Ecosystem 

Kobalt’s partnership with Madverse is not an isolated move but a calculated step in a broader global strategy. Founded in 2000 with a technology-first approach to modernize the music business, Kobalt has built its reputation on providing transparency and efficiency in royalty collection where traditional models offered opacity and delay. 

The company’s recent initiatives reveal a multi-pronged strategy: 

• Expanding market reach: This partnership marks Kobalt’s continued investment in the Asia-Pacific region, coming over five years after it first entered India via a partnership with Turnkey Music & Publishing. 

• Developing tiered services: Through its KOSIGN platform, launched in February 2025, Kobalt has created an “invite and application-only” service for emerging artists that offers an 80/20 revenue split in the artist’s favor while allowing them to retain 100% of their copyrights. This demonstrates Kobalt’s understanding that different creators need different types of support at various career stages. 

• Securing financial backing: In November 2023, Kobalt announced a partnership with Morgan Stanley Tactical Value to invest more than $700 million in acquiring music copyrights, indicating serious institutional confidence in their business model and the value of music as an asset class. 

Simon Moor, Kobalt’s Managing Director for APAC, emphasized the strategic thinking behind the Madverse partnership: “By combining their creator-first approach with Kobalt’s global publishing infrastructure, we’re committed to ensuring Madverse songwriters and producers have the resources, accuracy, and reach they need to succeed on an international scale”. 

The India Opportunity: A Streaming Giant Awakens to Publishing 

To understand why this partnership matters, one must grasp the extraordinary growth and unique challenges of India’s music market. India is currently the second-largest streaming market in the world by volume, with an estimated 471 billion streams projected by December 2025. Despite this massive consumption, monetization lags significantly behind Western markets, creating what industry analysts call the “India paradox“—huge audiences with relatively small revenue yields per stream. 

India’s Music Market at a Glance 

The publishing gap in India is particularly acute. As noted in industry analysis, many Indian creators “confuse publishing with distribution” or believe that uploading to streaming platforms automatically protects their compositional rights—it doesn’t. This knowledge gap, combined with a historically fragmented collection infrastructure, has meant that Indian songwriters have missed out on crucial revenue streams including synchronization licensing, international performance royalties, and mechanical royalties from global streaming. 

Rohan Nesho Jain of Madverse articulated the problem succinctly: “For too long, Indian creators have left money on the table simply because the infrastructure to collect global royalties was broken and almost nonexistent”. 

Madverse’s “Independent, Not Alone” Philosophy 

Madverse enters this partnership as more than just a local distributor; it has cultivated a tech-driven ecosystem specifically designed to support India’s independent music community. Their “Independent, Not Alone” philosophy emphasizes providing transparency, rights management, and operational support while allowing artists to retain full ownership and creative control. 

This approach aligns perfectly with Kobalt’s own creator-first values, creating a partnership based on shared principles rather than just complementary capabilities. Madverse has built substantial trust within the Indian independent community—a crucial factor for artists who have traditionally been wary of publishing deals that might compromise their ownership or creative freedom. 

The timing of this partnership is particularly significant as India’s music landscape undergoes a fundamental shift. While Bollywood soundtracks still dominate, accounting for approximately 80% of consumption, there’s explosive growth in independent and regional music. Platforms report a 96% increase in streams of local language music, with Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada content seeing especially strong growth. This diversification creates both opportunity and complexity—more artists need publishing support, but their needs vary across genres, languages, and career stages. 

Implications for Artists: From Royalty Collection to Career Sustainability 

For the 150,000+ artists in Madverse’s network, this partnership promises several tangible benefits: 

• Global Royalty Collection: Artists will gain access to Kobalt’s sophisticated tracking technology and direct licensing agreements with major platforms. This is crucial because, as Kobalt estimates, over $1 billion in publishing royalties go uncollected annually worldwide, with emerging artists disproportionately affected. 

• Faster Payments: Traditional publishing royalty collection can take “a year or more,” but Kobalt’s system, powered by its proprietary technology and its digital collection society AMRA, aims to speed this process to “typically within three months”. 

• Sync Opportunities: Kobalt maintains a 50+ member sync team that places music in commercials, TV shows, films, and games. For Indian artists, this opens doors to global sync markets that have previously been difficult to access due to clearance and metadata challenges. 

• Metadata Accuracy: Proper song registration with correct metadata is essential for royalty collection but often handled poorly by emerging artists. The partnership will provide professional support in this technically complex area. 

• Educational Component: Beyond just collection, the partnership will likely help educate Indian artists about publishing rights—an essential development in a market where, according to industry experts, “knowledge has to catch up” with creative output. 

The Bigger Picture: Global Music Industry Evolution 

The Kobalt-Madverse partnership reflects several broader trends in the global music industry: 

• Infrastructure as a Service: Kobalt is essentially offering its publishing infrastructure as a service to Madverse’s network, similar to how cloud providers offer tech infrastructure to businesses. This represents a new model for global music partnerships. 

• Strategic Focus on High-Growth Markets: With established markets increasingly saturated, global players are turning to high-growth regions like India. Kobalt’s partnership follows similar moves by other major music companies recognizing India’s strategic importance. 

• Technology-Driven Solutions to Age-Old Problems: The partnership exemplifies how technology is finally addressing the music industry’s longstanding inefficiencies in royalty collection and distribution. 

• Empowerment of Independent Artists: By providing major-label-level infrastructure to independents, this partnership continues the democratization of the music industry that began with digital distribution and continues with professional publishing support. 

As the partnership unfolds, its success will be measured not just in royalties collected but in careers sustained, cross-cultural collaborations forged, and the emergence of Indian independent music as a more substantial force on the global stage. In bridging the publishing gap between India and the world, Kobalt and Madverse aren’t just conducting business—they’re building the infrastructure for the next chapter of India’s musical journey.