Celebrating Amarjit Singh Batra: The Journey From Digital Pioneer To Spotify India MD

Some careers are defined by titles. Others are defined by the shifts they witness  and, in many ways, help accelerate. Amarjit Singh Batra’s professional journey belongs to the latter.

As Batra celebrated his birthday on September 17, his career offered a moment to look back at a path that mirrors the evolution of India’s digital economy, from the early days of online marketplaces to the country’s rapidly expanding music-streaming ecosystem.

Today, Batra is Managing Director of Spotify India and General Manager for South Asia, Middle East and Africa (SAMEA). But his journey into music streaming began much before Spotify entered India.

From India’s early internet economy

Batra was part of the generation that helped shape India’s early internet businesses. His stints with Baazee and eBay India exposed him to category management, advertising sales, partnerships and new business initiatives at a time when online commerce was still finding its place among Indian consumers.

His next major chapter came with OLX, where he spent close to a decade helping build the India business.

The challenge then was different: convincing consumers to buy and sell pre-owned products online. It was another moment of changing behaviour, requiring technology to meet consumers where they were and create trust around an unfamiliar digital habit.

That experience of building around emerging consumer behaviour would become central to his next chapter.

Building Spotify for India

Batra joined Spotify in April 2018, ahead of the platform’s India launch in February 2019.

India, however, was never going to be a straightforward market for a global streaming platform. Its music landscape was fragmented across languages, regions and genres, while Bollywood remained deeply embedded in mainstream listening habits.

Spotify’s India journey therefore required localisation, not simply bringing an international streaming product to the country, but understanding how Indians actually discover, consume and connect with music.

Over the years, that has meant greater emphasis on regional music, personalised discovery, independent artists and subscription offerings tailored to Indian consumers.

In July 2022, Batra’s remit expanded to include the wider SAMEA region, while he continued to lead Spotify India.

When Indian music began travelling further

Perhaps the most interesting part of Batra’s Spotify chapter is how closely it has coincided with the changing global footprint of Indian music.

Spotify’s latest Loud & Clear data, highlighted by Batra recently, shows Indian artists generated nearly 335 billion streams on the platform in 2025, while royalties generated by Indian artists grew 29% year-on-year. More than 40% of those royalties came from listeners outside India.

Regional music is also becoming an increasingly important part of that story, with Telugu royalties growing by more than 120%, Marathi by nearly 50% and Bengali by close to 40%, according to the data shared by Spotify.

For Batra, this represents a larger shift in how Indian music is discovered.

In a recent post, he noted that streaming has helped move listening behaviour from simply searching for familiar songs to discovering artists across languages and genres. Spotify says it drove 12.8 billion first-time discoveries of Indian artists last year.

More than a streaming story

What makes Batra’s career particularly relevant is the continuity between its different chapters.

At Baazee and eBay, the opportunity was to build new digital marketplaces. At OLX, it was about changing how people bought and sold. At Spotify, the challenge has been changing how people discover and experience music.

The technology may have changed, but the underlying question has remained similar: how do you build a digital product around a behaviour that is still evolving?

That question is becoming even more relevant as the music industry moves into its next phase, one shaped by AI, changing monetisation models, independent artists, regional music and the growing export potential of Indian culture.

Batra’s journey, therefore, is not merely a corporate success story. It is also a reflection of how India’s relationship with the internet has evolved, from discovering what could be bought online to discovering what could be heard, followed and shared across borders.

And perhaps that is the most telling thread in his career: wherever consumer behaviour has been changing, Batra has been close to the transformation.

As he enters another year, his journey continues to sit at an interesting intersection, technology, consumers, business and, increasingly, the global story of Indian music.