In this guest column, Varun Parikh highlights how India’s music export potential depends on education that creates a professional workforce, and how institutes like Abbey Road Institute Mumbai are paving the way.
India has the ingredients to become a true music-talent exporter: a vast pool of young creators, deep linguistic diversity, and a growing appetite for Indian sounds abroad. What we need now is the same backbone that helped IT scale-education that produces export-ready professionals with standardised skills, industry habits, and the confidence to work across borders. Done right, education won’t just train performers; it will build a workforce that writes, records, engineers, manages, markets and monetises music for the world.
Export means two things. First, star exports-artists who tour, stream and sync globally. Second, service exports-producers, mix engineers, live sound crews, composers, editors, metadata and rights specialists who deliver to international standards from India. Our education system must serve both.
Start earlier, professionalise later. At school level, normalise music as a viable pathway and build creative confidence through ensemble work, basic recording, and peer feedback. In higher and vocational education, the focus should shift to professional habits: session etiquette, delivery specs, file hygiene, metadata discipline, collaboration workflows, and client communication. Graduates should be “plug-and-play” for global partners-able to jump on international co-writes, send clean stems across borders, or prepare Dolby or broadcast-ready mixes without hand-holding.
Teach the business, not just the craft. Too many promising careers stall on contracts and collections. Curricula must include publishing and neighbouring rights, split sheets, PRO registrations, ISRC/ISWC discipline, and a working knowledge of visas, withholding tax, and cross-border payments. Students should practise delivering assets with correct credits and codes, pitch cues to music supervisors, and compare distribution terms before releasing. This isn’t glamour, it’s the plumbing that turns views into income.
Lean into India’s diversity. The surge in regional music has proved that “niche is the new mass.” Education can help artists translate local stories into globally legible catalogues without flattening their identity-through co-writing labs, lyric translation/adaptation for sync, and production workshops that blend folk idioms with contemporary sound design.
Simulate the real world. Classrooms should look and feel like the industry: deadlines, briefs, revisions, and external feedback. Capstone projects ought to be juried by practising A&R, music supervisors and engineers. Micro-credentials-live RF coordination, stage patching, metadata admin, podcast production, immersive audio workflows-let students begin earning before they graduate. Portfolio requirements should be explicit: an EP or equivalent singles, one international co-write, one sync-pitched cue, one live recording credit, and a service project with documented client feedback.
Where Abbey Road Institute Mumbai fits in. This is precisely the model we are building at Abbey Road Institute Mumbai, hosted inside Bay Owl Studios. Students learn inside a working commercial facility, with daily exposure to live projects and a clear line of sight to how the industry actually operates. The programme is deliberately hands-on: you spend your time in studios, production suites and a dedicated tech lab, not just in blind theory. Assessment is anchored in deliverables that travel-finished tracks, session files prepared to international specs, and projects evaluated by external professionals.
Beyond the craft, we treat the business as part of the curriculum. Students are guided through registrations, split sheets and release planning; they practise clean metadata workflows; and they work on briefs that mirror real-world asks-short-form cues for ads, podcast episodes with editorial notes, or immersive remixes to client delivery specs. Credit-bearing internships and structured industry engagement sit alongside teaching, so that by graduation you’ve already navigated professional settings, taken feedback, and delivered to deadline.
We also design for service exports. Not everyone wants to be centre-stage; many prefer to mix, master, produce podcasts, compose for games, cut dialogue, run monitors or manage touring. Our training covers collaboration, version control, studio etiquette and client communication-skills that let Indian talent plug into overseas teams from day one. Equally, we encourage star exports by pairing artists with producers, arranging co-writes and exclusive student song-writing camps, while helping them prepare showcases and release strategies that make sense beyond India.
Quality control is non-negotiable. To move from sporadic breakthroughs to a reliable export pipeline, we must align on standards. That means consistent technical checklists (gain staging, loudness, stems and recalls), clear editorial expectations (notes, revisions, approvals), and a culture of documentation (session sheets, patch notes, cue sheets). It’s unglamorous, but it’s the difference between “almost there” and “booked again.”
Finance and access matter. If we want more young Indians to join this workforce, we need realistic pathways: vocational loans that fit the gig economy, scholarships tied to measurable outcomes, and flexible schedules for working learners. A fair approach to internships-paid where possible, or else tightly structured with defined learning outcomes and mentor time-will stop exploitation and accelerate growth.
What to measure To know we’re exporting, track the right signals: share of streams from outside India; number of international co-writes and syncs; foreign royalty inflows; overseas touring tickets; service invoices (mixing, mastering, podcast, game audio) raised to international clients. Publish these openly and course-correct as needed.
India did not become an IT leader by accident. It standardised skills, linked learning to real projects, created confidence in delivery, and then repeated the cycle at scale. Music can follow a similar arc-if we build education that is creative, technical and commercial in equal measure. With institutes that live inside the industry, like Abbey Road Institute Mumbai at Bay Owl Studios, we can graduate talent that’s ready on Monday morning-whether the brief lands from Bandra, Birmingham or Berlin.