Guest column: Is the world sleeping on the India sync opportunity?

Last year, I helped sync an Arabic track called ‘Fa9la’ by Bahraini rapper Flipperachi into a Bollywood film called Dhurandhar. It was a straightforward in-context placement. Then the film was released, and something unexpected happened. Dhurandhar became the biggest blockbuster of 2025 and ‘Fa9la’ hit No.1 on both Spotify’s Top Songs chart for India and on the Billboard Arabic Hot 100. 

A Hindi film had produced one of the most clutter-breaking, cross-cultural sync moments in recent times, helping both the movie and the track reach an audience in the Arabic-speaking market that nobody in the original deal had specifically targeted.

B62 Productions, the makers of Dhurandhar, had come to me with a long wishlist of sync options, which was heavy with international names. ‘Fa9la’ was one of the songs on the list. Sealing the deal involved tracking down Flipperachi’s management and label in Bahrain. 

Part of the process was giving them the full context of who the film’s lead star Ranveer Singh was, and what a film of Dhurandhar‘s scale could mean for the track, before we agreed on workable numbers and closed paperwork shortly thereafter. 

This was not some unusually complicated deal. If anything, it was more straightforward than most syncs we’ve done. Yet, what I’ve noticed is that when most international music industry professionals hear the words “Indian sync market”, they assume a market structured somewhat like their own, but earlier in its development: music placed in films and shows, and a licensing ecosystem that resembles London or Los Angeles but with more paperwork and lower fees. From my view, that map is wrong.

The primary sync vehicle in India is advertising and brand campaigns. That’s a substantial  part of the Western sync market too, but there it sits alongside several other mature channels such as movies, TV and web series, and gaming, each with its own developed supervisor relationships and repeat commissioning structure. 

In India, those other channels have not developed to anywhere near the same degree. Here, contextual film and TV placements are few and far between rather than a parallel industry. Though there are no official figures, my estimate is that brand campaigns account for the large majority of India’s sync activity, likely upward of 80 percent.

The bulk of sync deals take place when an FMCG brand, telecom company, e-commerce service, beverage maker, automotive manufacturer, OTT platform, or a financial services enterprise licenses music for a campaign. That’s where the volume is, and where the fees, modest as they may be by global standards, are most consistent. 

Films and web series do license music, but the dominant mode of that usage is not contextual placement i.e. the song that plays during the scene, the way a music supervisor in the West would think of a sync.

The music is placed in marketing assets such as trailers, promotional reels, and ad campaigns that live outside the film itself. In other words, it’s aimed at selling the content, not telling its story. This is a structural fact about the Indian market and essential knowledge for anyone trying to understand where the licensing opportunity in India actually sits.

“The right music does not just fill the background space in an advertisement. It creates an emotional association between a brand and an audience”

The ‘Fa9la’ placement in Dhurandhar was an exception precisely because it was an in-context sync, music woven into the film itself in such a way that it turned into the villain’s theme. That gap between where most activity currently happens and where its greatest potential value lies, is the story that’s not being spoken about enough.

On the other hand, the brand side of India’s sync market has a persistent problem—treating music as a cost, not an asset. A brief arrives from an agency and the budget allocated is whatever is left after everything else, apart from the music, has been decided.

The conversation with the rights holder is a negotiation about how low the fee can go, not about what the right music could do for the campaign.

What gets lost in that transaction is the actual commercial logic of sync. The right music does not just fill the background space in an advertisement. It creates an emotional association between a brand and an audience, and when the music has genuine cultural resonance, that association can deliver a return no other creative asset quite matches. 

There are early signs of brands in India starting to get this. Some recent deals we made happen that have had an impact are: 

–Levi’s building a campaign with Diljit Dosanjh around ‘Hum Dum Suniyo Re’ from the 2002 Hindi movie Saathiya.

–Netflix’s incorporation of a remix of ‘Koi Sehri Babu’ from the 1973 Bollywood film Loafer into an ad for the launch of the Hindi dubbed version of season five of the Stranger Things.

–Airbnb’s placement of a remix of the Telugu track ‘Inkem Inkem’ from the 2018 film Geetha Govindam for a spot featuring the film’s stars Rashmika Mandanna and Vijay Deverakonda in March this year, soon after they got married. 

The above examples all use Indian songs. But just last month, we helped Volkswagen sync OneRepublic’s 2022 global smash ‘I Ain’t Worried’. Perhaps the next closest example to ‘Fa9la’ is how Bobby McFerrin’s 1980s classic ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ was seamlessly weaved into the third season of the Amazon Prime Video Hindi web series The Family Man, which was released in November 2025. India, notably, is among the top 15 markets for the Grammy-winning artist on YouTube.

Similarly, when ‘Fa9la’ was released in 2024, its streaming numbers were modest. India was not a priority market for Flipperachi. Within three months of the release of Dhurandhar in December 2025, the track had crossed tens of millions of plays across platforms.

That streaming growth converted into something more tangible. Flipperachi was booked for a stand-alone show in Mumbai and a slot at the inaugural edition of the UN40 festival in Bengaluru. Both were cancelled, not because the appetite wasn’t there but because of the conflict that broke out in West Asia around the same time, and the safety and travel concerns that came with that. 

‘Fa9la’ itself has found a life beyond the film, most recently soundtracking a campaign by Vivo in India, the kind of second deal that only happens when someone in the room already knows to go looking for it. What had looked like a contained licensing transaction turned out to be an architecture for market entry.

This is the part executives often miss. A sync deal looks, at the time of signing, like a financial transaction, a one-time fee for a defined usage. The instinct is to optimise for the number on the contract. What ‘Fa9la’ demonstrates is that in the right context, the fee is the least important part of what you’re building. 

The value is in the multiplier, the streaming uplift, the live opportunity, the publishing income, the brand visibility in markets you hadn’t reached. Each of those outcomes was a direct consequence of a single sync decision.

Executives too often treat their catalogue as something that has already reached its peak value, and read a cheaper sync deal as dilution rather than as a chance to build the value of a song further.

They don’t realise that the audiences for Indian content and marketing among the South Asian diaspora in the Gulf, the UK, North America and Australia, are significant. ‘Fa9la’ is somewhat of a one-off, but it points at something worth naming—a path that barely exists yet, because almost nobody abroad has been looking for it.

The bigger opportunity may not even be with emerging artists. It may be with established Western catalogues that currently sit behind fee structures that are priced for the kind of return that a Netflix series or a national ad campaign brings in markets like the US and UK, not a Bollywood film reaching audiences across the Gulf that a Western sync executive has previously never thought about. 

If those fees were reconsidered for what an Indian placement can actually do, the calculation changes. This is not a call to undervalue anyone’s catalogue. It’s a case for pricing sync in India against what it can generate rather than against what it costs to say yes.

Right now, that gap between the price being asked and the value on the other side of it is exactly why more of these moments aren’t happening. 

The path runs both ways. An Indian audience gets introduced to an artist who had never targeted them. A Western catalogue gets a foothold in one of the fastest growing music markets in the world.

The international music industry’s assumption that India is a developing sync market, one to be entered eventually, is the wrong bet. The market is already here. The money and the opportunities are already moving.

The question isn’t when to pay attention. It’s whether you understand this market well enough to move when the right deal arrives.