Anuv Jain: How an Indian singer built a global fanbase outside Bollywood

Anuv Jain sits backstage at London's Roundhouse before a sold-out show, and when asked about the numbers—hundreds of millions of YouTube views, 3.9 million Instagram followers, more than 20 million monthly listeners on Spotify—he shrugs them away. "It's not about the numbers," he says. But they do tell a story: a story of an Indian artist who built a global audience entirely outside the machinery that has traditionally controlled music in his country.

Jain grew up in Ludhiana, in Punjab, and began singing as a teenager. His songs are written mostly in Hindi, and they move through the emotional terrain of relationships and heartbreak with a softness that has resonated with listeners across continents. Fans describe his music as the soundtrack to their lives—something they return to in the car, on a run, late at night when they're alone. What strikes you about his work is its accessibility, the way it assumes nothing about its listener except that they have felt something.

The secret, Jain explains, is straightforward. When he writes, he imagines the person on the other end of the song. He thinks about what his mother would want to hear, what his sister would want to hear, what his wife would want to hear. "For some reason, the taste that we have in music is gentle enough that when we put it out there, there are millions of people who are wanting to consume all of this," he says. It's a philosophy that treats the audience not as a market to be captured but as people with whom you share something.

Bollywood has long dominated India's music industry, controlling both the funding and the visibility that most artists depend on. Jain exists in what he calls an "alternate space"—a growing ecosystem of independent musicians who release their own work and, as he puts it, "hope for the best." Two of his songs, Jo Tum Mere Ho and Afsos (a collaboration with AP Dhillon), reached number one on the Asian Music Charts. Yet he insists there is no formula, no repeatable recipe. Success, in his telling, is something that happens when you refuse to chase it.

His approach to releasing music is deliberate to the point of restraint. Until recently, he put out one song a year. He describes himself as "very selective," unwilling to release work that hasn't been fully realized. "When I start a project, I always finish it," he says. "There are no projects like right now for me that are half or that I haven't completed them yet." This discipline has meant a slower output than the industry might prefer, but it has also meant that every release carries weight. Passages from songs like Arz Kiya Hai have gone viral on TikTok and Instagram, not because they were engineered for virality but because they landed with enough emotional precision that people wanted to share them.

That said, Jain is not planning to remain this sparse forever. He has new songs finished, and he describes them as beautiful. "Technically you might have more music this year," he says, suggesting a shift toward a more regular release schedule. But the shift comes with a condition: he will not compromise the storytelling that has made his work distinctive.

When asked about collaborations with bigger names—something that has become increasingly common as Western and Indian artists have begun working together—Jain is open but cautious. He would consider it, but only if his own identity could be preserved and the work done "the right way." "The storytelling cannot get diluted just because there's a bigger name attached," he says. He acknowledges he's not yet at a point where such collaborations feel necessary. But he does allow himself one fantasy: working with Zayn Malik, the former One Direction member who has found success on both Western and Asian charts. "He would be somebody who would definitely work very well with the kind of music that I make," Jain says. "Maybe the universe will just make it happen." It's a small moment of openness in a career built on saying no—a reminder that even artists who have learned to trust their instincts still wonder what might be possible if the right opportunity arrived.