Mumbai, India – June 26, 2025 – In a significant development poised to reshape the music licensing landscape in India, Hoopr, widely recognized as the nation’s first dedicated music licensing platform, announced a strategic alliance with the Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS). The IPRS stands as the sole copyright society in India representing the interests of songwriters, composers, and music publishers.
This landmark partnership, revealed from Mumbai today, is specifically designed to address critical issues surrounding the proper, timely, and transparent disbursement of royalty payments. It focuses squarely on music creators and publishers whose valuable work is licensed for use within branded and various forms of digital content, primarily facilitated through Hoopr’s specialized microsync-licensing platform, known as hooprsmash.com.
Addressing a Pressing Industry Challenge
The collaboration arrives at a crucial time for the Indian music industry, grappling with substantial estimated annual revenue losses. Industry observers and experts estimate that unearned royalties within the sector could be costing creators and rights holders between ₹8,000 and ₹10,000 crore annually. This staggering figure highlights a significant gap in the current royalty collection and distribution mechanisms, particularly as digital content creation and consumption continue their exponential growth trajectory.
The Hoopr-IPRS alliance aims to directly confront this challenge by implementing a more structured, efficient, and transparent system. By leveraging Hoopr’s platform, which connects music rights holders with content creators and brands, and integrating it with IPRS’s mandate for royalty collection and distribution, the partnership seeks to ensure that music used legally in digital content generates appropriate and traceable income for its creators.
The Partnership Mechanism
The core of this initiative lies in the seamless integration between Hoopr’s licensing operations and IPRS’s rights management framework. When music licensed through the hooprsmash.com platform is utilized in branded or digital content, the partnership ensures that the necessary data is captured and processed to facilitate royalty payments to the rightful IPRS-registered members. This process is intended to be tech-enabled, offering a streamlined path from content usage to royalty disbursement.
Hoopr’s hooprsmash.com platform serves as the primary conduit for licensing, providing a curated library of music tailored for sync use in various media projects. This strategic focus on microsync-licensing for the digital space is key to the partnership’s objective, creating a clear and trackable path for royalty flows that may have previously been opaque or non-existent for certain digital uses.
Hoopr’s Role and Reach
As India’s pioneering music licensing platform, Hoopr has built a considerable presence within the creator and brand ecosystem over the past two years. The platform boasts an extensive catalogue featuring over 18,500 tracks, encompassing a diverse range of genres including popular Bollywood music, independent (indie) tracks, and a rich variety of regional music. This breadth ensures that content creators can find suitable music for a wide array of projects.
Hoopr’s operational track record demonstrates its reach and effectiveness in the market, having successfully worked with over 125 distinct brands and collaborated with more than 18,000 individual creators. Furthermore, its network includes partnerships with 21 label partners and representation from over 380 artists, underscoring its established connections within the Indian music industry and its capacity to facilitate licensing at scale.
Benefits for Music Creators and Publishers
For the vast network of IPRS-registered members – numbering over 18,000 songwriters, composers, and music publishers – this partnership unlocks significant new avenues for structured monetisation within the burgeoning digital content sphere. Traditionally, tracking and collecting royalties for music used in online videos, brand campaigns, and social media content has presented considerable challenges.
The Hoopr-IPRS alliance provides these members with a clear, transparent, and tech-driven process to earn royalties from the digital use of their work licensed via Hoopr’s platform. This initiative aligns with IPRS’s recent positive momentum, which saw the society achieve a significant milestone by exceeding ₹700 crore in royalty collections, demonstrating its increasing effectiveness in ensuring creators are compensated for the use of their intellectual property.
Perspectives from Leadership
The formal announcement saw key figures from both organizations underscore the importance of this collaboration. Rakesh Nigam, the Chief Executive Officer of IPRS, highlighted the society’s commitment to leveraging technology and strategic partnerships to enhance royalty collections and distribution for its members. The alliance with Hoopr is seen as a crucial step in capturing royalties from the rapidly expanding digital content market.
Gaurav Dagaonkar and Meghna Mittal, the Co-Founders of Hoopr, emphasized their platform’s role in bridging the gap between music creators and content users while ensuring that the rights holders are fairly compensated. They stressed that the partnership with IPRS is a natural evolution of Hoopr’s mission to build a transparent and efficient music licensing ecosystem in India, ensuring value flows back to the creators powering the digital content boom.
Looking Ahead
The strategic partnership between Hoopr and IPRS represents a pivotal moment for the Indian music industry’s engagement with the digital economy. By creating a transparent, tech-enabled pathway for microsync-licensing royalties, the alliance directly confronts the estimated multi-crore royalty gap.
This collaborative effort is expected to provide thousands of Indian music creators and publishers with reliable new income streams, fostering a more sustainable and equitable environment for artistic creation in the digital age. Its success could serve as a model for addressing similar royalty challenges in other creative sectors and geographies.
