Every Indian Artist in the YouTube Music Foundry Class of 2026

Every year since 2015, YouTube Music’s Foundry program has quietly done something the music industry rarely does well: it backs artists before the industry has decided they matter and this year’s global class of 24 artists from 11 countries includes four Indian acts.

What Foundry Actually Does

Selected artists receive a dedicated YouTube partner manager, seed funding for channel development, marketing and promotion support, and access to new product features ahead of wider rollouts.

For India specifically, YouTube Music has framed the program around the idea of turning local fandom into a global movement. “A new generation of Indian artists are using YouTube to share their unique visions with the world,” the company said in its announcement. “We are committed to providing these independent artists with the tools and support they need to build their own unique visual universes - from Shorts to the living room screen.” Previous Indian alumni include Kayan, Lost Stories, Seedhe Maut, Noor Chahal, Pragati Nagpal, Tanishka Bahl, and Chaar Diwaari.

The four - OutStation, Garvit-Priyansh, the Nandy Sisters, and Damini Bhatla - represent a cross-section of what India’s independent music scene looks like in 2026.

OutStation

The most high-profile pick in this year’s Indian cohort, OutStation is a five-member teen boy band selected through a nationwide talent hunt and backed by Grammy-nominated producer Savan Kotecha’s Visva Records, in partnership with Republic Records and Universal Music India. The infrastructure behind them is serious, and the ambition matches it - the band is being positioned as the face of India’s next generation of pop culture.

Garvit-Priyansh

Garvit Soni and Priyansh Srivastava hail from Udaipur and Faridabad respectively, and their music sits in the space between Indian classical and contemporary Bollywood pop - a fusion that found an audience far beyond what either genre typically reaches on its own. Their breakthrough indie single “Kaahe Mose” crossed 3.2 million Spotify streams and earned an endorsement from Arijit Singh, which in the Indian music landscape is about as strong a co-sign as it gets.

Antara and Ankita Nandy

The Nandy Sisters from Assam became a lockdown phenomenon with their Balcony Concert - a series of multilingual covers performed with ukuleles and household items for percussion, filmed on their phones and uploaded to YouTube. The videos went viral at a time when the world was desperately looking for exactly that kind of warmth and intimacy, and the sisters turned that moment into a career.

Damini Bhatla

The most classically rooted of the four, Damini Bhatla brings over 20 years of Carnatic music training to her indie pop transition. She gained wider recognition through “Pacha Bottasi” from Baahubali: The Beginning, but the chapter she is writing now is her own. She is also preparing to release her debut project via Mass Appeal India later this year.

Each of this year’s four have built an audience on their own terms, used digital platforms as infrastructure rather than just distribution, and arrived at Foundry with something already proven. The program’s job, as Pragati Nagpal, a 2025 alum, put it, is to give artists “permission. Permission to trust my instincts, own my sound, and stop apologizing for making music that feels deeply mine.”