Indian radio in this directory is dominated by film music, which is the correct reflection of the market: Bollywood soundtracks and their regional equivalents account for the overwhelming majority of popular music consumption in India, and radio follows.
The linguistic picture matters more than the national one. Hindi-language stations serve the north; Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi stations serve their own regions with their own film industries and their own stars. A listener browsing by country will find all of these mixed together, so browsing by language is usually the more productive route.
Indian stations frequently stream at low bitrates, reflecting a mobile-first audience and the real cost of data. A 48 or 64 kbps AAC+ stream is the norm rather than a compromise, and it is a sensible engineering decision for the market.
