US-based non-profit The Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) has published a report titled ‘Profiting from Hate Music: The Role of YouTube, Meta, Spotify and Apple Music in Hosting and Monetizing India’s Hate Music Industry’. The report has been co-written by Kunal Purohit, the author of the book ‘H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars’, which was published in 2023 and documented the rapid growth of the genre in India.
Between January 2025 and January 2026, the report’s researchers identified over 500 Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) pop hate songs across YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and Meta’s music library, each of which violate those platforms’ own content policies by “promoting hatred, dehumanisation, and incitement to violence against religious minorities, primarily Muslims and Christians”.
Out of the total of 523 songs they tracked, 263 “directly threaten or incite violence against religious minorities”, while the remaining 260 “promote or incite hatred through slurs and dehumanisation”. YouTube hosted the highest number of them with 210 videos by 98 artists published across 100 different channels with a total subscriber base of 76.4m.
Notably, three YouTube channels accounted “for over 40 percent of identified hate songs, yet [they] continue to operate as verified accounts, monetise and grow their subscriber bases”, says the report. CSOH also found 109 by 53 acts on Spotify, 103 by 67 artists on Meta’s music library, and 101 by 59 artists on Apple Music. The tracks on YouTube garnered almost 200m views and 3.1m likes while those in Meta’s library were used in nearly 6m Instagram Reels.
While all these services have policies in place for the reporting of and removal of such content, the researchers found these largely ineffective. As part of the study, 225 songs (43% of the dataset) were reported to the four platforms for content policy violations in October 2025: 91 on YouTube, 59 on Spotify, 34 on Apple Music, and 41 that were used in Reels on Instagram. By May 2026, 207 songs (92%) were still live, and only 18 had been removed: 13 on YouTube, four on Meta, and one on Apple Music.
Even when uploads are taken down, they often return with artists creating new channels or profiles. “Enforcement is superficial and easily circumvented,” says the report, using as an example, singer Sandeep Acharya “whose accounts have been suspended at least three times, yet 21 of his 26 violative songs remain available across other YouTube channels”.
By allowing this content to stay available, be shared (and probably even get recommended through their algorithm-based suggestions), and earn revenue for the artists and labels behind them, CSOH says that “Big Tech platforms are not merely offering impunity to the creators of hate music who stoke hatred against religious minorities – they are among the most significant sources of financial patronage for these artists”.
Among its key findings were that YouTube’s ‘Super Thanks’ feature was enabled on 55% of the violative videos, and that Mayur Music, which has published 25 hate songs, has been awarded a Silver Creator Award, which is given to channels in recognition of their crossing 100,000 subscribers. On Meta, CSOH notes, 20 out of 30 prominent Hindutva pop singers had monetised Facebook accounts.
“The visibility afforded by the world’s biggest online platforms is central to the survival and growth of the H-Pop industry,“ says their report, which has chosen to focus on these particular services because they are the largest of their kind globally. That explains the exclusion of local streaming services such as JioSaavn and Gaana that have a larger pan-India presence than their international counterparts and are likely to also host such content, given that it’s distributed by third-party platforms to all major DSPs.
“We are reviewing the examples raised in the study and will remove any content that violates our policies,” a spokesperson for YouTube told Music Ally, adding that the platform consistently takes action against hate speech and that between January and March, they removed 22,948 channels and 179,186 videos for violating its policy.
We also reached out to Spotify, which declined to comment, and to Apple and Meta, from which we had not yet received a response at the time of publication.
