A report by the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate (CSoH) published on June 15, 2026, shed light on how digital platforms enable the reach of hate-fuelled music in India, not only allowing it to flourish, despite violating their own content policies, but also profiting from its unchecked dissemination.

The specific genre of music studied in this report, titled ‘Profiting from Hate Music’, operates within a Hindu nationalist/Hindutva ideological framework, deploying dehumanising rhetoric against religious minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians. The report also states that this music openly incites listeners to commit violence against the targeted communities.

The term for this genre of music was first coined by journalist and author Kunal Purohit in his 2023 book titled ‘H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars’ as “Hindutva-pop” or “H-Pop”. The book examined how Hindutva pop, becoming an extension of the larger pop culture that influences masses, become one of the most effective vehicles for promoting Hindu majoritarianism and prejudice against religious minorities.

Centre for the Study of Organised Hate (CSoH), a nonprofit, US-based think tank, conducts evidence-based research on hate, violence, extremism, radicalism and online harms. Their previous publications include detailed analyses of hate speech and discriminatory trends targeting groups of minorities across categories of religion, race, nationality, caste, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation. Fundamentally, the organisation studies hate as an organised phenomenon.

The organisation’s website describes them as “collaborating with universities, government bodies, and human rights organisations to translate rigorous research into actionable policy solutions.” Alt News had written on on CSoH’s annual report on hate speech events in India last year.

For the purpose of the study, the four platforms selected were YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and Meta’s Music Library. Across these platforms, a total of 523 songs were identified that violate the platforms’ own respective content policies and guidelines, with 210 on YouTube, 109 on Spotify, 103 on Meta’s Music Library, and 101 on Apple Music.

The report further identifies instances where this hate takes the form of explicit calls for violence or bodily harm. Out of the 523 violative songs identified, one in every two was found to explicitly call for violence, indicating that 50% of the songs studied show a propensity toward inspiring real-world violence, calling for killing or harming Muslims and other religious minorities for posing a fabricated threat to Hindus and Hindutva.

The report outlines the repercussions of the unhindered circulation of such music on online platforms, in both video (YouTube) and audio (Spotify, Apple Music, Meta’s Music Library) formats. It delineates the relevant community policies of each of these platforms, and documents the themes and engagement metrics of the songs that were found to be violative of the same.

YouTube harbours an estimated 50 crore Indian users, outnumbering USA by almost double, thus making Indians the most susceptible to dissemination and circulation of extremist hate. Despite clearly mentioning in its Hate Speech Policy that the platform does not allow violence or hatred, CSoH identified a staggering 210 instances (around 40% of the dataset) of hate-music existing on this platform alone, catering to a combined subscriber base of over 7 crore.  106 out of these 210 YouTube songs portrayed Muslims as an existential threat to Hindus, and amplified conspiracy theories like “Love Jihad”, as a means to ferment hatred against the Muslim community.

On Spotify, which happens to be India’s largest paid audio streaming service, 109 H-Pop songs were identified to be violative of the platform’s policies around hate content and conduct. Some of them refer to Muslims as “black snakes” that ought to be kicked out, some liken them to “demons”, while others call for “traitors” to be shot down.

Meta’s Music Library, available within Instagram, serves as an audio bank for personal, non-commercial use and is accessible to more than 41 crore users in India. It is a critical vehicle for the amplification of H-Pop music, with songs often featuring in Instagram reels that contain extremist visual content. The reel ecosystem, the report writes, amplifies the reach of each song far beyond its original audience, showing how Big Tech platforms are self-reinforcing systems. In this case, the study identified 103 songs on this platform that transgressed its own community standards, out of which 57 were found to stoke hatred against Muslims, while the rest 46 actively call for violence. As of April 2026, 37 out of the 41 reported songs remain active on the platform.

Apple Music unlike the other three platforms, does not explicitly list prohibitions with regard to content, and maintains only that the content follow “local regulations and cultural sensibilities” of the country in which it is accessed. On this platform, 101 songs were violative of Indian laws, which prohibit the promotion of enmity between religious groups.

The songs that were studied in this research spans allegations like: ‘Love Jihad’ against Hindu women, covert Islamic plots to take over the demography of India, a ‘history’ of destroying and looting temples, and more. Terms like “traitors”, “terrorists”, and “enemies” were found to be frequently used to refer to Muslims, painting the community as working against national interest, and/or at the behest of Pakistan.

Speaking to Alt News, Purohit said that H-Pop has since [the publication of his book] transcended the boundaries of class and geography — meaning that it has gone beyond pandering to rural audiences in northern India, and seeped into the cultural terrain of the urban elites across the country, and even among the diaspora, also becoming a part of Hindu festivals and processions.

He further highlighted about how H-Pop becomes a tool to reinforce ideas of religious extremism during times of crises. For instance, while the country was still reeling from the Pahalgam terror attack in April 2025, renowned H-Pop singer Kavi Singh released a song within a day of the tragedy that blamed Muslims and called for their exclusion from the country. “It essentially feeds into some of these moments, and then weaponizes them in a way that aligns with and appeals to Hindutva ideals,” Purohit said.

“To understand that, one has to look at the role that Big Tech has played in not just disseminating [H-Pop] but also profiting through it and sharing the profits with the creators themselves. In some ways, it’s also funding and encouraging more people to create such music,” he asserted.

How Hate Music is Monetised

The report demonstrates how these four platforms are complicit in directly funding the Hindutva pop ecosystem, by running advertisements on hateful content and earning revenue from it, ensuring that it reaches hundreds of millions of internet users, actively instigating them to resort to violent means against minorities.

The platforms also allow creators to monetise their content; in some cases, distributing a share of the advertisement revenue to those eligible. In the second case, platforms allow creators to raise money directly from their audiences through features baked into the platform interface, or through product placements. Music streaming platforms pay royalties to artists, including Meta’s Music Library, where a share of the advertisement revenue goes to the creator holding the rights to a certain song used in videos by other users.

On YouTube, the list of advertisers on H-Pop music includes a total of 103 brands and services, including including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s NotebookLM, Amazon Prime, Canva, Opera Browser, Adobe, and others. Advertisements from international brands like Motorola, Dell, Haier, Kellogg’s, Oreo, Nivea, Ponds, appeared in hateful songs targeting Muslim minorities. Major Indian corporations also ran advertisements alongside dehumanising songs, including Godrej, JK Cement, Urban Company, Flipkart, Myntra, ITC Hotels, IndiGo Airlines, Akasa Air, Reliance Jewels, Tanishq, ICICI Bank, and Kotak Life.

Platform Moderation: Failure or Design?

The findings of the CSoH report make evident that hate-fuelled music is rarely taken down by platforms despite violating content policies. Between October and November 2025, 225 of the 523 studied songs (around 43%) were reported to their respective platforms for violating hate speech policies. Only 18 had been removed by the end of April 2026, indicating a takedown rate of 8%. The remaining 207 continued to circulate on the platforms despite complaints being raised for flouting their own content policies.

On YouTube, out of 91 songs reported in mid-October 2025, only 13 were no longer available as of May 2026. This means, 78 songs remained active after being formally reported to the platform for violating its own community guidelines.

Of the 109 songs identified as violating Spotify’s hate content policies, the study randomly selected and reported 59, through the platform’s online reporting mechanism. As of May 2026, the platform had taken no action against the songs. The report calls out the reporting mechanism for its lack of clarity and accessibility, providing no straightforward means to take action, or check the status of a submitted report.

The content regulations on Apple Music are particularly vague providing a limited scope to challenge songs on the basis of their violating local laws on hate speech and incitement. 34 songs were flagged in early November 2025. At present, 33 of them remain active on the platform. The CSoH study notes that the effort required to navigate the reporting process would likely deter most users from completing it.

On Meta’s Music Library, over 59 lakh reels out of the 103 songs found violating guidelines. Out of them, around 14 lakh reels were found to contain calls to violence against Muslims. In October 2025, 41 reels were reported for containing songs that violate the community guidelines.

The report stresses that the 523 songs identified and studied represent a “structured and thriving ecosystem of hate,” enabled by the platforms despite violating their own content policies and guidelines. The monetisation demonstrates a nexus between advertisers and platforms in enabling this extremist music scene.

To ensure that this hatred does not continue to spill from the digital to the real world, the report calls for urgent, coordinated accountability from platforms, content regulators, and civil society alike.