Indian live entertainment company SkillBox has launched Zenith Studio, an “AI-powered ‘event creation’ engine” that enables organisers to generate listings, descriptions, ticketing information and artwork using a single-line prompt or uploaded poster. Its launch has been accompanied by a new logo and redesigned app and website that “reflects the breadth” of its businesses.
They now span ticketing, artist management, concert promotion, festival curation and production, marketing and brand solutions, and proprietary technology such as its cashless payment system SkillBox Pay. The Gurugram-headquartered enterprise now boasts 6.3m registered users — a significant jump from the 1.5m it had in November 2024 when Warner Music announced that it had made a minority investment in the company,
SkillBox has sold 21.4m tickets since it started operations almost a decade ago, and currently enjoys a 37% repeat-customer rate, reveals the press announcement. Earlier this week, co-founder and CEO Anmol Kukreja shared some more stats, related to both his company and India’s live music industry as whole, in an interview with Storyboard18.
Revenues jumped almost 200% in FY2026, with brand sponsorships — chiefly in the form of surrogate advertising by alcohol and cigarette makers — contributing as much as 30% of income, Kukreja told the news platform. Highlighting the lack of concert infrastructure in India, he said that production-related expenses account for 30% to 35% of the costs SkillBox incurs when putting up a show, making it the second-highest outflow after artist fees.
The emergence of purpose-built gig venues could lower this down to 15% to 20%, he said. In the interim, the company has started diversifying by selling tickets for sporting events, starting with those for the ongoing Super League Kerala football tournament. Sports, Kukreja believes, “would even become larger than the music side” because of the size of the industry and frequency of matches.
It’s a strategic move for SkillBox, which operates in an oligopoly of sorts where the major players include such deep-pocketed rivals as BookMyShow and District by Zomato, and recent entrants like ThumpN. In this competitive environment, platforms are increasingly giving advances to promoters to secure exclusive ticketing partnerships, a development that’s been putting additional pressure on profitability, Kukreja said.