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Peter Cat Recording Co announces “Good Luck Beta ‘24” tour
Mumbai: Following a dramatic rise in the cult following of Peter Cat Recording Co, India’s ever-evolving genre-bending act is gearing up for one of the largest tours by an Indian band, as they announce 77 concerts with their third and latest album BETA. The band’s ‘Good Luck Beta’24’ run will kick off in August 2024, covering North America, Europe, UK and India. Paytm Insider, one of India’s leading entertainment experiences platforms, along with partners Pagal Haina & WMS Entertainment will bring the tour’s final leg to the country in December 2024.
BETA from the band’s POV is “… a collection of stories about the future told 50 years in the past to make sense of the present, on our only home, planet Earth.” BETA’s origin story is quite heartwarming. They came up with five potential album titles, wrote them on pieces of paper, put them in a hat, and had the drummer Karan Singh’s six-month-old son pick one out. Serendipitously, BETA emerged.
Peter Cat Recording Co has displayed a multitude of emotions, and sonic influences in their music. While psychedelic, jazz, alt-rock, and other genres were novel in the country, PCRC’s vision to establish a contrasting musical identity has been rooted since its inception, despite being in the nascent stage. You might find a sly homage to great acts, however, their music has always had an antecedent mark. The Delhi-formed band comprises Suryakant Sawhney on vocals and guitars, Karan Singh on drums, Dhruv Bhola on bass and samples, Rohit Gupta on keys and trumpet and Kartik Sundareshan on guitars and trumpet.
After the globe-trotting legs of the tour, PCRC will return to the heartland for the last leg of the tour, performing in Pune on 14 December followed by Goa on December 15, 2024. Mumbai will experience PCRC’s electrifying performance on 20 December 2024, at JVPD Ground. On 22 December 2024, they will perform in Delhi NCR, the band’s birthplace, at DLF Cyber Hub in Gurugram. For the finale phase of the India tour, the band will deliver a memorable performance in Bengaluru’s Jayamahal Palace on December 28, 2024, and at Roots in Kolkata on December 29, 2024.
Being one of his favourite Indian bands, Paytm Insider COO Varun Khare said, “Peter Cat Recording Co. are torchbearers in the Indian alt-music scene. Their global tour is a major win for India’s indie culture. Paytm Insider has been a witness of the band’s soaring success, and there has been a strengthened affiliation with them over the years. We’re pumped to bring this iconic tour to fans – old and new – who will experience a tapestry of transcendent melodies, ready to groove to tracks from their latest album, BETA.”
Peter Cat Recording Co. has been rigorously creating genre-bending music, but their efforts were widely acknowledged with their anomalous sophomore album ‘Bismillah’. The musical exploration saga continues with BETA. Each album showcases a whimsical amalgamation of indie, alternative pop, psychedelic, disco and more sub-genres that blend flawlessly with a rare but fleeting Indianness in their tracks. However, with BETA, that rarity would be overturned. The first single, ‘People Never Change’, has more than a half minute of Bhangra beats, slowly descending into a mellowness with Suryakant Sawhney’s velvety croon.
Tickets for the India concerts of the ‘Good Luck Beta’24’ tour are live now on Paytm & Paytm Insider.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
