VIVA's return and the monetisation of millennial nostalgia

This week, VIVA arrived on music platforms.  Created in 2002, through a reality show on Channel V, India’s first mainstream, all-girl pop group had, for years, existed as memory through grainy YouTube uploads, nostalgia reels, and the occasional argument over why their songs never made it to streaming.

Featuring singers Neha Bhasin, Anushka Manchanda, Pratichee Mohapatra, Mahua Kamat, and Seema Ramchandani, VIVA released two albums, VIVA and VIVA Reloaded. Music was composed by Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy, Jatin–Lalit, Salim–Suleiman, Sandeep Chowta, with lyrics by Javed Akhtar.

For the uninitiated, they were the closest equivalent to the girl-band fantasy of the Spice Girls or Destiny’s Child. Music platform and label KaanPhod (launched under JioStar) has now released VIVA's albums on audio streaming platforms. 

Their return says something uncomfortable about millennials. We may have finally reached the age when platforms realise nostalgia is profitable.

Nostalgia and stability

For millennials, the language of media consumption was centred around waiting. Channel [V] and MTV countdowns were the windows to new songs, not search bars. Teen friendships were built through CDs that were borrowed, burned, or copied. Songs downloaded from Songs.PK took long enough for anticipation to become part of listening. Every MP3 felt earned.

Growing up between media scarcity and digital abundance created a sense of attachment to cultural artefacts for millennials. VIVA’s arrival on streaming platforms, then, may signal something more complex than simple yearning for a bygone era.

Psychologists have argued that nostalgia becomes intense during periods of disruption. Challenging the decades-old definition of nostalgia as indulgent longing for an idealised past, recent scholarship by researchers like Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut has established that nostalgia often emerges as a psychological response to loneliness, instability, uncertainty, or abrupt change.

Nostalgia can become a way to access continuity when the present feels fragmented. For millennials, adulthood did not arrive as the promised secure pill for wealth creation and prosperity. Instead, it brought layoffs, EMIs doomscrolling, side hustles and the exhausting sense that attention itself had become labour.

In such conditions, cultural memory becomes a reassurance. VIVA's arrival on streaming platforms signals a return to a time when culture was collective. When the same songs travelled through school buses, cable television and scratched CDs, before Instagram, X, and YouTube feeds splintered attention into customised, but lonely algorithms.

Nostalgia scholarship rejects the proposition that longing for the past is necessarily regressive. Memory often serves the purpose of reminding people who they have been to stabilise who they are becoming.

Business of memories

That said, emotional longing alone does not explain why dormant cultural artefacts make a comeback in public memory. Economics does. And nostalgia is hardly a new business model.

Even before streaming became the mainstay, music labels monetised memory through remix albums, retro programming, reunion concerts, and remastered classics. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Hindi music labels routinely revived older songs for newer audiences.

However, what has changed now is the infrastructure. Earlier, revivals required a remake, or through using a song in a television serial slot, radio curation or physical reissue to generate value. Streaming has made nostalgia a perpetual inventory. A two-decade-old song no longer needs to be reintroduced to audiences. It merely needs to remain searchable.

Cultural nostalgia was difficult to monetise at scale before the advent of streaming. While during its lifetime, an old song could survive through CDs, radio reruns or occasional television specials, it had a limited economic afterlife. Dormant catalogues often stayed dormant.

A look at India’s music economy could explain why a catalogue like VIVA’s may suddenly seem worth reviving. The FICCI–EY Media and Entertainment Report 2026 shows that Indians streamed nearly 5.8 trillion songs in 2025, up 15% year-on-year. Around 178 million Indians streamed music online, while 96% of smartphone users consumed music on their devices.

Historically, India has had enough listening volumes but weak revenues. While music consumption was either ad-supported or free, low willingness to pay and cheap telecom data kept subscription monetisation limited.

That is now gradually changing. According to the FICCI-EY report, music subscriptions grew 37% in 2025 to 14.4 million users, while subscription revenues crossed Rs 10.3 billion for the first time, driven partly by streaming platforms nudging listeners away from free listening. The Indian music segment, measured as revenues earned by music labels from licensing and other income, grew by 10% to reach Rs 59 billion in 2025.

The economics of recorded music have therefore shifted from one-time purchase to perpetual access. A twenty-year-old, forgotten song can become cultural currency through an algorithmic suggestion, a nostalgia playlist, or someone posting “only millennials will remember this” on an Instagram reel.

A new asset class

Listeners do return to older music. In mature streaming markets, catalogue music — songs older than 18 months — now accounts for most of the listening. Familiarity, too, is commercially valuable.

India’s market, however, is younger and under-monetised. But the direction is similar. Platforms are driven by repeat listening rather than simply novelty. Businesses do not manufacture nostalgia from nothing; they notice when collective longing already exists and then build systems around it.

Reunion concerts, Y2K fashion revivals, retro playlists, and remastered catalogues generate revenues because familiar things are easier to sell than unfamiliar ones. An already emotionally invested listener would generate more value than one who must be persuaded to care.

VIVA’s return brings with it the unsettling realisation that the songs once copied onto MP3 players and passed between friends are valuable again. Not simply as memory, but as data, repeat listening and digital revenue.