MBW’s World Leaders is a regular series in which we turn the spotlight toward some of the most influential industry figures overseeing key international markets. In this feature, we speak to Jay Mehta, Managing Director, Warner Music India & SAARC. World Leaders is supported by PPL.
India is a big priority for Warner Music Group – and it’s not hard to see why.
The company’s CEO Robert Kyncl told analysts on WMG’s calendar Q3 earnings call the other week that India “will become an increasingly influential global force in the music business”.
He pointed out the gap between the size of the market’s GDP (the world’s fifth largest) versus the size of its recorded music market (the world’s 14th largest).
Kyncl argued that this gap will close, pointing to the opportunity in subscription music streaming. He noted that only 2% of the country’s 1.4 billion population currently subscribe to music streaming services, but that India’s total subscriber number has grown 40% over the past year.
India might not be the largest market globally by number of music subscribers, but it could be on course to become the largest by volume of streams.
Stats published by Luminate in January showed that India saw the biggest YoY increase in total annual on-demand music streams of any nation last year.
If annual streaming volume growth in the US slows in 2024, as many expect it will – but India manages to sustain its 2023 YoY streaming growth margin this year – India could become the world’s largest music streaming territory by volume in 2024.
WMG officially launched Warner Music India in March 2020, headed up by Jay Mehta.
He joined Warner Music Group following several years at Sony Music on April 1, 2020, right in the middle of the first COVID lockdown.
His remit expanded in April 2024 to include oversight of Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka as Managing Director of the newly formed Warner Music South Asia.
“We had a very interesting start to Warner Music India,” Mehta tells us. “But what we’ve done in the last four years is significant.”
Warner Music has since inked several distribution and M&A deals in the market, looking to bolster its positioning amid projections of significant subscriber growth and streaming consumption domestically.
On the distribution front, WMG has struck deals with Bollywood specialist Tips Music and Punjabi music company Sky Digital India.
WMG’s M&A moves, meanwhile, include a strategic investment in JetSynthesys’ Global Music Junction in April. It also acquired India-based artist management and live events company E–Positive in October 2023 and bought a majority stake in digital media and music company Divo in February last year.
Most recently, earlier this month, WMG took a minority stake in ticketing platform SkillBox, just a couple of weeks after Robert Kyncl revealed via an Economic Times article that WMG is actively seeking M&A opportunities in India.
Speaking with MBW, Jay Mehta reiterates that M&A will be key to the company’s expansion in India.
“One of the things we always aimed for when I started Warner Music India was to become a top three label in the country,” he tells us. “It seemed very ambitious when we started because we were the last big player to enter the market.”
He adds: “To have that kind of dream in an extremely competitive Indian market, without having a domestic catalog, almost felt unreal. But [we’ve already] had success. In the month of March, we had close to 30 tracks in Spotify‘s Top 200 and we don’t have a big catalog as part of Warner [in India]”.
“We want to be the flag bearers taking this sound global, and I think we’ve had a good start in that.”
Jay Mehta
In addition to preparing for India’s domestic music industry growth through local partnerships and investments, Mehta argues that India will start playing an increasingly influential creative role in the global music industry.
He predicts that Punjabi-language music will be the next global breakout genre after K-pop and Afrobeats.
“I’ve been saying this for a while now,” he says. “The first interview that I gave when I started Warner Music India was about this. I truly believe the next global wave is going to be from India. And I feel Punjabi music has all the ingredients to make that happen, from the beats to the melody and the artists.”
Warner is seeing success in India and globally with frontline Punjabi-language artists like Diljit Dosanjh, who signed his first major label partnership with WMG in March 2022. According to Mehta, Dosanjh is becoming “one of the biggest superstars of the Indian diaspora”.
Evidence of Dosanjh’s global appeal arrived in April when he performed the biggest-ever Punjabi concert held outside of India at the BC Place Stadium in Vancouver, Canada. He also became the first-ever Punjabi-language artist to perform on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in June.
“We want to be the flag bearers taking this sound global, and I think we’ve had a good start,” says Mehta.
Other Warner-affiliated Punjabi-language stars include Shubh, plus Karan Aujla who is signed between Warner Music India and its Toronto-based JV with Warner Music Canada, 91 North. Warner also works with Hindi-language superstar rapper, King.
“All of these artists will ensure that it’s not just a one-artist phenomenon,” says Mehta. “A big cultural shift is going to happen.”
Mehta tells us that the 91 North joint venture, led by Ikwinder (Ikky) Singh and Ajay Charlie ‘B’ Saxena, forms part of Warner’s “ambition of taking South Asian music to the world”.
He plans to replicate the model in other countries but explains that Canada was chosen as the first location for the JV, because it’s where a “big cultural revolution is happening in terms of content creation” in the global South Asian diaspora.
“There are a lot of markets which are consumption markets for South Asian music, but Canada is becoming a big creator hub,” adds Mehta. “That’s why we wanted to do this JV in Canada. It’s where some of the biggest artists and so the best music is getting created.”
He spotlights the success of Karan Aujla and Ikky’s Making Memories album as an example of crossover success in the market. It reached No.5 on the Canadian album chart last summer, the highest-charting Punjabi-language album in the chart’s history.
Looking ahead, Mehta says that he’s looking forward to the day when a frontline South Asian artist “celebrates a mainstream award” like a Grammy in a major category.
“Fingers crossed on that one,” he says and tells MBW about the steps WMG is taking to try and make that a reality…
What markets globally are you identifying as key creative hubs for South Asian music like Canada?
India and Pakistan are the most obvious markets. But outside of the South Asian community in South Asia and Canada, we’re seeing [potential] in California and lots of parts of the US.
The UK has always been a hub, but I think it has started to mirror some of those [trends] from Canada. That’s where we want to take North records – to all of these diaspora markets.
Could you comment on Diljit Dosanjh’s success in North America?
It’s a big moment, not only for him but for the entire community. We always wanted there to be the flag bearer of taking this sound global, or taking South Asia global.
He is leading from the front with the successes and the amount of interest that he’s generating from across the world and on his North American tour. We’ve seen arenas sold out and sold out within days of him announcing the tour. That’s incredible.
We don’t see that happen for many artists, not only South Asian artists but big, global artists; when they announce a tour, it gets sold out in hours. That’s the power of what Diljit has [achieved]. And a lot of that is reflected in other success as well.
The amount of collaborations that we’ve done with him in the last 18 months is incredible. The Sia track [Hass Hass] was on Spotify charts in multiple countries. It was on YouTube charts in multiple countries.
A series of big international collaborations are coming up. He’s only going to grow bigger from here.
Looking at his touring stats, he has arguably broken the North American market in live. Are those collaborations with global stars the key to breaking the North American market, in terms of breaking into the top 10 of the Hot 100?
For sure, yes. That’s what we’re aiming for next. You’re right – in terms of touring, he’s already broken there, but we want to hit the Billboard charts and we want to hit top streaming charts in these markets.
Collaborations are the immediate steps to ensuring that a wider audience beyond the diaspora starts to discover and stream his music.
So we will have the fans of the artist he is collaborating with discover him, and slowly, the revolution will be complete in terms of, people who are not listening to South Asian music will now start listening to it because of him.
As Punjabi artists become more successful globally, how competitive is it getting to sign artists from South Asia, and are you competing with labels in the US for those signings?
Sure, but that’s only exciting for us.
More competition means that these artists are generating a lot of interest worldwide. That’s important. It’s a big positive takeaway for us that many big US labels are now interested in signing South Asian artists.
What’s driving the growth in streaming volume domestically and in the global consumption of music from India?
It’s a combination of how underpenetrated India as a market was, and at the same time, we now have artists who are [making] truly international-level music, and we have Indian artists who are becoming big stars.
It’s a combination of all three. But, you know, the first track ever from India to hit the Global Top 25 on Spotify was by an artist that we [signed], called King.
The second track to hit the Global Top 25 on Spotify was again from one of the artists signed to us, Jasleen Royal.
These [global hits] were driven by a large number of streams from India. India, as a market, has approximately 220 million audio streaming users, which is just 40% of the country’s total YouTube users. YouTube users are at around 550 million, approximately less than 50% of total mobile users.
At such low levels of penetration, India is turning out the [domestic streaming] numbers [to produce] a truly Global Top 25 on Spotify.
Imagine, even if we reach 50% of India’s total mobile population using audio streaming, we might start having global No.1s only coming from streams [from within] India.
We are growing much faster than large parts of the world. So even at these big numbers and big base, there’s a market that is going to multiply. And we finally also have a big list of artists who are making truly international music of very good quality. India is going to [produce] the next big global wave for music.
Circling back to Warner Music’s positioning in India and in South Asia, you’ve signed a few partnerships and made a few investments since 2020. How important will M&A be in expanding your presence in the market in the coming months and years?
M&A is important because the larger aim is to be a top label in the country within the first five years of launching. And we’re not too far from that. We’re definitely in the Top 5. M&A is a way of ensuring that, more importantly, we have deeper penetration and deeper presence within a country.
India behaves like a continent in terms of music, where music is created in different languages, in different states. Each language and each state has a journey of its own.
Our aim was to ensure that we are definitely present in at least 12 or 13 of the country’s top languages. While Hindi was growing faster than English, regional languages were growing multiple times faster than Hindi.
That was our big objective: ensuring that we grow bottom up and be closer to the ground. That’s why most of our M&A deals are in the regional space.
We acquired a company which is one of the biggest media companies in the south of India, called Divo. We have a big presence in Punjab through acquisitions and a partnership with Sky Digital. We invested in the biggest central India company called Global Music Junction. As we speak, we effectively have some sort of presence in 19 of 28 states in the country on the back of M&A.
While at the center, we are signing artists and making ourselves a destination for pop culture in India. But at the same time, we are creating this ecosystem across the country by having the same philosophy across different languages to our partners.
What was the thinking behind the launch of Warner Music South Asia?
It was started with the objective of taking the success that we had in India and replicating it in other South Asian nations. Because, like I said, our dream is to take South Asian music to the world. And it will happen off the back of, not just India, but by taking Pakistan, Bangladesh, and this entire creative hub across these countries to the world.
And because of proximity to these markets, the idea was to operate Warner Music South Asia from Dubai, but all of these countries have access to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.
Pakistan in particular is the second-biggest South Asian market outside of India, and some of the best content created there is through Coke Studio. So we decided to invest in the company called Giraffe Studios, which have been making the biggest tracks out of Coke Studio.
The idea was to ensure that we look at South Asia holistically, and that means that across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, collectively, we have to take these cultures to the world. That’s the larger idea behind the South Asia [division].
What are your longer-term predictions for the music sector in both India and wider South Asia?
This phenomenon is here to stay. We are just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of exploring the true potential of South Asian music and the artists.
The presence is truly felt, both in terms of music and consumption, and now artists like Karan Aujla are winning Junos and Diljit Dosanjh are selling out stadiums.
These are very encouraging signs. But in the near to long term, we will see a big, major South Asian music wave throughout the world. These are the best times for South Asian music and artists.
