In 1978, Kuljit Bhamra’s collection of Punjabi folk songs sung by his mother, under the unassuming title of Punjabi Geet, was released. Bhamra would get on his bicycle and ride around London’s Southall, stopping at every grocery store he passed by. “I’d go up to them and say, ‘listen, can you put these five records here on the shelf?’” says Bhamra, who would go on to become a pioneering UK bhangra producer. “And they’d stock them right next to the onions.”
Half a century later, Punjabi music no longer needs to be smuggled into the marketplace next to the groceries. Instead, it’s now a global juggernaut and one of India’s biggest cultural exports. Diljit Dosanjh is making white Americans dance the bhangra, collaborating with Ed Sheeran and Sia, and selling out shows at Wembley Arena and Madison Square Garden. AP Dhillon, Karan Aujla and Shubh have become chart mainstays in India, Canada and the UK.
In 2025, Punjabi Pop (P-Pop) accounted for over 57% of India’s top exported music. Last year, Aujla alone occupied four slots on Apple Music India’s list of the ten highest-played tracks of the year. In Canada, the Punjabi wave is so strong that it prompted the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences to add a South Asian category to the Juno Awards.
“Today, major global labels aren’t just dipping their toes in the Punjabi market, they’re actively hunting for artists to work with,” says Deep Rehaan, the COO of Vancouver-based label Rehaan Records and Karan Aujla’s manager.
From a distance, Punjabi pop’s dominance can look like an overnight streaming miracle. But in reality, this is just the latest stage in a transnational project built over decades – by UK immigrants who first welded Punjabi folk rhythms and melodies onto the grammar of Western pop, by artists and entrepreneurs in Punjab who capitalised on the opportunities presented by the emerging digital economy, and by a global diaspora that supplied audiences, capital and new musical influences.
The foundations were laid in the 1980s in U.K.’s Southall and Birmingham, where a new generation of Punjabi kids were combining the Punjabi folk songs they’d inherited from their parents with the disco, pop and reggae that their non-South Asian peers were listening to. “That’s when people like myself and other producers began experimenting with bringing Western production techniques and sounds into Punjabi music,” says Bhamra. “I was basically just trying to make my Punjabi songs sound like the pop songs we were hearing on the radio.”
Meanwhile, flush with investment from the diaspora, Punjabi entrepreneurs began building their own labels and music distribution networks, expanding on the groundwork laid during the cassette era. The fact that this emerging scene was largely blocked out of the Bollywood ecosystem – and that the Punjabi film industry still hadn’t recovered from its precipitous collapse in the 1990s – became a blessing in disguise.
It pushed Punjabi artists to become early and enthusiastic adopters of YouTube, using the platform to bypass radio, film studios and major labels. While other artists were trying to break into Bollywood, Punjabi artists were building their own independent fanbases and their own personal brands. Rehaan traces that relationship back to Punjab’s akhadas, open-air performances in which singers addressed village crowds without any real institutional mediation.
“There were no middlemen, no heavy PR machines and no studio tricks,” he says. “It was just the artist, their voice and a crowd of die-hard music lovers. So when the digital age arrived, Punjabi music was already wired for a direct-to-fan model. While Bollywood operated on massive studio timelines, complex film budgets and corporate gatekeepers, Punjabi artists were entirely agile. They could write a track today, shoot a video and drop it straight onto YouTube or streaming platforms tomorrow.”
“I feel like the songwriting that happens in Punjabi is very intelligent in a way that they make sure that the lyrics are not too theth (traditional),” adds Aayushman Sinha, founder and CEO of artist management firm REPRESENT, which counts AP Dhillon and Jonita Gandhi among its clients. “They were also the first artists to recognise the value of performance marketing, of presenting data in a bigger way. They’re just incredible marketers, I think it’s ingrained in their blood.”
The Punjabi diaspora has also been a key part of Punjabi music’s global growth, evidenced by the fact that the scene’s centre of gravity today is not Jalandhar or Amritsar but Brampton, Ontario. It enables these artists to pack out arenas in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., attracting the attention of global major labels. It brings in fresh new sounds from its home territories back to Punjab, widening the scene’s sonic gene-pool. And now, it’s serving as a launch-pad for true global crossover.
“Punjabi is definitely the Spanish language of India,” says Sinha, referring to the breakthrough of Latin artists such as Bad Bunny and Rosalía, though he’s careful to add that we’re not there yet. But the building blocks for that to happen are largely already in place. And Punjabi music’s trajectory from a regional industry to national dominance and global appeal provides a blueprint for other scenes to follow.
Other regional hip-hop and pop scenes in India have been taking notes. Sinha believes that South India could provide us with the next proper global pop scene, building on the success of their own global diasporas. “They have the same kind of passion, as well as people across continents, as the Punjabi communities do,” he says. “I think their progress will mimic exactly how Punjabi music was consumed overall. You can already see artists like Anirudh Ravichander selling out gigantic arenas across the world.”
This bet is backed up by the numbers. The share of global royalties earned by Tamil and Telugu music on Spotify has more than doubled since 2021, with Telugu royalties growing by 39% in 2024. Meanwhile, Malayalam has been the fastest growing language on Spotify since the platform’s entry to India, with Malayalam music consumption growing by over 5300% between 2019 to 2024.
Ahluwalia, too, believes that the next big thing will come from the South. “The desi hip-hop scene in particular will soon be taken over by people from those communities,” he says.
Srikant Seshadri, who heads the Independent Artist Collective division at Universal Music India, also agrees that South Indian music has strong potential. But he thinks that the next Diljit Dosanjh is much more likely to be a Haryanvi-speaking rapper or pop singer. “What I see on a day-to-day basis is a macro-shift in consumption towards Haryanvi music,” he says, pointing to rappers Dhanda Nyoliwala and MC Square as major stars. “You have a pretty large local repertoire that’s brewing within the country, and it’s sort of tapping into multiple different genres. And then there’s a strong base in Australia as well.”
Rehaan says that the biggest lesson that other regional scenes can learn from Punjabi pop is to stay deeply rooted in your own soil even as you speak in a universal language. “The biggest mistake a regional scene can make is watering down its local flavour to sound like generic Bollywood or standard Western pop,” adds Rehaan. “The more specific, unpolished, and true to your local experience your music is, the more magnetic it becomes on an international stage.”
But that tightrope between local specificity and generic universality is a hard one to walk. And Punjabi music isn’t immune to these challenges. The more Punjabi pop adapts itself to the dominant styles and sounds of global rap and R&B, the easier it becomes for it to lose what makes it truly special. Bhamra worries that this is already happening.
“What definitely has endured is the Punjabi language,” he says. “And what hasn’t stayed there, in my opinion, is the Punjabi music culture – the sound of the tumbi or the dhol. Everyone’s using the same loops, so you’re totally reliant on the lyrics and the catchy nature of them. Sometimes you lose out on the beauty of the acoustic instrument sound.”
