Anjula Acharia-Bath

Age: 38

Company: DesiHits!

Year founded: 2006

Site: desihits.com

What DesiHits! does: The company creates media about South Asian/Western fusion music (known as Desi), including online editorial content and videos that are published on the company’s website or syndicated through other channels. DesiHits! also promotes recording artists in the Desi space.

How she’s changing the game: When Acharia-Bath and her husband Ranj Bath moved to the US from the UK in the mid 2000s, the two noticed that the South Asian/Western fusion that was up and coming back home had no presence in the US. The two music lovers recruited Arun Sandhu, Ranj Bath’s cousin, a former VJ in India and eventual DesiHits! co-founder, to help them put together a podcast of a mixture of bhangra, Bollywood, and western music in early 2006. Within weeks, the podcast was downloaded 4,000 times. Just like our economy and many other aspects of our culture, music is going global, in large part due to technology. And Acharia-Bath was out in front of this trend. Pop culture was fusing behind the scenes, but mainstream western media wasn’t doing much to connect the dots. From the recent success of Slumdog Millionaire to Jay-Z’s remix, “Beware of the Boys,” it’s obvious that DesiHits! was out in front of the South Asian/Western fusion trend and in a position to capitalize. Acharia-Bath created a business model leveraging the promotion of fusion artists through new media (online videos, podcasts, social media, and so on).

Recent highlights: In addition to promotion, DesiHits! started consulting for major labels like Warner Music Group and Sony BMG, as well as expanding their content syndication. DesiHits! creates content for mobile, web and print media and has a distribution channel that has a reach exceeding 15 million people. The company is creating original television content that they’re syndicating to a South Asian television channel called Zee TV. The show is seen in 11 million homes in the UK, Canada, and the US. “We’re kind of like a fusion MTV,” says Acharia-Bath. “We come from the digital world and we’re becoming a bit more traditional now. We’ve flipped the business model, and that’s really just to get distribution and scale.” The company now has 15 employees, with offices in NYC, London, and Mumbai. The company received a lot of great press around the celebrities they have worked with, including Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Black Eyed Peas and AR Rahman (of Slumdog Millionaire) and the East/West fusion content DesiHits! has created around them. They also played a role in the success of Jay Sean, a chart topping R&B artist, with no radio play Jay Sean got to number 12 on the UK music charts and that is no easy task. Their editorial voice has become very influential globally and desihits.com is the largest online east/west fusion website worldwide.

What’s next: In addition to distribution of their content on desihits.com and syndication to Zee TV, Acharia-Bath is working on securing more distribution channels and more collaboration with other content owners. She also hints she’s looking to take the company beyond promoting artists. “I’d like to do something in the future where we can participate in some of that success of those artists that we’re pushing.”

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