• Himanshu "Heems" Suri spoke to Insider about his work on launching a Punjabi music vertical at Audiomack.

• An artist of Punjabi-Indian descent, Suri joined the music streaming platform in 2021 to lead its South Asian expansion.

Earlier this month, the music streaming platform Audiomack launched "Audiomack Punjabi," a new vertical aimed at amplifying the regional language genre that originated in India and Pakistan.

In a phone interview last week, Insider spoke to Himanshu "Heems" Suri, who's leading the vertical and overseeing the company's broader South Asian expansion.

An artist of Punjabi-Indian descent, Suri gained notoriety as one-third of the hip-hop group Das Racist and has gone on to release music as a solo act and with the group Swet Shop Boys. Following a corporate stint at Spotify, Suri joined Audiomack in 2021 as its director of marketing and South Asian music strategy.

In the interview, Suri framed the vertical's launch as a continued effort on his part to "shine a light on Indian culture as a whole" within the corporate structures of digital streaming platforms (DSPs), and discussed the potential for Punjabi music to mirror the international emergence of genres like Afrobeats and Dancehall.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You came onto Audiomack around this time last year. What made that the move for you personally and professionally at the time?

Yeah. I mean, it made a lot of sense for a lot of reasons. I had moved into the space of working at DSPs, trying to shine a light on Indian culture as a whole, and something both professionally and personally that drives me is the idea that Punjabi music deserves a place alongside hip-hop, Afrobeats, Dancehall, Latin, and some of the more popular genres of the world right now. And Audiomack already having that belief in those other genres, already kind of connecting diaspora dots, whether between Africa and the UK, or now in this sense, with what we're doing, India and the US, UK, and Canada — so seeing that they were already doing that. And then thirdly, seeing that folks were already engaging with Audiomack to listen to solely Punjabi music, versus other Indian genres. Those three things, I think. Actually, a fourth being: seeing how artist-forward they are, and what they kind of do to nurture artists early on in their career, having been an artist myself. So as you could see, there were a lot of reasons why it made sense to work together.