Ricky Kej on Bollywood, Grammy economics, and the soft-power ceiling of Indian pop

On 21 June 2026, in an interview with The Indian Express's Expresso show, three-time Grammy Award winner Ricky Kej delivered a verdict on the most powerful cultural-export machine in South Asia that is unlikely to find a place in any trade-ministry brochure. Bollywood music, he said, has not broken cultural barriers. The remark is worth more than the headline it generated, because Kej is not the natural critic of that industry — he is one of its most decorated outliers, a Bengaluru-based composer who has built a career around precisely the question of whether Indian popular music can travel.

The diagnosis is sharper than the contrarian reading suggests. Bollywood does not lack for reach: its film soundtracks dominate the domestic market, soundtrack streams on global platforms are measured in billions, and the playback-singer format has produced a recognisable vocal register across South Asia, the Gulf, and the African Indian-Ocean littoral. What Kej is pointing at is a ceiling on legibility — the point at which familiarity stops translating into vocabulary, where an audience recognises a song without being able to name what it is doing differently from the rest of its global playlist. That is a more uncomfortable claim than "Bollywood is bad." It is "Bollywood is heard, and not learned."

The studio, the stage, and the recording academy

The tension Kej is naming has a measurable shape. The Recording Academy's international categories — where his own three Grammys sit — were created precisely because the body of work classified as "pop" or "world music" under older Grammy taxonomies was, by design, dominated by anglophone and Latin-American releases. A composer from India who wins in the contemporary-instrumental or immersive-audio categories has, in effect, won by leaving the country's mainstream pop apparatus and entering a more borderless register: film scores, ambient composition, collaborations with Western symphony orchestras and African percussionists. The pattern is visible across South Asian Grammy winners of the past decade, several of whom have won in categories that do not require them to out-sell a Nashville or Stockholm release.

This is not, strictly, a failure of talent. It is a structural feature of how the global music economy is built. Anglo-American A&R still controls the radio and editorial gatekeeping on which most "crossover" careers depend. Streaming recommendation systems are trained on the listening patterns of anglophone users, which means a Hindi film song with 800 million domestic streams can sit adjacent to, but never above, a K-pop release in a Western-curated Viral 50 list. Bollywood's commercial problem is not volume. It is that the architecture of attention treats South Asian popular forms as a category to be sampled, not a centre to be organised around.

The counter-narrative: reach is reach

The counter-argument is straightforward and not entirely wrong. The most streamed Indian music in 2025 was, by virtually every available metric, film music. A.R. Rahman's catalogue has been sampled, credited, and cited in Western pop production for two decades. Slumdog Millionaire's soundtrack — a deliberately Bollywood-coded release marketed for a Western audience — won Oscars and shifted the global perception of what an Indian film score could sound like in a Hollywood frame. Diaspora-driven virality has, in the last 36 months, pushed multiple Tamil and Telugu film tracks into TikTok's global trending lists without any assistance from a Western label. From this view, the cultural barrier has already been broken; what has not been broken is the perception inside the global industry that the breaking matters.

There is something to this. Bollywood's soft-power footprint across West Africa, the Caribbean, and the Gulf is not in dispute, and it operates through a different distribution logic than the Western hit parade. The Nigerian film industry has absorbed Hindi film music vocabulary for at least a generation; Mauritanian and Senegalese hip-hop producers have built careers on Bollywood samples; Fijian and Surinamese diaspora communities treat playback singers as part of their own musical heritage. By any reasonable measure of cultural diffusion, the Bollywood sound is already global. What it is not is hegemonic in the sense the term carries in the global music industry — that is, the centre from which the next round of genre definitions is drafted.

What the global playlist is actually for

This is the part of the conversation that rarely makes it into the trade press. The global music industry's "global" is, in practice, a small number of well-funded labels and a smaller number of editorial gatekeepers deciding which non-anglophone releases get pushed into the algorithmic shelves that Western listeners actually see. Bollywood has reach but not pipeline: it sells extraordinarily well inside its own networks and inside the diaspora networks those networks have built, and it stops where those networks stop. The expansion that the industry calls "global south" growth — the rise of K-pop, the Latin explosion, the Afrobeats wave — happened in part because Korean, Latin, and Nigerian artists were absorbed into a label-and-A&R apparatus that managed the translation. Bollywood has, for complicated domestic reasons, never quite needed that apparatus, and so has never quite built it.

This is also where the soft-power argument has to be made carefully. The claim that Bollywood is a cultural ambassador runs ahead of the evidence on what ambassadors actually accomplish. A successful cultural export changes the receiving audience's idea of what is possible in the sending country's own culture; it is not enough to be admired. The most rigorous case for the global success of, say, K-pop is not that fans outside Seoul like the songs. It is that the institutional architecture built around K-pop — training academies, label-backed development deals, English-language press infrastructure, social-media strategy designed for global recommendation systems — has begun to produce Korean-language pop that travels without translation. Bollywood has the audience. It does not yet have the apparatus that would convert audience into influence.

Stakes

The stakes of Kej's argument are not really about awards. They are about what India's growing cultural weight is going to look like in a world in which the consumption of media is increasingly a soft-power variable. If Bollywood's ceiling is treated as a problem to be solved through state-backed cultural missions, the result is likely to look like the export-promotion programmes that have, in other sectors, produced scale without taste. If it is treated as a creative problem — what would a 22-year-old composer in Chennai need to build the kind of international career that K-pop producers have built — the result might be more interesting, and less exportable as a policy line. The Grammys are an imperfect measure of any of this, but they are a measure, and the gap between Kej's three and the absence of any purely Bollywood-coded winner in the same categories is at least an honest data point.

What remains genuinely uncertain is whether the barrier Kej is naming is structural or generational. The streaming era has compressed the half-life of a global hit and lengthened the distance between a viral moment and durable influence. The next Indian composer to win a Grammy may do so by following Kej's route — leaving the dominant commercial apparatus and entering a category the global industry takes seriously. Or the apparatus itself may change, and Bollywood-coded music may enter the global mainline in a form that no current observer would recognise. Both outcomes are visible from where the industry sits in mid-2026, and the music, in Kej's telling, is in no hurry to commit to either.

Desk note: Wire coverage of the Expresso interview has so far leaned on the headline. This piece reads Kej's argument as a claim about the architecture of the global music industry — not a verdict on the quality of Bollywood — and treats the counter-argument that Bollywood's reach is already global with the same weight as the critique.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricky_Kej
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Contemporary_Instrumental_Album
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood_music