(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- T-Series, which owns the rights to about 70% of the Bollywood songbook recorded in the past three decades, has been flooding YouTube with music videos. Its ascent to the top of the site—it dethroned comedian-gamer-troll PewDiePie—was powered by an explosion of cheap mobile data in India, which has helped bring online about 300 million new users since 2016.
Kumar took over the business in 1997 after his father, the founder, was gunned down by criminals linked to India’s most notorious gangster. As chairman, Kumar transformed T-Series from a seller of cheap cassette tapes into a dominant music industry force, a prolific film production house, and more recently, a partner for entertainment giants clamoring to break into India’s massive streaming market. In January, Spotify Technology SA signed a deal with the company to give global listeners access to the 160,000-plus songs in the label’s catalog.
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