The next K-pop? POPS founder Esther Nguyen hopes TikTok can make Southeast Asian music a global phenomenon

Esther Nguyen has what may be a stereotypical story for a Vietnamese-American entrepreneur working in Vietnam. Her parents fled the country when Saigon fell in 1975; Nguyen, born in Michigan and raised in the Bay Area, had long felt the pull of her family’s former home.

“I knew I wanted to do something in Southeast Asia, and specifically Vietnam,” Nguyen tells Fortune. “I thought about what really resonates with the local culture, and landed on music.” 

In 2007, she packed her bags and moved to Ho Chi Minh City with a dream of creating the “Spotify of Vietnam,” before there was even a digital ecosystem to work in. 

The local music industry, she recalls, was a mess. Back then, “no one understood digital rights,” and artists were signing contracts for CDs and DVDs that said nothing about digital distribution. 

Nguyen responded by starting POPS Worldwide, an entertainment company which produces, licenses, distributes, and monetizes digital content across platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Nineteen years after she arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, she now manages a portfolio of over 45,000 recordings across different genres, with hubs in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. In March, Primary Wave—the independent publisher whose catalogs include Prince, Bob Marley, and Britney Spears—invested in the company; a Tokyo listing is in the works.

Now, Nguyen sees an opportunity for Southeast Asian music as social media shakes up the world of pop culture. “Nowadays, people are listening to music from Africa, South Korea or Mexico, and embedding it into their stories and reels—and they like it even if it isn’t in their own language,” she explains. “Our goal is to ensure that Southeast Asian music will also resonate globally.”

‘Song by song, title by title’

Nguyen had a tough hill to climb when she arrived in Vietnam in 2007. Her Vietnamese, she says, was “like a two-year-old’s,” so local artists often laughed her out of the room. “They’d kind of brush me away, and I’d keep coming back, and they’d be like, ‘Well, just go take it. Our content is on the internet anyway.’”

Still, she says she relied on her Silicon Valley experience to keep going. “The mentality of ‘keep moving, don’t........

© Fortune