"Fame Monster" is attacking India.
Lady Gaga and her team have launched a formal strategy to spread her brand in the booming, Bollywood-crazed India market, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The team has tapped the founders of Desi Hits, a New York-based media company that produces and distributes entertainment content targeted at South Asians all over the world, to help build her brand, particularly in India but also in the large South Asian diaspora.
"The reason I'm going to India now is because I can," said Lady Gaga, who has the nickname "Fame Monster" because of her candid admission of wanting to spread her music and name across the globe.
"I didn't have the money or the resources before to travel and bring all of my things with me and reach an entire new territory of fans."
The push into India is part of the massive marketing and social-media machine the Lady Gaga team has created around the release of her third album, "Born This Way."
The campaign includes partnerships with companies including Starbucks Corp. and online giveaways of remixes, videos and tracks. It has inspired companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and Best Buy Co. to find creative ways to leverage the popularity of Gaga's music to their benefit.
For example, Amazon.com sold the album for just 99 cents to promote its new online music storage service, a move that led to such strong demand that Amazon's servers were overloaded.
Lady Gaga is only the latest US entertainer who have turned to Desihits to help crack the India market. Others include Britney Spears, 50 Cent, Akon and Enrique Iglesias. India is an appealing target for entertainers, as it has 700 million people under the age of 30.
Desi Hits, which also has offices in the UK and India, promotes artists' music on Desihits.com, links them with influential producers and DJs, and helps de-mystify the commercial culture for the artists and their record labels.
Desi Hits co-founder Anjula Acharia-Bath said that unlike in the US, India's mass music industry is largely driven by the film industry, so the hit songs of the day are predominantly from the mainstream movies. If an international artist wants to penetrate 'mass' pop culture, she said, navigating Bollywood is essential.
Acharia-Bath arranged for Lady Gaga's hit single "Born This Way" to be remixed by two sets of producers: The Bollywood team of Salim and Sulaiman and Culture Shock, a Canada-based band and production team.
Those two remixes were released last month and are available only as videos on YouTube and Desihits.com. This week, two more South Asian-influenced remixes of her song "Judas" -- mixed by Salim and Sulaiman and another popular producer, Panjabi MC -- were also released on Desihits.com.
Desihits.com attracts 1.5 million unique visitors a month, mainly youths and young adults. The website generates about a half million impressions of its content a day on Facebook, and reaches a total audience of 20 million people across the web, mobile and television platforms each month.
