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 stop’ and that it’s okay to fail—I think I’ve really embraced that part of Silicon Valley,” she says.
POPS’ answer was to educate the market—“song by song, title by title,” as she puts it—slowly assembling one of Vietnam’s largest music repertoires and becoming one of YouTube’s first music partners in the region.
Following its foundational years in Vietnam, POPS expanded to other markets in Southeast Asia, entering Thailand in 2016 and Indonesia in 2020. “Vietnam is our home country. Indonesia has close to 300 million people, and Thai consumers have high purchasing power,” Nguyen explains. “You put those three markets together…it’s really a powerhouse for the region.”
POPS is part of a growing Vietnamese pop-culture scene. Yeah1, Vietnam’s first listed media company, reported a 60% revenue jump in 2025 thanks to formats like Call Me by Fire, a singing competition that drew crowds as large as 50,000 people a night. Corporate heavyweights are stepping in: Vingroup, No. 26 on the Southeast Asia 500, made culture a “core pillar” of its strategy last year.
Even Vietnam’s government is backing the cultural industry. In January, Vietnam’s government passed Resolution 80, which set a target of growing the cultural economy by 10% a year, until it reaches 7% of GDP by 2030.
Easy to scale, tough to monetize
Still, consumers in Southeast Asia’s emerging markets are also highly price-sensitive, which Nguyen admits made it difficult for her to grow the business financially. “Southeast Asia is a place where you need a lot of patience—it’s a difficult place to to scale in terms of monetization, but it’s really easy to scale in terms of numbers,” she says. “I’m still waiting for the two to converge together.”
Apart from licensing Southeast Asian content, POPS also helps to bring foreign IPs from markets like the U.S. and Japan to the region. The firm is one of Southeast Asia’s biggest importers of Japanese anime, including series like Doraemon, Naruto, One Piece, and Detective Conan. (In 2022, Japanese broadcasting company TV TOKYO, which airs major titles like Sergeant Keroro and My Guardian Characters, was the lead investor in POPS’ Series D fundraising round.)
“The secret to our success is going deep into each market, understanding the cultural nuances, and then layering on cross-border content, whether it be from Korea, U.S., or Japan,” Nguyen explains.
POPS is also working toward a Tokyo listing, through the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Asia Startup Hub program. POPS executives had previously suggested a listing might come in 2027, but Nguyen won’t put a date on it for now. “Japan is not like the U.S., where if you decide this, you can list in six months,” she says. “There’s a lot of requirements for a Japan listing.”
Nguyen says the firm is “near breakeven” today, with plans for profitability in 2027 across its markets, though she declined to reveal exact figures.
AI, a double-edged sword
Generative AI has flooded the market with cheap content—AI-generated microdramas have proliferated on Chinese streaming platforms like iQIYI, while apps like Suno and Google’s Lyria can generate a song from a prompt. Creators, Nguyen says, have to experiment. “It’s about cutting costs,” she says. “AI allows creators to deliver high-quality content in a short period of time, [which is important] because the hunger for content is so prevalent.”
Her own focus group is at home—she has four children. “The younger generation is very anti-AI,” she says. “They’ll criticize something as long as they can see or smell AI in it. Instead, they value content not produced with AI, which they deem as more authentic.” Platforms, she notes, are still “rewarding fully authentic, human-made content”—or at least content with a human touch.
Yet POPS itself straddles that line. The firm runs AI influencers, and brands have booked them, Nguyen says, “without us having to do anything because they couldn’t tell it was AI.” She calls that “a little unnerving.”
The industry’s way through, she argues, is labeling and enforcement: platforms and artists are locked in “a chicken and egg” discussion over how to flag AI content and train the systems to protect the originals.
‘That’s the K formula’
Social media, Nguyen argues, is giving lesser-known artists a chance to shine outside a music ecosystem that privileges local acts and Western superstars. “Social media has really democratized content,” she says.
In 2024, “I Like You the Most,” a song by Thai R&B singer PONCHET, went viral on TikTok, after global creators and influencers adopted its “sped up” version for dance challenges and acoustic covers. Today, its official music video has over 140 million views on YouTube.
That same year, “the cutest pair,” a song by Singaporean singer-songwriter Regina Song, went viral on TikTok. At its peak, the song topped Spotify’s “Viral 50” global chart, and today has over 68.5 million streams on the platform.
Nguyen is certain that Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam will eventually get their time in the spotlight. “V-pop is extremely catchy,” she says. “It’s a great genre for dance, and fits well with the TikTok style.”
Her dream sits on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. “I would love to see a Vietnamese artist doing a sellout concert in Mexico City,” Nguyen says. “That is definitely one of our biggest goals.”
Esther Nguyen will be speaking at the Southeast Asia 500 Summit on Nov. 3 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Join executives from the Fortune Southeast Asia 500, policymakers, and investors to examine the forces reshaping one of the world’s most important growth regions. Apply here.
In Fortune’s Asia Agenda column, released at least twice a month, we speak with Asia’s top business leaders about how they are building for the future and the lessons they’ve drawn from leading companies in one of the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic regions. Explore all of our profiles here.
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