MTV Desi Coming your way

From WorldChanging blog:

"In late July, MTV will premiere MTV Desi, a new music tv offering aimed squarely at second-generation Indian-Americans (desis). The channel will mix Bollywood  videos with Asian Massive, add a shot of M.I.A., offer up cross-generational comedy (one suspects a la The Kumars at No 42), interviews with bicultural artists, profiles of happening desis and live house parties.

It's a mass culture tap into the notion of transnational identity -- the idea that despite a degree of assimilation, immigrant communities now retain close ties to their native cultures, thanks to easy air travel, transglobal business and trade, and you-are-there communications technologies. Unlike previous generations (say, that of my grandparents and parents, early 20th century immigrants and first-gen Americans, respectively), the "old country" isn't being left behind forever. This hybrid identity leaves a lot of young Asian-Americans hungry for pop culture that reflects their ties to both West and East.

MTV Desi will be the vanguard for two other Asian-American channels: MTV Chi, a melange of Chinese diaspora popcult, and MTV K, merging South Korean and Korean-American pop music. Says MTV exec Nusrat Durrani, "This country has had the African-American experience, the Hispanic-American experience, and now it is the time for the third-largest group, the Asian-Americans." While of Russo-Jewish extraction, I look forward to getting my fixes of Karsh Kale, DJ Cheb i Sabbah, Tabla Beat Science et cetera that much more easily."

More coverage here and from ContentSutra.

 

More links from lungis.com

: Time on the rising marketing potential of South Asians in America:

Welcome to the next marketing frontier. For years, Western companies have understood the potential of 1 billion consumers in India,but now they are slowly starting to realize the purchasing power of people in the U.S. who trace their roots to the subcontinent—a group known as desis. MTV India has aired overseas since 1996, but MTV Desi—a channel for Americans of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Bhutanese and Nepalese descent—is brand new, launching this summer. And MTV isn’t alone as it chases desi dollars. South Asian marketing is still in its infancy, but early adopters like General Motors, Citibank and GlaxoSmithKline are advertising in ethnic newspapers, buying airtime on satellite channels, sponsoring cultural festivals, underwriting minority scholarships and even creating new products, like MTV Desi.

 

Why the interest? It’s not just America’s growing appetite for South Asian culture—movies like Bend It Like Beckham and stars like Bollywood actress and model Aishwarya Rai. The marketing thrust started with the 2000 Census, which revealed that during the 1990s the number of Indians in the U.S. more than doubled—making them the fastest-growing Asian minority. There are some 2.5 million desis in the US, and the vast majority are Indian. That may not seem terribly significant compared with, say, 40 million Hispanics, but consider how premium a customer a South Asian is: Indians alone commanded $76 billion worth of disposable personal income last year, according to market-research firm Cultural Access Group, using figures from the University of Georgia’s Selig Center for Economic Growth; median household income is nearly $64,000—50% higher than the national average. The U.S. has always welcome the world's poor and working classes.d’s poor and working classes. India has sent its professionals.

: “MTV plans to further infilitrate the Asian-American market by releasing MTV Chi (for Chinese Americans) and MTV K (for Korean Americans) by next year.”