Punjabi popular music is one of the largest regional music industries in the world by streaming volume, and it operates almost entirely outside the Hindi film system that dominates Indian music.
The structure is singer-led. A singer, a lyricist, a producer and a video crew make a single, put it on YouTube, and tour on the strength of it. Labels came later and have never controlled it the way they control other markets.
The subject matter of a large share of it is money, cars, guns, caste pride and rural masculinity. That has been criticised inside Punjab for two decades, including by the state government, which has periodically tried to regulate it, and it continues because it sells.
There is also a serious tradition running through the same industry: Sufi and folk material, and the songs of Shiv Kumar Batalvi, Surjit Patar and the qissa repertoire, recorded continuously by every generation.
The industry has been touched repeatedly by actual violence, including the killing of Sidhu Moose Wala at Jawaharke in 2022, which was reported worldwide.
The business runs on video platforms and on the live circuit, and the money is in shows abroad rather than in recordings anywhere.
Toronto and Vancouver are as much production centres as Mohali, and a track can be written in Punjab, recorded in Canada and released to both audiences at once.
The lyrical content, particularly the gun and the caste assertion, is a standing public argument in Punjab, and the industry's response has been that it sells.