AP Dhillon, Gurinder Gill, Ikky, Karan Aujla, and Jonita Gandhi Grace the Cover of Billboard Canada’s Debut Edition

Billboard Canada has launched its inaugural edition with AP Dhillon, Gurinder Gill, Ikky, Jonita Gandhi, and Karan Aujla as cover stars.

Released on October 5, the cover story titled “Punjabi Wave” looks at how diasporic Canadian artists are redefining the global music scene.

Speaking of their respective experiences in the music industry, Dhillon, Ikky, Aujla, Gandhi and Gill share details of the struggles they faced when they were starting out their music careers.

“When I was young, I didn’t know what I was doing. I really needed help,” Aujla told Billboard Canada. “I wrote over a hundred songs and didn’t know I was supposed to get royalties. Some people around me took advantage. And that’s still happening in Punjab a lot. It needs to be corrected ASAP.”

Dhillon added: “Early on, I tried to send my music to a few labels, to people in the industry. I tried to message producers.

“It wasn’t going anywhere. They weren’t grabbing it. They were like ‘this ain’t it.’ So we just kept going, kept going, kept going, and we didn’t stop.”

Gill – who has worked alongside Dhillon on “Excuses” and “Insane” – highlighted the “financial struggles” he, Dhillon, and rapper Shinda Kahlon faced towards the beginning of their careers. The trio kicked off their music careers together. The story of how the trio blew up globally has been recorded in the “Hills” singer’s new Prime Video documentary First of a Kind.

 “We were not financially stable [at first], and we were finishing school,” Gill said. “It was a lot of work when we started taking it seriously. We had to do everything by ourselves.” 

Gandhi on the other hand touched upon how she was called out for sounding “too Indian” or “too Western”. The 33-year-old singer also highlighted that she appreciates “the blend of global influences that defined her early life”.

“Being exposed to so many different cultures and people from around the world in my school opened up my mind to a lot of music that I might not have come across if I grew up somewhere else,” she said. 

Ikky describes how “Punjabi heritage is in everything he makes, but so are reggae and dancehall, hip-hop and R&B, because those were the influences he was growing up around.

“Our diversity is crazy in Toronto,” he said. “Enough for you to be adding these cultures in your music without you ever knowing it.” 

In the past few years, Dhillon, Gandhi, Gill, Ikky, and Aujla have constantly released chart-topping singles. In fact, Dhillon’s 2023 single “With You” debuted at No. 42 on Billboard’s Canada Top 100, bumping out Travis Scott. 

Read Rolling Stone’s review of Dhillon’s Prime Video docu-series AP Dhillon: First of a Kind here.

Billboard Canada’s cover stories will run quarterly.