Telugu Rapper Akhil Bandhu Clinches JioSaavn Spotted South Winning Song with ‘Sye’

A seasoned rapper who has been in the game for 10 years, Telugu hip-hop artist Akhil Bandhu aka A-B says the talent search JioSaavn Spotted has boosted his confidence to make more music.

A winner in the South category for his song “Sye,” Akhil says he never thought he’d even make the top five. “It is such an encouraging win for me and my crew to be associated with Warner Music India through JioSaavn Spotted,” he says. 

It’s also a boost for independent, boundary-pushing Telugu music, according to Akhil, who’s part of the hip-hop crew Rival Mob. With a lot of people tuning in to songs being made by indie artists in Telugu, the artist points to easy accessibility via streaming platforms like JioSaavn as a major plus. “This gives us (independent artists) a huge scope of reaching a lot of people who usually listen to Tollywood or Bollywood movie music,” he adds.

Discoverability of indie music, then, was (and to some extent, continues to be) a major gap but Akhil now proudly claims the Telugu indie scene “has been going mad within Telugu states” thanks to contributions by pop-rock bands like Chowrasta and its vocalist-composer Ram Miriyala. “[He] pushed the indie scene by bringing Tollywood into the picture,” Akhil says.

For his part, Akhil created “Sye” with beatmaker Sxperblu in May 2022 and says he knew it was going to “get me something big.”  He says about the song’s potential, “[It can] pull more people to hip-hop because it has the melody touch to it. My final goal was to reach out to distributors so I could get some sponsors to make a good video.”

With those plans in mind, there’s also a Rival Mob album coming up. A multilingual full-length by the crew, Akhil says it’s also going to bring in “underground artists” as featured guests. “Since this album has Hindi, Telugu and English languages, we are expecting it to reach people all over India,” he adds.