HYBE India Has Opened Auditions for a New Girl Group
By Hasan Beyaz
HYBE INDIA
HYBE INDIA has taken its next concrete step in the Indian market: opening applications for a new girl group, with auditions now live for female talent from across India born between 2005 and 2011.
The search spans a wide range of disciplines: vocals, rap, dance, acting, modelling, and more. Both online submissions and in-person rounds across key Indian cities are part of the process, though specific venues and dates have yet to be announced. Further details are expected on HYBE INDIA's official audition website and social channels.
The announcement gives clearer shape to the ambitions HYBE INDIA outlined when it first launched its talent discovery programme earlier this year. That initiative framed the company's entry into India in broad terms – a long-term commitment to developing artists from India and the Indian diaspora through HYBE's global training and production infrastructure. Today's update narrows the focus: a girl group, built to represent India's cultural diversity, aimed at international audiences.
It follows a template HYBE has used before. KATSEYE, developed through a joint project with Geffen Records and debuted in 2024, now counts over 36 million monthly listeners on Spotify – proof, by HYBE's own metrics, that its artist development system can generate global traction when applied outside Korea. The India project would operate on similar principles, with locally sourced talent moving through the same creative development, performance training, and storytelling pipeline.
The harder question is whether that pipeline can accommodate the specific complexity of the Indian market – one where mainstream pop is inseparable from Bollywood, where Tamil, Telugu, and Punjabi film industries each run their own parallel music ecosystems, and where the idol group format HYBE has built its entire business around has no real precedent or established fanbase infrastructure. A girl group brief that explicitly references cultural diversity suggests HYBE is at least asking the right questions. Whether the answers come through in who gets signed is another matter.