FIVE Hotels and Resorts: Aloki Batra [Interview]

Not your average CEO, FIVE Hotels and Resort’s Aloki Batra is the face behind the successful lifestyle destination, and now record label, FIVE Music. Recently creating the FIVE Music record label as a way to further fuel the brand as a forward-thinking music initiative, this is the centre of everything that he now does with the brand. We wanted to find out more about the brand and the record label so we sat down with him for a talk.

Congratulations on the launch of FIVE Music! With this new record label and the expansion of the brand, how do you think it will benefit the overall FIVE brand as it grows further?

“At the end of the day, music is a large part of our story. We have lots of venues with music-driven entertainment and by investing in the music business, it gives us good foresight of the future trends and it also gives us a good idea of what the next trend is. One is to grab the next trend and to be in a space where the trends are created, but at the same time when you actually make it a business you start taking it more seriously.”

Why did you decide to start the label? What’s the idea behind it and what inspired you and pushed you to go in this direction?

“A lot of music is elite, and a lot of producers are sitting down in their studios and making music. We meet a lot of them, they come here and a lot of them play here and we thought it was a good idea. There’s no place they can really test the music which they are producing so we thought it might be a good idea for us to get into the game and start testing music on our audience and see what works and what doesn’t work, and we believe we are in a good position to really define what the next big musical hits are.”

Image credit: FIVE