Super Cassettes Industries Private Limited, doing business as T-Series,[note 1][1][5] is an Indian music record label and film production company founded by Gulshan Kumar on 11 July 1983.

[8] As of October 2024, T-Series also owns and operates the most-viewed and the second most-subscribed YouTube channel, with over 278 million subscribers[9] and 272 billion views.

Kumar, initially a fruit juice seller in Delhi, founded T-Series to sell pirated Hindi songs before the company eventually began producing new music.

They eventually became a leading music label with the release of Aashiqui (1990), composed by Nadeem–Shravan, which sold 20 million copies and became the best-selling Indian soundtrack album of all time.

T-Series also have other channels dedicated to content in several Indian languages including Bengali, Bhojpuri, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi and Rajasthani.

T-Series was founded on 11 July 1983[14] by Gulshan Kumar,[15] at the time a fruit juice seller in the Daryaganj neighbourhood of Delhi.

"[20] The company also took advantage of loopholes in copyright law allowing for the release of cover versions of songs, which T-Series would then flood the market with.

[21] Researchers Lawrence Liang and Ravi Sundaram wrote: T-Series was a profoundly disruptive force in the Indian music market, in large part because it was a tremendously successful pirate.

The company built its catalog through a variety of quasi-legal and illegal practices ... [T-Series] engaged in more straightforward copyright infringement in the form of pirate releases of popular hits, and it often illegally obtained film scores before the release of the film to ensure that its recordings were the first to hit the market.

[25] The biggest hit song from the album was "Papa Kehte Hain", sung by Udit Narayan and picturised on Aamir Khan.

[33] His assassination also led to T-Series losing its most prolific musicians at the time, Nadeem–Shravan, due to Nadeem Akhtar Saifi initially being accused of involvement in the murder, before later being exonerated.

The highest-grossing T-Series film production to date is the critically acclaimed sleeper hit Hindi Medium (2017), written by Zeenat Lakhani, directed by Saket Chaudhary, and starring Irrfan Khan and Saba Qamar.

[61] The most popular song on the T-Series channel is "Dilbar" (2018),[62] an updated version of a 1999 song from Sirf Tum originally composed by Nadeem–Shravan, reinvisioned by Tanishk Bagchi with Middle-Eastern musical influences,[63] and a music video featuring Arabic belly dancing from Moroccan-Canadian dancer Nora Fatehi.

[64] It has become one of the most popular Hindi film music videos of all time,[65] with its international success inspiring an Arabic language version released by T-Series, also featuring Nora Fatehi.

"Dilbar" is popular across South Asia and the Arab world, with all versions of the song having received more than 1 billion views on YouTube.

A major breakthrough in India's Internet growth came in September 2016 with the advent of 4G network Reliance Jio, offering data at very low costs.

T-Series overtook PewDiePie in a similar manner many more times over the following weeks, and on 27 March, finally gained and maintained, until 1 April, the top spot by a fluctuating, but overall growing, margin.