Jocelle Koh Interview
Jocelle Koh is the founder of Asian Pop Weekly, and also works as Label Distribution Leader for Singapore/Malaysia at Believe Digital. But more generally, Jocelle likes to think of herself as a "gap bridger and music industry professional." Asian Pop Weekly began in 2010, arising out of the utter lack of English language resources for music of its kind. Today, it's one of the most successful Asian music websites of its kind.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I started my media platform Asian Pop Weekly in 2010 when I was in high school in Western Australia, Perth. The need arose because I was trying to get into Mandarin music at the time, but was getting frustrated with the lack of English-language resources available. I’ve always been interested in writing, so it was a natural progression for me to try to create the content myself, and improve my Mandarin in the process.
The next few years were spent trying to learn as much as I could about the Mandopop genre in particular, as I didn’t have a native speakers’ understanding of it. Little did I know that this would give rise to new perspectives on the genre, which were relatively few and far between at the time. After an exchange trip to Taiwan, I decided that I wanted to go all in and changed my university degree from Human Biology to Media and Communications in order to have a more formal education on journalism and media studies.