Prerna Vohra joins Big FM as content and IP licensing head

Prerna Vohra does not do small moves. She has joined Big FM as dgm, content, ip licensing & partnerships head for audio and video, and the appointment is less a career update than a statement of intent from a company that wants to be taken seriously beyond the FM dial.

The backstory matters here. Vohra spent three years and nine months at Kuku FM building its ip licensing and partnerships function from literally nothing. By the time she left, the catalogue ran to more than 20,000 assets across six Indian languages, paid subscribers had grown sixfold, digital revenue was up 40 per cent year on year, and she had somehow trimmed acquisition costs by the same margin. That is the kind of arithmetic that gets a person noticed.

Her dealmaking was not limited to the usual suspects either. She struck agreements with Shemaroo, Viacom 18, JioStar, Krafton and Ubisoft on one side, and Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette and Storytel on the other, while also reaching into international talent and literary agencies including Inkwell, PFD and CAA. Along the way she notched a string of firsts: India’s first Hindi films released in vertical format, the first simultaneous print-and-audio release, and the first Hindi digital audio commentary for the ICC World Cup.

None of this happened by accident. Vohra spent a full decade in publishing before audio ever entered the picture, rising to publisher at Bloomsbury India, where she delivered 15 per cent year on year growth across more than 60 titles, and earlier as commissioning editor at Hachette and Rupa, where she shepherded titles that later became Sultan of Delhi on Disney+ Hotstar and Akhada, the source material for the blockbuster Dangal. Few executives arrive in audio licensing with that kind of literary provenance intact.

Announcing the move on LinkedIn, Vohra said that over the last 13 years she has had the chance to build stories across formats, books, audio and video, and that each one taught her something different about how audiences actually engage with content today. She added that she is excited to shape a fresh content and ip strategy for a platform with this kind of reach and history, describing Big FM as a legacy brand stepping boldly into a new chapter.

For Big FM, the hire signals ambition well beyond traditional radio, a push into microdrama licensing, vertical video and multilingual ip that mirrors the very playbook Vohra wrote at Kuku. Whether a legacy audio brand can move at the pace of its digital-native rivals is the open question, but few dealmakers in India are better placed to find out.