In February, after some delay, Spotify launched in India. For the global music business, the country that birthed bhangra and Bollywood looks like a vast untapped market. With a population of 1.3 billion people and only about 6% of them currently streaming music, India’s recording industry would seem to have ample room for growth. By the end of Spotify’s first week on the subcontinent, the streaming company had signed up 1 million users, including both paid and ad-supported.

As worldwide music brands move into India and other so-called emerging markets, most notably China, recent history suggests the cultural exchange won’t only go one direction. With the spread of streaming across Latin America, songs like “Despacito” and “Mi Gente” have sprung up from regional playlists to become massive international hits. Will something similar happen again, next time with music local to Delhi or Beijing?

Willard Ahdritz, founder and CEO of music services juggernaut Kobalt, is upbeat on the idea. “With the globalization of music, it is clear that a global hit will come from China or India in the next couple of years, if not sooner,” he says. “These territories are already producing high-quality music to pair with well-produced videos, and they’re getting better access to internet bandwidth. The tough part is that to make a song global, it will have to be executed flawlessly and have a compelling audio-visual element, but the opportunity is there for someone to grab it.”

The basic template for a cross-border streaming hit predates the recent Latin hip-hop boom, and it stands apart from the Western success of someone like PSY, whose “Gangnam Style” ruled YouTube when Spotify’s current algorithms were still a twinkle in some chipmaker’s eyes. When German house producer Robin Schulz released a remix of Dutch rapper Mr. Probz’s then-new song “Waves” in 2013, it went to No. 1 right away throughout Europe. But Schulz’s “Waves” remix didn’t become a Top 40 hit in America until months later. This successful invasion of the U.S. charts, Spotify contended, was thanks to its own curated playlists.

It wasn’t long before other streaming-driven hits took a similar path around the globe. English-language international hits were one thing, but a big breakthrough came in 2017, when Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” and then J Balvin and Willy Williams’ “Mi Gente”—buoyed by guest appearances from Justin Bieber and Beyoncé, respectively—went from No. 1 on most Latin American charts to the top 10 of the Hot 100. Those songs were also the first tracks by Latinx artists to hit No. 1 on Spotify.

The general pattern tends to go something like this: Songs gain traction on local playlists and on YouTube. Streaming algorithms notice this activity and put the songs on more and more prominent playlists. Rinse, repeat. Eric Fritschi, an executive at Mtheory, a company that consults with artist managers, has suggested that hits from China and India could also follow this path. “Traditional Chinese music and Bollywood are likely going to explode globally at any moment,” Fritschi told Billboard recently.

Speaking with Pitchfork, Fritschi strikes a more measured tone, but he’s still enthusiastic—particularly about the prospects for Indian music. He points out that three out of the top five artists on YouTube globally are from India: Neha Kakkar, Kumar Sanu, and Alka Yagnik. “We’ve got the gasoline,” Fritschi says. Spotify’s entrance into the market exposes Indian listeners’ tastes to its own algorithms. “And we’ve got the spark.” All that remains is for an Indian musician to spread across the planet like proverbial wildfire.

China may pose a more complicated challenge for the global music industry. The country’s Great Firewall restricts local access to foreign websites, including YouTube. Apple Music has launched there, but not Spotify, although the Swedish company does own a stake in China’s most popular streaming service, Tencent. Still, it’s easy to find signs of American music-business thirst for this market and its global diaspora, whether it’s Chinese singer Lay Zhang’s attendance at this year’s Grammys as an official “ambassador,” or Apple Music’s Chinese New Year playlists curated by Zhang and other Chinese stars. China’s 1.4 billion people already stream music and use smartphones at much higher rates than people in India; some analysts forecast China to be the biggest revenue-growth market for streaming in the coming years. Just last year, China joined the world’s top 10 biggest music markets in the industry’s official rankings.