Saregama, the Indian label founded around 1901 and now part of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, is using generative AI to produce new music videos for film songs from the 1960s and 1970s. Managing director Vikram Mehra laid out the plan on the company's first-quarter earnings call on August 4. The label holds the recording and composition rights to those songs, but the original footage stayed with the films' owners, because at the time nobody thought song visuals had a market.
Mehra called the missing visuals a weakness that younger rivals do not share, since their catalogues are newer. Reshooting was never worth the money, but he said AI can now produce convincing videos cheaply enough to change that, putting the cost of one at around INR 70,000, roughly $740. Saregama's main YouTube channel has about 64 million subscribers, which gives the new videos a large place to land.
The approach splits by audience. Older listeners would get the original recordings with fresher-looking visuals. For Gen Z, the label would also rework the arrangement, changing instrumentation while keeping the composition, and pair it with a new video. A second strand uses outside AI tools to build spoken-word content around the catalogue, such as podcasts in which an older narrator looks back on life, scored with the label's songs, which Saregama would then license to podcast companies.
Mehra drew a line between this generative work and the predictive AI Saregama has used for four years to decide which new music to buy, which he credited with a better hit rate than competitors. Two internal AI teams now exist, one for content and one for operations, funded from the existing content budget rather than new money. At the same time he restated that the company backs licensed AI but will fight unlicensed use of its music, that new digital deals include protections against dilution and fraud, and that in May he had urged streaming services to give fully AI-made music no value.
The push sits inside a bigger catalogue strategy. Saregama holds around 180,000 songs, and Mehra said nostalgia for older music is surfacing on Instagram at a scale that surprised the company. It reported quarterly operating revenue of INR 263.6 crore, up 27%, with music revenue up 39%, and repeated its view that India could reach 100 million paying streaming subscribers if free tiers were curtailed and prices settled near INR 100 a month.
Sources · 1