Vikram Mehra, managing director of Saregama, wants streaming services to pay nothing out of the royalty pool to AI-generated music, while keeping India's oldest label open to licensing its catalogue to AI companies. He set out both positions on Saregama's fourth-quarter FY26 earnings call on May 14.
Mehra told analysts that labels in India and elsewhere are pressing the three biggest global streaming services so that, when payouts are divided, tracks made wholly or partly by AI get no value and the money goes to genuine rights holders instead of what he called "AI slop". AI music is on every platform, he said, but it is finding no audience, so for now the label sees no lost revenue and no loss of market share.
On the same call he cast AI as a new licensing opportunity, pointing to the deals global labels have signed with generative platforms, and said Saregama would engage commercially with those companies when the time is right, as one more way to earn from its catalogue. The company has also set up an internal AI efficiency team, whose uses include tracking infringement.
Saregama says its archive of more than 150,000 tracks is India's largest. It reported FY26 revenue of 9.85 billion rupees (about $102m); music brought in 8.14 billion rupees, up 17%, and adjusted EBITDA for the quarter reached a record 1.33 billion rupees, up 31%.
MBW notes that keeping AI tracks out of payouts while licensing to the firms behind them mirrors several Western majors. Universal and Warner settled their Udio lawsuits in late 2025 and signed licensing deals, and Warner reached a separate deal with Suno in December. Suno's talks with Universal and Sony have stalled, though, the Financial Times reported.
Volume is the backdrop. Deezer said that by April it was taking in nearly 75,000 fully AI-made tracks a day, over 44% of daily deliveries, up from 10,000 when its detector launched in January 2025 and 60,000 in January 2026, and that up to 85% of streams on them are fraudulent and get demonetised. In March, Michael Smith pleaded guilty in the first US criminal case over AI-assisted streaming fraud, after bots played his AI songs billions of times for more than $8m in royalties.
A 2024 CISAC and PMP Strategy study put nearly a quarter of music creators' income at risk by 2028, up to about EUR4 billion a year, and in February artists' representatives jointly put out an open letter urging musicians to reject Suno for diluting royalty pools.
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