Saregama May 2026

To the tech world, Carvaan looked like a joke: a bulky, plastic portable speaker with no Bluetooth (initially) and no screen. It had just one function: play 5,000 pre-loaded Saregama songs. You couldn't change the playlist. You couldn't skip the sad songs if you wanted to. It was the anti-Spotify.

Furthermore, Saregama has finally embraced the remix culture it once despised. Recognizing that a bad remix of a classic brings attention back to the original, the label now licenses its stems to EDM producers in Mumbai and Los Angeles. It is a delicate dance: preserve the heritage, but cash the check. Walking through the Saregama office is a disorienting experience. In one corner, a 24-year-old social media manager is creating a "Lofi Beats to Study to" playlist featuring 1950s jazz. In the other, a preservationist is manually cleaning a master tape of a Pankaj Mullick song from 1939. saregama

By flexing its muscle, Saregama has secured better revenue shares than smaller labels, creating a two-tiered market where the past is actually more valuable than the present. As we look at the landscape of 2026, Saregama faces its most paradoxical challenge yet. The rise of AI voice cloning tools means that any teenager can now make a "new" Kishore Kumar song. Saregama has responded with a blitzkrieg of lawsuits and a proprietary "Artist Protection" protocol. To the tech world, Carvaan looked like a

Consider the When a Bollywood film flops, its music disappears from the charts. But the Saregama catalog grows every year. A child born in 2020 discovering Sholay in 2030 will stream "Mehbooba Mehbooba." Saregama gets paid for that. Every time a politician uses "Mere Desh Ki Dharti" at a rally, Saregama gets paid. You couldn't skip the sad songs if you wanted to

Saregama’s CEO, Vikram Mehra, has played this game masterfully. He understands that for a global streamer, Old Hindi music is not a niche—it is the second most streamed genre behind current Bollywood. Without Saregama, Spotify is just a podcast app.

This is the ultimate moat. You cannot reverse-engineer a Kishore Kumar. You cannot algorithmically generate the ache of a 1970s RD Burman baseline. Saregama doesn’t sell music; it sells time travel . In 2017, Saregama was in trouble. Streaming had arrived (Gaana, JioSaavn, Spotify), but the elderly demographic—the people who actually remembered the lyrics to "Lag Ja Gale"—didn't know how to use an app. They were dying off, and with them, the memory of the analog era.