India’s oldest and most prolific music label, Saregama India Limited, is positioning its massive music archive as a premium foundation for the generative AI era.
Speaking to institutional analysts during the company’s recent Q4 earnings briefing, Managing Director Vikram Mehra revealed that the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group company is actively exploring strategic commercial licensing opportunities with international generative AI platforms.
The structural pivot could open a highly lucrative revenue channel for Saregama, which controls an authoritative domestic catalog of over 180,000 iconic tracks spanning Bollywood, classical, and regional music history.
The Dual Strategy: Stop the “AI Slop,” Monetize the Source
Saregama’s stance highlights a calculated, dual-track framework currently playing out across global entertainment conglomerates—simultaneously fighting unauthorized synthetic distribution while positioning clean, legal catalogs as a premium commodity.
1. Defending the Streaming Royalty Pools
Mehra issued a direct call to major Digital Service Providers (DSPs) like Spotify, YouTube, and JioSaavn to structurally re-engineer their payment distributions. The label argues that platforms should assign absolute zero financial value to fully AI-generated music tracks.
Under current streaming models, a flood of algorithmic background tracks (“AI slop”) threatens to dilute the localized royalty pools reserved for human creators and legitimate copyright holders.
“All the music labels globally and in India are working very closely with the leading three global streaming platforms, making it very clear that when the content pool is going to get distributed across the labels, no value should get assigned to content which is getting generated purely or through AI,” Mehra noted. “We are hopeful that platforms and IP owners will come to a reasonable agreement whereby the royalty monies… will get distributed only to genuine IP.”
2. Embracing the Training Marketplace
While pushing to strip independent synthetic tracks of algorithmic royalties on streaming platforms, Saregama sees the backend creation process as a completely different commercial landscape.
Following recent landmark partnership trends—including licensing pacts signed between major Western labels and foundational audio platforms like Suno and Udio—Saregama plans to treat its legacy files as highly valued training assets.
“We are realizing that AI is creating a new licensing opportunity,” Mehra shared. “At the right time, we will also engage commercially with many of these people. It may become one more way in which our IP can be monetized.”
Premium Human Content Becomes a Scarcity Play
Saregama’s broader thesis rests on the idea that as the internet becomes oversaturated with synthetic media, verified, artist-driven human music will command an unprecedented valuation premium.
To build up its defensive wall of original IP, Saregama is aggressively expanding its content budgets. The company announced plans to invest ₹300 crore to ₹350 crore in fresh music acquisition for FY27, stepping up its baseline from the ₹235 crore deployed during FY26. This pipeline is bolstered by long-term formula-based acquisition deals, such as its strategic multi-year equity alliance with Bhansali Productions.
Additionally, the firm has established an internal AI-efficiency team. Rather than focusing on creative generation, this division is deploying automation tools to track cross-platform copyright infringement, streamline digital rights management, and clean up administrative data processing.
With paid music streaming penetration in India sitting below 3%—compared to over 50% in Western markets—Saregama is betting that an aggressive combination of expanding local subscriptions and new enterprise AI licensing fees will drive structural margins over the upcoming fiscal period.
