Saregama is betting big on regional tunes and stories

India’s oldest music label Saregama is betting big on the rise of local language consumption in the country with investments in regional content for both its music label and film production businesses.  

“There’s a substantial investment we are making across all leading Indian languages. We are aggressively acquiring regional music also from Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Bhojpuri, Bengali and Gujarati,” Saregama India MD Vikram Mehra told Business Today.

The company has acquired the music rights of the Telugu film Sarkaru Vaaru Patti starring Mahesh Babu and announced their first Punjabi film production starring Amarinder Gill. Known formerly by the household name of HMV, the Kolkata-based company’s films production company Yoodlee Films has ‘Abhiyum Anuvum’ (bilingual: Tamil & Malayalam) and ‘KD’ in Tamil to its credit.  

Some of its upcoming projects, including ‘Zombivli' in Marathi, Super Senior Heroes in Tamil and ‘Padavettu’ in Malayalam starring Nivin Pauly, are also in the regional language space. “It’s a Saregama belief that big consumption of tomorrow is going to come from the regional space. While we keep on focusing on Hindi, we want to become the leader in every regional language of our country,” said Mehra, without divulging investment numbers.

He said Hindi will be their largest investment as a single language but did not comment on whether the budget for all regional languages put together will exceed the budget for Hindi.   The listed firm has a catalogue of more than 130,000 songs spanning 25 languages. Its music streams on all major apps such as Gaana, Wynk, Spotify, Jiosaavn, Hungama, Amazon, Resso, YT Music and Apple Music, while its films have been sold to Netflix, Disney+Hotstar and ZEE5.

According to a FICCI-PwC report, the share of regional language consumption on OTT platforms will cross 50% of total time spent by 2025, easing past Hindi at 45%.  Mehra said the investments are towards developing the know-how, creative talent and relationships in each of the regional markets to get the story of the soil. “They will be stories of the local people rather than somebody in Bombay writing about Kerala.”