Enter .
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
In an industry obsessed with the "next big thing," Saregama has bet everything on the "last big thing." It is a testament to the idea that music is not just a product, but a public good. As long as there are parents who want to introduce their children to their youth, and as long as there are algorithms that reward the familiar, the 120-year-old company will endure.
But the smarter move is leaning into (synchronization licensing). You can't hear a period film set in the 1970s without a Saregama track bleeding through the radio. You can't watch a Netflix documentary about the India-Pakistan war without "Aye Watan" playing in the background. You couldn't change the playlist
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.
For decades, the company was a colonial conduit, pressing records for the British officers stationed in Shimla. But in the 1930s, it discovered its true purpose: Bollywood. By the time it rebranded to "Saregama" (named after the musical notes Sa, Re, Ga, Ma) in the early 2000s, it had swallowed up the back catalogs of HMV, Times Music, and a dozen defunct regional labels. Furthermore, Saregama has finally embraced the remix culture
Saregama’s crown jewel is its catalog. They own the rights to the works of Kishore Kumar, R.D. Burman, Manna Dey, and a massive chunk of Lata Mangeshkar’s vocal cords. While new labels like T-Series fight over the remix rights to a Punjabi pop song that will die in six months, Saregama plays the long game.