Listen to the audio of Saregama’s earnings call here: Saregama’s investor relations website | Alpha Street YouTube channel
Saregama is working closely with global streaming platforms to ensure they do not assign value to purely AI-generated content, said Vikram Mehra, Managing Director, Saregama India, during Saregama’s recent earnings call (Q4 FY26). While criticising low-quality AI-generated content, he also said there has been no revenue leakage or loss of market share due to AI.
Revenue should be distributed to only genuine intellectual property (IP), not AI slop: “It’s there. It’s there across all platforms. But the fact of life is that it is seeing no traction. All music labels globally and in India are working very closely with the leading three global streaming platforms, making it clear that when content is distributed across labels, no value should be assigned to content generated purely by AI. There is no revenue leakage today. There is no market share loss happening today. We are hopeful that platforms and IP owners will come to a reasonable agreement whereby the royalty money or the content pool money will be distributed only to genuine IP and not AI-generated slop,” he said.
He further said: “Our position in the company is that owned music, which is artist-driven premium music, is going to become far more valuable and not less valuable in this AI-driven world where a lot of AI slop is coming in.”
Saregama plans to license its music for AI data training: “We are realizing that AI is creating new licensing opportunities, as can be witnessed by the deals signed by various global music labels with various generative AI platforms. At the right time, we will also engage commercially with many of these people. So it may become one more way in which our revenues from IP can be monetized,” he added.
He also said they launched a dedicated AI efficiency team and that tracking infringements is one of the operational use cases of their AI-based solutions and workflows.
Annual fixed flat fee licensing model for short-form platforms bothers Saregama: “Actually, nothing has changed over the last one year. This is one of the areas which bothers us… we are able to get some a step jump, but it is not as ideal as an advertising-driven model is. Because of an advertising-driven model, you straight away see benefits accruing right now to your bottom line. What happens with YouTube free service? Short format content. All the licensing to short-format services is still a fixed-fee deal renewed on an annual basis,” he clarified.
Saregama pushes for paid-only streaming services: “Indian customers are not stingy. Indian customers value music and are ready to pay. But if the free option is available, people always prefer the free option. But the moment the free option goes away, Indian customers are ready to pay. We maintain a bullish position on the subscription growth in the country,” he said.
“Music catalog, globally, is increasingly being treated as an infrastructure-like inflation-linked asset. It’s long term, it’s predictable, and its value keeps on going up as platforms keep on increasing their own subscription prices.” he said.
Shutdown of Airtel Wynks helped Saregama’s revenue: “In FY25, Q4 did not have Wynks revenue, which affected us significantly. We are completely out of the cycle of free platforms shutting down, and that has started showing in the growth numbers of our music vertical,” he said. He further said that this year, Spotify, YouTube, and Jio Saavn tried to build paid subscription revenue, and that increased their revenue.
Ban on real-money games impacted our revenue; despite it, YouTube saw healthy numbers: “I think the ban on real-money games ended up taking a large revenue stream out of YouTube. But a big part for us is that the content we are putting out is more film music, which is more family content. We, as a category, were affected less by the removal of real-money advertising. And hence on YouTube, we were able to show healthy growth, both on the free and the pay side. I have heard people say that their numbers from video OTT are going down. That doesn’t apply to us,” he said.
How Saregama is earning revenue through artist management services: “Artist management, the newer vertical under music, works by making artists popular through our IP releases and then monetizing them via booking for live events, weddings, and more importantly, brand endorsements. And, Saregama gets a share of it,” he said.
On why Saregama didn’t continue music rights for Dhurandhar Part-2: “In fact, there was a lot of peer and partner pressure around it. Everybody expected Saregama to go and buy the Dhurandhar Two music. But I am very proud that the acquisition team stood its ground and refused to buy the album because of the pricing. The producer’s expectations simply did not fit into our five-year payback guideline. And we said no. I am proud to share that we stood our ground and did the right thing by not going out there and picking it up. As we continue growing the music vertical, we are steadfastly committed to growing it on strong economic principles and never doing things out of vanity,” he clarified, addressing the reasons behind losing music rights of Dhurandhar Part Two to T-series.
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