Saregama, India’s oldest label, is using AI to make music videos for songs whose visuals it never owned – and refresh its catalog for Gen Z
Saregama, India's oldest music label, is leveraging generative AI to address a gap in its extensive back catalog: thousands of songs from the 1960s and 1970s for which the label owns recording and composition rights but not the original film visuals. The videos were never separately marketed when the films were produced, and producing new ones traditionally made no economic sense. AI now enables the label to generate music videos at dramatically reduced cost—approximately $740 per video—making the refresh financially viable and opening the older material to contemporary audiences.
The company plans to deploy the technology along two audience paths: for Gen X listeners, pairing original audio with visually modern accompaniment, and for Gen Z, modifying instrumentation while preserving compositional integrity alongside newly generated visuals. Saregama is also experimenting with AI-generated spoken-word content, licensing podcast formats built around Saregama songs to third-party platforms. The initiative sits within the label's broader embrace of generative AI as a competitive tool, though leadership has publicly positioned the company as supporting only licensed innovation whilst opposing unlicensed exploitation of its 180,000-song catalog.
- Saregama is using generative AI to create music videos for songs from its 1960s–1970s catalog that lack original visuals, reducing production costs to roughly $740 per video.
- The strategy targets Gen X audiences with contemporary visuals over preserved audio, and Gen Z with remixed instrumentation and new videos.
- The label supports licensed AI innovation while opposing unlicensed music exploitation, and is expanding into AI-generated podcast content.
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