During the Q1 FY27 earnings call, Saregama explained how they are using AI tools in their production house to produce ‘AI-based ancillary content’ and why. Saregama Managing Director Vikram Mehra also reiterated their long-standing ask for a paid-only music streaming business model. Here are a few key statements from the earnings call: 

Using AI to generate music videos of vintage songs to avoid the ‘incremental cost of video production’: “We have been trying to create brand new music videos, but the incremental cost of actually shooting a music video is not making sense. With AI, we are now reaching a position that a very true to real video can now be created at a very low cost, which may start making financial sense. If that experiment works, you literally can do both the things: create brand new videos with the original audio to talk to Gen X, giving them more contemporary-looking videos. And then you can also modify the audio a bit to make it sound more modern,” said the MD. 

Why Saregama is relying on GenAI for producing vintage music videos: “To give you a flavor of what we are trying to do, one, on the music video side, as you may be aware, is that the older catalog that Saregama owns, we own all the rights connected to the song except the rights of the original music video. It was a movie from the ’60s and ’70s. At that time, original music videos were not sold to the music labels because there was no market for it. They were not contractually part of the deals that happened with labels, and hence they remain as part of the movie negative, and it’s controlled by whoever is controlling the movie negative. So that’s one of the weaknesses, if I may say, we have in the older catalog. So if you want to do a recreation, if you want to sing, all those rights are sitting with Saregama, but not the original music video,” added Mehra. 

Saregama has been using AI to predict the hit-flop ratio of songs: “Predictive AI has been there for some time in the system. All I can see on predictive AI is our hit to flop ratio is better than any competitor in the market. And I don’t think we give credit to anybody but our predictive AI models for that.” 

Free music streaming should stop to increase paid subscriptions: Calling for paid subscriptions for music streaming, Mehra said that “One of the biggest ways of showing value is to stop supply of free content.” He further added that Saregama intends to “maintain a bullish position on subscription growth happening in the country.”

“The success of the video streaming apps in the country or the paid television services like digital cable and DTH that Indian customers are ready to pay, can afford to pay and is ready to pay, provided they see value in it,” he reasoned while quoting an Indian consumer study by EY and the Apex Music Body called Indian Music Industry (IMI) that apparently revealed 64% users of free music customers in India are ready to shift to a reasonably priced paid service if the free content stops.

India is the most under-penetrated large music market on Earth, says Saregama MD: “Just to put things in perspective, paid streaming penetration is 67% in Sweden, 57% in the US, even Brazil and China are closer to 18%, while we are just 3%. When I say percentage, it means percentage of the total Internet users in a market,” said Mehra. 

“If you look at some of our competing international labels, they end up getting anything between 50 to 70% of their revenues coming from paid subscriptions. India is just at the beginning of the start of that cycle,” he added elsewhere during the discussion. 

With a Rs100 price, the Indian music streaming market can reach 100M paid subscribers if free music is stopped: “If the subscription is priced correctly, which means closer to 100 bucks, and if the supply of free content is curtailed, we should not have a problem touching a hundred million paid subscription mark pretty soon,” he predicted. 

How Saregama’s revenue is distributed: According to the investor presentation, here is how the revenue is distributed across the type of content and the source of revenue:

Revenue by segment:

  • Music: 83%, from licensing, artist management and retail.
  • Video: 11%, from film, television, digital series and short-form content.
  • Live events: 6%, from concerts, festivals, devotional events and stand-up comedy.

Revenue by source:

  • Streaming and broadcasting Platforms: 67%, including Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, JioHotstar, Sun TV, Doordarshan and Instagram.
  • Brands: 19%, including Myntra, Indriya, Unilever, KFC and Hero Music.
  • Direct customers: 14%, including Amazon, Vijay Sales, BookMyShow, District and PVR.

How Saregama wants to leverage legacy music IP in podcasts: “If you are talking of a story of a 50-year-old man or a woman who’s thinking of days gone by, while you’re reminiscing those days, can I, in your story, also build in some of the biggest music connected to romance or separation or friendship into those podcasts and make it uniquely Saregama? And then work out models right now, licensing it to third-party podcast companies, too,” he explained. 

Saregama-acquired content creation production Pocket Aces breaks even: “Pocket Aces reached break even in financial year ’26 and is now moving towards profitability. This year, we should be seeing further building on the profitability of Pocket Aces,” he said. During the February 2026 earnings call, Saregama said that ” Pocket Aces can bring back to us a digital footprint” across platforms like  Instagram, YouTube Shorts, YouTube and Facebook. 

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