MUMBAI: Saregama India Ltd. is the largest music label in the county with over one lakh tracks available across platforms. The means and ways of music consumption have evolved over the time.

To get in-depth information about Saregama India, Carvaan and future plans, we connected with Vikram Mehra, Managing Director, Saregama India.

Check the interview below.

How has your journey been until now as you own a huge repository of music?

Today music is not just a listening experience but also a very powerful medium to create content. People are using our catalogue extensively in expressing & creating content over Facebook, Instagram or Tik Tok apart from listening to it on various OTT platforms. Today, we serve music to all generations through various channels. Elderly swear by the simplicity of Saregama Carvaan, while the younger generation prefers to consume it over OTT platforms. The journey has been fantastic and ever evolving with the changing dynamics. 

What are your views on music during all the highs and lows?

Every occasion in India is earmarked with music, the nature of the occasion is just incidental.  Music is well known to be therapeutic and this has been proven again across the world during these unprecedented times of Covid-19. We have so many people sharing their stories of how Carvaan has helped them to sail through these tough times. It’s only the power of music that cuts across all generations and situations. It would be interesting to share that during the last 3 months of pandemic, we have received so many videos of small children enjoying the old melodies, the 30+ generation enjoying the music that they have grown up listening to with their parents. And just after the lockdown got lifted, we saw a huge spike in the demand of Carvaan. It’s very heartening to see how Carvaan and music at large are making difference to people’s lives cutting across age groups.

What are your plans on revolutionizing the music space with Carvaan?

Ever since its inception, Carvaan has been a huge rage in the disruptive category. Bringing back the look, feel, and charm of a transistor radio, the genesis of this physical product is to give a lean-back music listening experience to the users instead of a lean-forward one, with all the music stored in a digital format. However, we are now leveraging the brand’s equity to break away from the restraints of it just being a hardware, and moving towards expanding it to a platform. Aligned to this vision, we introduced Carvaan 2.0 where customers get access to over 15000 additional songs and 200+ music/ non-music podcasts via Wi-Fi. In fact, we have launched a Content Partnership Program inviting people to use our platform to distribute their content across the globe.

Carvaan lounge, a studio property was also launched last year where the iconic tracks were reprised with the current talented singers. We also have plans of venturing into live events in the near future with Carvaan Musicals. The end goal is to consistently provide good quality content to our audiences across mediums with brand Carvaan at the core of it.

What are your future plans in terms with the rapidly growing music industry?

We are completely in sync with the ever growing and evolving music industry. Apart from offering a legacy of 100 years of music, we are also acquiring new film music and creating a lot of it under Yoodlee films and Carvaan Lounge. Many other properties are also being worked upon. Recently we added over 11000 tracks to our content library in multiple languages and across genres. Apart from only music, we are looking at overall audio content space with Carvaan 2.0 which offers podcasts across topics and relevant for all age groups.