Bollywood sings the royalty blues

Hindi film composers, singers and lyricists have agitated for decades for royalties on their own music. Though there are still plenty of hurdles, a recent historic judgement may have them singing a happier tune

- Bhanuj Kappal

On a balmy Sunday evening in late April, some of India’s most beloved playback singers—including Pankaj Udhas, Udit Narayan, Kumar Sanu and Alka Yagnik—got together in Mumbai to celebrate a landmark victory in a decades-long fight for royalties and copyright protection. The Indian Singers’ Rights Association (Isra) had put together the event to announce a historic new deal with the music-label body Indian Music Industry (IMI) that would finally see playback singers and musicians get performance royalties for the music they helped create.

“Ever since I started singing (in 1980), I have been hearing that singers deserve to get royalties,” Udhas told reporters. “But for so long, that remained just talk. Even now, I cannot believe that the dream we saw so many years ago has now become a reality.”

Just a few days later, in a dusty little courtroom at the Bombay high court, India’s music creators would score another key victory. After over a decade of legal wrangling, the court finally ordered two FM radio stations, Radio Tadka and Radio City, to pay royalties to the “authors”—the lyricists and composers—for the copyrighted music they broadcast, setting a legal precedent for all stations. Coming within a week of each other, these two landmark wins represent a turning point in a fight that has earned support from a long list of music luminaries, including singers Arijit Singh, Sunidhi Chauhan and Shreya Ghoshal, composers A.R. Rahman, Pritam and Vishal-Shekhar, and lyricists Javed Akhtar, Varun Grover and Shailendra Singh.