India's Saregama is using generative AI to make music videos for songs that never had them

Saregama, India's oldest music label, is generating music videos for its archive of pre-video-era songs using GenAI. It's a concrete, revenue-driven AI deployment - not a demo - and it points to where AI and cultural archives intersect.

In plain terms: India's biggest music archive has thousands of songs from before music videos existed. GenAI lets Saregama create visuals for those songs now - and put them on YouTube.

The fact

Saregama, India's oldest music label, is deploying generative AI to produce music videos for its vintage song catalogue - recordings that pre-date the music video format. The approach generates era-appropriate visuals, published as official music videos on streaming platforms.

Our take

This is AI unlocking economic value from existing assets, not replacing human creativity. Saregama's archive covers Bollywood's golden era, classical performances, and regional music that never generated visual content. Traditional production would be prohibitively expensive for the long tail; GenAI makes the math work at scale. The result: a larger monetizable surface on YouTube - more catalogue discovery, more ad revenue. The authenticity questions are real - how historically accurate should AI-generated 1950s visuals be? - but the business logic is sound.

What to watch

Whether major Western labels (Sony, Universal, Warner) run similar programs for their pre-video archives. The Saregama model is directly replicable for any rights-holder with catalogued content.