I think the Indian music industry is the best in Asia even though most people might disagree . I am confident in making this statement simply due to the variety and abundant talent and lately there has been a world wide appeal to Indian music , Thanks primarily to Rehman . For all the movie fans who watched the “Inside Man” the title song in the beginning of the movie is a very famous Hindi hit composed by A.R Rehman for the Mani rathnam movie “Dil Se” starring the King Khan and Manisha Koirala. Rehman has also worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber for the Broadway show “Bombay dreams”.Time magazine recognized the music for Roja , the first major album by Rehman by rating it one of the top ten soundtracks ever to be released.
However there is a big problem which I strongly believe can derail the originality of Indian Music. Most South Indian music fans will remember Deva for his ability to rip music from anywhere in the world and customize it to suit the local audience. Anu Malik is the Hindi music director who made it big just by his sheer ability to copy western songs. Lately this disturbing trend has grown to mammoth proportions with most music directors copying music in the name of inspiration when it is simply Plagiarism
Pritam one of the famous music directors from North India has managed to enter into the hall of fame for copycats with his ability to copy music from all over the globe without making any distinction between genre , race , country etc. Simply visit the Wikipedia link and search for Pritam and you can see that they have dedicated a special page for Plagiarism
Yuvan Shankar Raja the hot music director from south India is not far behind. It is frustrating to read this article in Behindwoods as it is very obvious that this son of one of India’s talented Music director has literally ripped music from other albums and made the singers sing in Tamil. Itr gets worse when you find out that he even ripped BGM’s from his father . The song manmadhane is a lift from the BGM of Siva and his more famous Theme song from 7 G Rainbow colony is a direct rip off his fathers BGM from the movie Johnny. I personally like Yuvan a lot but when he has shamelessly copied music without making a refrence to the original in the CD’s you can only conclude the only genuine artist in India is Rehman. There are some references to some of his songs in behindwoods but if you listen carefully it is very obvious that Rehman is the only director who can genuinely use the term “inspiration”. Harris Jeyaraj another popular music director is also guilty but definitely not as bad as Yuvan.
The main problem in India is the lack of copyright protection. There is no law to protect an artist or prevent someone from copying music and releasing it in thier name. Amr Diab , the awesome Arab music star can easily sue Pritam for a million dollars or even more as almost 90% of his hit songs are carbon copies of Amr Diab’s albums.
One thing we can do from a moral standpoint is not to recognize these artists who commit plagiarism . They should never ever nominate anyone who has copied songs for awards. In Europe and the United States people do release various versions of the same song but they make sure that they refrence the original version in the records and the original artists even get compensated. This sort of model helps people to innovate than trying to copy songs.
Hopefully the Indian government can amend the law to prevent copyright violation and also penalize artists proven guilty of Plagiarism
