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Saregama: India's Oldest Music Label and Its Catalogue

Before Bollywood had music labels, before cassettes, before radio — there was the Gramophone Company. Saregama, India's oldest music label, began operations in 1901. Its catalogue holds the first song ever recorded in India, the soundtrack of the first Indian talkie, and the voices of more than a century of Indian music.

1901: The First Recording

In 1901, the company began operations as the first overseas branch of the Gramophone Company, incorporated in Calcutta (now Kolkata) as The Gramophone and Typewriter Ltd. The following year, Fred Gaisberg, assistant to gramophone inventor Emile Berliner, arrived in India on a mission to capture its music. On 5 January 1902, Gauhar Jaan became the first Indian artist to be recorded. In 1907, a record manufacturing facility was established in Dum Dum, Calcutta — the first of its kind outside the United Kingdom.

The HMV Years

From 1909 to 2003, the company retailed its music under the His Master's Voice (HMV) brand, with the iconic logo of a dog named Nipper listening to a gramophone. The company was incorporated as The Gramophone Co. (India) Limited in 1946 and converted into a public limited company in 1968. In 1985, EMI sold the company to the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, though Saregama continued to use the HMV name under a licensing agreement until 2003. On 3 November 2000, the company was renamed Saregama India Limited — a name drawn from the first four notes of Indian classical music: Sa, Re, Ga, Ma.

A Catalogue Like No Other

Saregama's repertoire spans film and non-film music, including Carnatic, Hindustani classical, devotional, and folk music, in more than 23 Indian languages. Its vault holds the voices that defined Indian music: Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi, and R.D. Burman, among many others. It also captured non-film treasures, including recordings of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The soundtrack of Alam Ara (1931), the first Indian talkie film, was released under the label.

Reinvention: Carvaan and the Digital Era

A catalogue built over a century could easily have become a museum piece. Instead, Saregama digitised its catalogue, added album art and metadata, and used consumption data to guide new products. Its most famous reinvention was Carvaan, a preloaded music player shaped like a retro radio, aimed at listeners who wanted their old favourites without a smartphone. It became one of the fastest-selling products on Amazon in its category. Saregama's lesson for every label: a catalogue is only as valuable as your ability to bring it to new audiences.

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