Music Album Releases in Bollywood are Dead: Sulaiman Merchant

This week’s episode of Reel Deal talks about dearth of quality music in Bollywood.

Not many Bollywood songs have made a lasting impression in the last few years. 

(Photo: The Quint)

The last few years have seen a considerable drop in the quality of Bollywood music. Its either about creating stock party numbers with poor lyrics, remixing old songs or random use of rap and a lack of a wholesome film soundtrack.

This year, apart from Gully Boy and Kabir Singh, there has not been any other complete album that has impressed. The songs of most of the films in the last two to three years have come and gone, without making a lasting impression.

In this week’s episode of the entertainment podcast, Reel Deal, I speak to Sulaiman Merchant, one half of the music composer duo, Salim-Sulaiman, about why we don’t get a whole top-notch soundtrack for a film, the overuse of remixes and the lack of imagination on the part of makers and record labels.

Tune in to the podcast here.

The big music directors like Pritam Chakraborty, Amit Trivedi, Vishal-Shekhar and Salim-Sulaiman, among others, have all become really selective about the projects they pick up and Sulaiman Merchant says that it has a lot to do with them not getting the opportunity to compose the entire soundtrack.

“If you’ve realised, a lot of the big composers are not doing too many films. If you see Pritam, Vishal-Shekhar, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, they are not doing many films. Nobody wants to do a multi-composer film. Everybody wants to do single-composer films. And nobody wants to do remixes of other old songs,” says Sulaiman.

The composer says that a whole album for a Bollywood film is “completely dead” now.

“The music label, the producer... they all want quick stuff,” he says. “What has happened now is that there is no album as such. When you look at music release, you don’t see an album on an OTT platform. The album release is completely dead. What the producer and music labels are looking for is quick hits, something they can promote on YouTube and get eyeballs for the film.”