Deteriorating Quality of Bollywood Music — Are We Responsible?
On one hand, our Bollywood industry has been setting quality benchmarks in terms of movies like URI, Dangal, Andhadun, Badhai Ho and is also making progressive movies like Chandigarh Kare Ashiqui, Pink, Padman, etc, one the other hand, the quality of Bollywood music has been deteriorating noticeably. In today’s time, all we hear out of Bollywood are absolute copies of old hit Hindi songs or some cringy songs by Tony Kakkar with the same lyrics being modified again and again. But, instead of just blaming things on the makers, we as the audience should also understand that we are largely at fault in this situation, and it is partly because of us that Bollywood is making such songs.
Go on Youtube and search ‘most viewed Bollywood songs’, and you would understand that the same songs we criticize for being trash are on top of that list. Simple songs with no complexity or significance of art in them are being heard by people all across the country multiple times. The music industry is a huge business sector with thousands of people employed under it. This industry generates billions of dollars worth of revenue every year. With that amount of money involved, the makers only want to make the kind of music people are listening to. Even the most hated singers and artists have made beautiful songs, but those songs do not break records or get recognition. Therefore, it is important for these singers to make songs that the audience likes listening to.
For example, Badshah, who gets a lot of negativity from the audience because of his pop songs, has made several rap songs that will leave you with goosebumps (for example- his last album TPODOAK) but those songs have not managed to do well financially. Why would an artist want to not earn millions of rupees making simple and uncomplicated songs with the same tune if that is what gets him money?
If we truly want quality songs to come out of Bollywood, we as an audience have to let the makers know what we want. And we can do that only by supporting goog songs and streaming them on audio platforms. This way, our artists will be able to get a better idea about what we want and would happily deliver that to us.
