“The “Formula” is spreading fast, everyone is getting infected!”

Bollywood as we know it; is one of the biggest film industries in the world. It is renowned throughout the world for its music and dance sequences. Millions are invested into making these dance sequences and composing the music to address the demand of the audiences. We love singing these songs and dancing to them in our weddings and functions, a wedding without a good item number would just be dry. Without music, there would be no high-budget, well choreographed, colorful dance numbers that are celebrated by us all. Music defines the key plot lines, or how else would our beloved hero fall in love with the ‘heroine’? The music industry has multiple artists who come together to give a variety of sounds to the music. Arijit Singh, he has become the voice considered for at least “one" song on every director’s list. Vishal & Shekhar have got their game strong on the top charts. Today, some of our favorite indie voices of  Raghu Dixit, Prateek Kuhad, Jasleen Royal are being introduced as fresh sounds to our films. Amit Trivedi who never fails to disappoint us by creating sounds resonating to the characters of the film. And Pritam, who incredibly had composed 29 tracks in the first true musical Jagga Jasoos. It can be safely assumed that there is no dearth of talent.

Then What’s Missing?

Every time I listen to a track; it sounds like something I’ve already heard before. Does that happen to you? Let's not confuse this with Plagiarism. That one has been spoken of over and over in the recent past, and I am hopeful our music industry has understood that no music can be hidden under the digital space! The industry has only gotten more transparent, and music only more accessible.

Although, I am wanting to address the sounds of similarity here. In voices, in compositions, in song writing, and even arrangements. I’m talking here about a sense of similarity in the nature of songs the that are being produced in the recent times. While these perpetually come out as ‘fresh new tracks’, yet you feel you’ve heard the same thing before somewhere.

We Hear the Same Chord Arrangements and Repetitive Melodies!

We spoke to multiple musicians from Bollywood music circuit, it was interesting to note that most songs are created on a combination of three to four chords. It’s quite easy to cover most romantic Bollywood songs by knowing the basic chords. It is understandable, that they all operate in similar chord patterns. This is not really a play of the recent times, it has been going on since the 60s. “What sets apart each song usually is the melody that’s looped over it, which is where the game lies”. Even Beatles and Bob Dylan had very similar chord patterns for quite a few songs, but the melody over it was written so beautifully that one could never figure out that the underlying chords are very similar.

The problem here I’m trying to address is, that in Bollywood we are falling back to the same sounds, literally like a “Formula” to make the songs where even he melody is kind of given a formula. It’s a tried and tested thing, which is what it is. The music directors are not willing to experiment or broaden the whole spectrum. If this was corrected, it is likely to contribute towards the overall growth of the industry, in terms of changes in music consumption patterns as well as on the composition side.

We must take a look at our Punjabi Bollywood, talking of Honey Singh’s, Badshah’s or Mika’s songs, we hear the same beats, reproduced pop-folk modernized sounds and similar style of singing in every song. We could also consider the remixes of the older songs, with a standardized rap phrase which has become an essential element of Bollywood film music. A new one is taking popular Punjabi songs and converting them into Hindi songs, we’re hopeful that they’re all licensed versions. 

The Epidemic: There is a Fear of Experimentation, Rather An Application Of A Formula!

It’s a pattern, a formula! Anything that becomes a hit, becomes a formula for a “HIT” song! And well who doesn’t want a HIT song, right? Like most in the industry say, “Whatever Works”!

Let’s take Arijit Singh between 2011-13. In 2011, when he got introduced to Bollywood with Mithoon’s Composition “Phir Mohabbat” from Murder 2, it took the whole industry by storm! The same year when he was programming for the song "Raabta" from Agent Vinod (2012), Pritam asked him to sing as well. Arijit was unstoppable post that! He sustained his position on the charts and released tracks that we all love until today. Films like Barfi, Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani, Aashiqui 2,  and the list goes on,  all are always on top of the charts. Here's what we came to notice, after 2013 he has sung almost every 3rd song released in the past 5 YEARS! That’s Absolutely Mental. Imagine if you ONLY Heard Chris Martin (Of Coldplay) sing every song ever released for 7 years straight, the Global Audiences would get saturated, and lose its value!

It’s great to produce hits after hits, but why overuse an artist, a voice and over feed the listeners? It’s really not that “Everyone sounds like Arijit Singh”, rather it IS Arijit in every song. EVERY SONG SOUNDS THE SAME, due to this formula! I’m sure if Arijit was to produce his own track he’d definitely do it differently, every sing time.

It's all a numbers game! Application of the formula has to do with creating what will work for the masses. It’s only done to become No.1. Consciously or Unconsciously, today no matter who sits down to create a new song they tend to bend towards creating what will work or do things that will work. 

But, Is It A Sustainable Methodology?

The bigger question here is, Is it going to work for the long run? As a Bollywood music follower, I can say there’s threshold after which this formula stops working or becomes redundant. I'm sure we’ve all danced to Honey Singh songs at least once, the ‘Daru sharu’ and the ‘Patolas’ and ‘Lamborghinis’. After a while, we started questioning it, and then we realized that the same thing is being served to us over and over again by a different name, we did eventually got over it. Let’s be honest, we all loved these songs when they came out. But now when something works out, Bollywood has a habit of milking it out dry.

There is a sense of extremism in our country, either we develop an extreme likeness for something and defend that with our blood and soul or we loathe. When we like something we want more of it and eventually when we get sick of it and then we just forget about it and move on; kind of like that one song that you keep playing on repeat till you start hating it and cannot get it out of your head.

It's an interesting approach that Bollywood has taken towards understanding whats “In Demand” or what-who makes a song “a Super Hit” and created a formula around it. It's Absurd! It’s important to make an attempt to understand consumption patterns of our listeners, and creating patterns of our artists. What we fail to see is, if the newer sounds were introduced sooner than “7 YEARS OF FORMULA DRIVEN HITS”, our listeners would adapt.

The industry is seen to be exploiting consumption patterns of music lovers. This results in blocking the creativity of the artist and the terminologically speaking, the word artist here doesn't remain relevant anymore once that happens.

At times we don’t know what we want until we see it or hear it and like it, something fresh, something that we’ve never heard before. That's when it delivers this burst of energy to our soul and we fall in love with it. To keep that feeling going we need to innovate, experiment and find the perfect solution to the equation then re-invent the equation again starting from basics.

Humans have this tendency where we sometimes enjoy doing whats tried and tested, its called playing safe. It's also probably the easier thing to do. It’s likely the same what’s happening here.

After all the criticisms faced by Bollywood musicians, directors on plagiarism, we did learn a lesson. But partially, our habit of copying stuff from international, local sources turned into this new thing of copying our own formulas and producing the same thing again and again, calling ‘potatoes and cream’ Gratin Dauphinois, does not make it a new dish, it's just the same dish with a different name.

It’s not all bad though, we’ve had some great albums with a fresh flavor of beats and rhythm in the past few years too. Take for example the soundtrack of Udta Punjab by Amit Trivedi that made us lose our minds to the title track and at the same time made us aware of the drug problem in Punjab but in an engrossing and enjoyable way. The soundtracks of Ae Dil Hai Mushkil by Pritam, with Bulleya delivering something fresh or Channa Mereya that needs no introduction Even the songs from When Harry Met Sejal reintroducing us to the flavors of indie folk and who can forget the thumping beats from Banjo by Hriday Gattani and Vishal-Shekhar.

And the upcoming film Chef introducing sounds of the globally celebrated indie artist Raghu Dixit which set to air its first look very soon! We are excited and can’t wait to hear the sounds.

These pieces inspire hope, they tell us that there is room for creativity in our vast film industry and that we have it in us to push the boundaries and prove the critics, and the upset fans wrong. We need more cases like these to inspire the younger generation who are the future of this industry. We need to teach them to step out of their comfort zone and create something awe inspiring that can make people feel the emotions they want to feel, that help in driving the Bollywood film making to a whole new level, that change the way we tell our stories.

It’s high time for the film industry to start experimenting with the sounds. Something refreshing and new, because anything raw feels way better than an overripe version of anything at all.