Bollywood has been known to remake music and pass it off as inspiration or coincidence. Many music directors have talked about the music that got distorted in the process of remaking, but were ignored. However, the release of Masakali 2.0 stirred unrest in the Indian audience. People had a soft spot for the original Masakali, and appreciated the effort that went into it. Remake This resulted in people talking about re-make culture all over again.
“As we all know, good artists copy; great artists, coincidence” –Kanan Gill, 2016
Expressing your creativity, to try out new things, to try and make something better is one reason to re-make music, but there is another logic Remake behind re-making music, and a smart one at that. So let’s take for example, a hypothetical re-make for a popular song that everybody loves, Tum Se Hi for instance. If tomorrow, T-series decides to re-make the song, it will attract attention from the masses and regardless of whether it’s positive or not, it will still be humungous publicity. When the song comes out, people will listen to it just to assess it compared to the original song. It will get shared and re-shared, streamed everywhere. People will not only listen to the new song, to talk about how good/bad it is, but also the original song for comparison’s sake. This will bring the label royalties from both versions Remake of the song. Now monetary reasons might not be why most songs are made again, but the advantages are unmissable.
We cannot ignore the humungous amount of effort that goes into making an original song, nor can we belittle the ‘creativity’ that goes into remaking one. All We can say for sure, is that I swear to god if they remake Sham (Amit Trivedi) and mess it up, there will be a rebellion.
