Popular Bollywood songs are being removed from Spotify

A host of popular Bollywood songs have been removed from Spotify after a licensing dispute with a top label.

As The Independent report, fans have been sharing their anger after hundreds of songs from the Indian label Zee Music Company have been disappearing from playlists.

The label, which purports to be India’s second most popular, claims it is home to more than 50 per cent of new Bollywood music.

Now, hugely popular soundtracks to films including Bajirao Mastani, Ram-Leela and Gully Boy have all been removed from the service, while the song ‘Apna Bana Le’, from new film Bhediya, has also been removed despite being the most-streamed song in India on Spotify in recent weeks.

In a statement to Billboard, Spotify said: “Spotify and Zee Music have been unable to reach a licensing agreement.

“Throughout these negotiations, Spotify has tried to find creative ways to strike a deal with Zee Music and will continue our good faith negotiations in hopes of finding a mutually agreeable solution soon.”

Elsewhere, it was recently revealed that Spotify executives have only spent 10 per cent of their $100million (£81.75million) budget on a new fund to promote music and audio content by members of “historically marginalised groups”.

The Creator Equity Fund was launched last year in the wake of controversy surrounding Joe Rogan’s Spotify-exclusive podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, due to uses of the N-word and COVID-19 vaccine misinformation.

Just over a year on, however, Bloomberg has found that the initiative has got off to a slow start. Spotify was found to have taken months to hire staff and deal with “shifting priorities”, and Bloomberg also obtained a memo which said that at the beginning of the year, they were still finalising the fund’s budget and were still sorting out their priority projects.

Many outlets have pointed out that the Creator Equity Fund had the same budget as Rogan’s contract with Spotify (though others have estimated that his contract was worth twice as much).

Following the Rogan controversy last year, the likes of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash and Nils Lofgren all pulled their catalogues from the streaming platform as a means of protest.

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