New Delhi: Bollywood singers often don’t get paid for their work and are often replaced on projects for vague reasons. Opening up about why he stepped away from the industry, singer Armaan Malik told Raj Shamani’s podcast that after being replaced multiple times, he was scarred. “That phase, where I was being replaced, I thought, ‘To hell with this s**t’.” Armaan said that he decided to give it all up and focus on his own music, after spending some months in New Zealand and detoxing.
“There was a phase where I was replaced in quite a few songs in Bollywood, which scarred me, in a way. I was like, ‘Am I not a good singer?’ And I can’t let that happen to me. I’m very sure of how I am as a singer. But it’s the circumstances… If I’m replaced because I’ve not sung the song well, I’ll accept that. But if I’m replaced because of certain factors or politics, that’s unacceptable. That happened so much to me, and still does, I’ll be frank. I moved on from that…” he said.
Uncovering more open secrets about Bollywood, he continued, “Singers don’t get paid to sing in movie songs. Obviously, you do certain things for the love of music, but there’s also a monetary motivation… At the end of the day, think of it as a job… It’s crazy that as singers, we don’t get to see that. We are so used to this (not being paid) that it is not even a conversation. They feel if the song is a hit, the singers will earn through live shows. There’s no conversation. It’s just like, ‘Are you free to come to the studio?’ We come, we sing the song, and the next day you find out someone else has sung the song… Sometimes, even composers don’t get paid. The streaming revenue goes to the labels. This could be a story that we’re uncovering here, but not many people know this, the general public doesn’t know that their favourite artists are not being paid.”
