Now, he has restrained a few of them from infringing his copyright.
In the new millennium, when audio rights include a spectrum of digital rights like downloads through mobile networks, rings tones, caller tunes, internet streaming and the like, Ilaiyaraja had sounded the warning bugle against piracy and named some companies as copyright holders. These tracks, which had been given for five years were then transferred to Pyramid Audio which has about 150 Ilaiyaraja films now. AVM came in on the 61 st year of its audio business but let go after a crop of releases as the humungous hype was not converting into profits. He gave up after a score of films saying the money he paid for the tracks could not be recouped from cassette sales. Eknath, a prominent video library owner was drawn into the circle of devotees and given the audio rights for a price. Bhaskar put it then, ‘We should not have entered a business we had no idea about’!īy this time there was a halo round Ilayaraja, and he was being hailed as Ragadevan, a musical god.
He started his own company, ‘Raja Cassettes’, but as Ilaiyaraja’s elder brother R. This opened Ilaiyaraja’s eyes to the commercial potential of his work yet again and he stopped giving films to Echo. Parthasarathi and Ilaiyaraja released the latter’s first compact disc of hits in Singapore but the celebration lasted for a few years only till the producer of the mega pic Thalapathy (1991) sold the audio rights to a another label (Lahiri) at a huge price. Echo was then made over in 1988 to ‘New York’ Parthasarathi, an erstwhile music director who had moved over to the US and made a mark with his music company there. Yet, the enterprise did not do very well as it could not meet the huge demand, and pirates made a killing. Ilaiyaraja got his audio rights as part of his payment for composing music for films and there was a huge demand for his songs. It was a business that could not go wrong. It was then that Ilaiyaraja took charge of his audio tracks, propping up the Echo label through his Pannaippuram boyhood friend Subramaniam. Ilaiyaraja had about forty films a year – a huge vindication for a composer who had been challenged in the field about his capacity to arrange music! Film production too peaked from around 60 in the mid seventies to well above a hundred.
The start of the eighties saw a greater democratization of film music through the proliferation of cassettes.
By the early eighties, Ilaiyaraja was on the way to achieving a status that no music composer had attained in Tamil cinema, the name above the title. Ilaiyaraja’s scintillating music proved to be the anthem of this breed of films. Such films signalled a bright new cinema of fresh faces, talented directors and a newer approach to cinema. And Inreco has the tracks of the nationally awarded Nenjathai Killaadhe featuring some truly memorable hits, Sigappu Rojakkal in which Kamalahasan played a psychopathic killer and Priya, the first Tamil film with stereophonic recording. This is why the tracks of such all-time classics like the Rajinikanth-Shobha starrer, Mullum Malarum, the blockbuster Kalyanaraman featuring Kamalhasan in two roles, the musically vibrant Rosappu Ravikkaikaari and Annakili are with HMV. The maestro known for moving fans with his music has been forced in recent times to move courts to protect his copyright.įor a few years after making a redoubtable debut with Annakili (1976), when Ilaiyaraja was just another composer, albeit brilliant and promising, he made no claim of ownership on his tracks and music labels like Inreco and HMV purchased the audio rights from the producers. Like the ascending and descending notes of ragas and scales Ilaiyaraja uses to compose his tunes, his relationship with his song tracks has seen many ups and downs through the decades.