{"id":2326662,"date":"2026-03-13T16:18:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-13T16:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2326662"},"modified":"2026-03-13T16:18:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T16:18:10","slug":"new-indian-startup-raagapay-wants-to-fix-ais-hindustani-classical-music-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/new-indian-startup-raagapay-wants-to-fix-ais-hindustani-classical-music-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"New Indian startup RaagaPay wants to fix AI\u2019s Hindustani classical music problem"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Delhi-based startup RaagaPay<\/a> claims to be \u201cIndia\u2019s first ethical Indian classical music dataset for AI\u201d, specifically Hindustani classical music. \u201cWhen you ask a Suno to give [you a song in the] raga Yaman, it will give you a Western approximation of the raga,\u201d says founder, sound engineer and composer Debjit Mitra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He launched RaagaPay in October 2025 to fix this. \u201cWe want to solve that problem, and beyond that preserve our culture and heritage,\u201d says Mitra, who has worked with Spotify, the BBC and Zee TV and runs the sonic branding company The Sound Story. To this end, he has been recording Indian classical musicians across 50 gharanas or schools of music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first phase, which comprised a cumulative ten hours of sitar, harmonium, tabla, bansuri (Indian bamboo flute), sarangi and vocal music, was completed in December. His aim is to lay down 1,000 hours of recordings by over a 100 performers by 2028. He told us that the artists will be paid lifetime royalties for their work, which they will earn every time a track of theirs is licensed for Al training or other uses.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

Mitra says that while most \u201cWestern metadata schema [covers] about 12 to 15 to parameters, like what tempo a song is in, what key it is in,\u201d RaagaPay\u2019s tally is around 80 and includes a whole lot of genre-specific parameters such as the classification of the raga, the taal (rhythm), its emotional framework (rasa), the season and time it\u2019s associated with, and the gharana to which it belongs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interestingly, 50% of the recordings will be of Hindi film music, and the metadata includes information such as the use of a raga in a particular Bollywood song, for e.g. in a romantic track composed by S.D. Burman or R.D. Burman. \u201cAt the end of the day, all Bollywood music is based on ragas,\u201d says Mitra whose team includes an ethnomusicologist, a human annotator and a lawyer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When asked how he was able to record existing compositions, he explained that they were specifically capturing the sargams or notes of the songs that form its skeletal melodic framework\u00a0(sa, re, ga, ma\u2026) \u201cstripped of the original lyrics, specific orchestration\/arrangement, production elements and the performer\u2019s unique interpretation\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis falls under\u00a0un-copyrightable musical ideas\u00a0rather than protectable expression,\u201d says Mitra who added that copyright \u201cprotects the\u00a0specific recorded performance and arrangement\u00a0(the sound recording and musical work), not the underlying\u00a0melodic idea or scale pattern. If recorded as\u00a0neutral, instructional renditions\u00a0not mimicking the original arrangement, this is transformative and educational, which strengthens fair use\/fair dealing arguments under Section 52 (1)(a) of the Indian Copyright Act.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next step for the company, he says, is to enter into a strategic partnership with academic and research institutions, and then gradually tie up with AI companies.\u201cWe\u2019re telling these companies, your model hallucinates as much as 40% with the data you\u2019ve scraped, take our data and teach it. Your convergence rates will be better.\u201d<\/p>\n