T Series signs up with Agra singer

Telecom service officer to produce 3 original albums

T Series, a music company known to highlight singing talents in the Indian film industry, has struck a three-year deal with an Agra singer Yash Srivastava, who is also an Indian Telecom Service official, to produce three original music albums featuring his voice.

T-Series sources said the company had also decided to shoot four music videos to promote these albums, one of which, featuring Gladrags super model and Miss Malaysia Leena, was already being aired on the music channel MTV, topping the charts barely a couple of days of its launch.

According to the sources, the company had tied up with Yash to produce the songs himself, while the videos were to be prepared by the company at its own cost, in order to promote the albums which were expected to sell anywhere around 3-4 lakh copies initially, though it was hard to predict the market's mood these days.

Talking to Business Standard on the occasion of the formal launch of "O Haseena", the first album in this series at Agra, on Tuesday, Sumit Dutt, the video director of T-Series, who has produced more than 50 videos so far, including the four videos of Yash's album, said the innovative idea of embedding a "sting operation" in the storyline of the first remixed music video from this album being aired on entertainment channels had proved highly successful for the company, which should definitely reflect in the music sales.

Later, talking to Business Standard, Yash Srivastava, currently posted in Agra as general manager, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, said his contract with T-Series contained a revenue-sharing clause, by which the company would share a 25 per cent of the earnings from album sales with him.

Besides, he will also be receiving a share of the sales of the recently launched "DJ Hot Remix" album featuring four videos from his album, along with songs of artistes like Sonu Nigam and Adnan Sami.

He said so far, he had produced two music albums but they had been more or less "privately produced" albums released by "Tips" & "Sagarika" music companies and this was the first "big deal" he had struck in the past few years since he began recording his own compositions.

He said the contract also bound him to first produce these three music albums before he signed up with any other music company.