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T-Series

T-SERIES & MUSIC PIRACY
Initially, Gulshan's cover versions featured only old Hindi film songs. Gulshan got unknown singers to sing these as their rates were low and Gulshan was able to make good margins on the overall deal. Soon, he began making cover versions of new movies as well. Though the cassettes always made it clear in small print that these were not the original recordings, the consumers were not always savvy enough to read the small print.
During the early 1990s, Gulshan released a number of albums featuring religious songs. These were fairly successful. He even acted in, sang for and directed a few of the videos of such songs. These were run on the state-owned television channel Doordarshan. T-Series also began producing Hindi films. One of the company's first ventures, the musical 'Aashiqui,' was a huge success. This was followed by many more movies, a majority of which flopped. However, the music of these movies was a success in almost all the cases. The success of 'Bewafa Sanam,' one of the many mediocre T-Series movies starring Gulshan's actor-brother Kishen Kumar, took the whole industry by surprise. Gulshan even invented the concept of the 'music bank' where tunes were stored till a movie or a record was identified to 'fit' them into.

Things were going on rather smoothly - till Gulshan released a cover version of what was reportedly one of India's biggest blockbuster movie, 'Hum Aapke Hain Kaun' in 1997, violating the three-year waiting period stipulated by the Supreme Court. This time around, the attack on GCI's profits was too strong to be ignored and the company filed a suit against T-Series. In the same year, a few music industry players approached the former finance minister V P Singh, demanding that Gulshan be punished for violating copyright laws and pirating music. However, V P Singh reportedly6 dismissed them saying, "Don't come to me with your hard luck stories. You've no marketing strategies so you haven't discovered the...