Stree 2 And The Smashing Success Of Single-Composer Albums

Stree 2's soundtrack has done what no other Hindi film OST has done in the recent past — all its tracks, composed by Sachin-Jigar, have reached the top ten of Spotify India’s Weekly Top Songs chart.

The soundtrack's 100% strike rate got me wondering if it’s time for Bollywood to go back to enlisting a single composer instead of several, and treating soundtracks like albums rather than compilations. After all, statistics seem to favour the former. I decided to look back at the biggest Hindi movies and soundtracks of the past five years to confirm this.

The success rate of a film’s songs are often, though not always, dependent on its box-office fate. Stree 2 isn’t just the largest hit of 2024, it’s the highest-grossing Hindi movie of all-time not adjusted for inflation. It recently took over that title from Jawaan, 2023’s largest money spinner, whose soundtrack spent seven weeks atop Spotify’s Album chart for India - the most for any OST released that year. Just like Stree 2, it had a single composer, hitmaker Anirudh Ravichander. Similarly, the soundtrack of 2022’s largest grosser Brahmastra: Part One - Shiva, which was the most streamed among that year’s new releases, was helmed by a solo music director, the platinum-pushing Pritam.

Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior and Sooryavanshi, the respective No.1 films of the atypical pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, did not generate the No.1 OST of those 12-month periods. Tanhaji was devoid of any hit songs and two of Sooryavanshi’s three smashes were recreations. Incidentally, both their soundtracks were multi-composer efforts.

The chart-topping album of 2020 came from a box-office flop, Love Aaj Kal, whose tunes were, once again, created by a single music director: frequent Imitiaz Ali collaborator Pritam. The most streamed soundtrack of 2021, on the other hand, was for a film that wasn’t a theatrical release: Shershaah. Its five songs were by five different composers. And if it wasn’t for the inclusion of the promotional track “JaiHind Ki Sena”, it too would have had the same cent-per-cent strike rate as Stree 2.

However, even as filmmakers gravitate towards multi-composer OSTs, cases like Shershaah — in which almost all the tunes reach the top ten of the charts — are the exception rather than the rule. Which is ironic, given that the very idea behind roping in multiple composers is to maximise the chances of scoring a hit.This is, however, just one of several reasons why they’ve become more common.

Worldwide, the music industry has moved towards focusing on singles over albums, in keeping with how music is consumed in the streaming era. Within the Hindi film industry, the grammar of movie making is changing — songs are used less, and often in the background, during the end credits or as narrative-breaking “item numbers”, rather than as lip-synced, picturised elements that take the story forward.

As music labels increasingly turn into production houses (and vice versa), they rely on their back catalogues of older film classics or more recent Punjabi pop hits to hedge their bets and lower their costs. Most veteran music directors, such as A. R. Rahman, decline to be part of multi-composer soundtracks, and are more expensive to hire than newbies who may not enjoy the same luxury of choice.

Notably, filmmakers trying to create a cinematic universe tend to stick to the same music director to maintain tonal consistency. Sachin-Jigar are behind the songs of all four movies in the Maddock Supernatural Universe. Vishal-Shekhar are the team that created tracks for four out of the YRF Spy Universe's five films. Rohit Shetty’s Cop Universe films, on the other hand, have relied on multiple composers but none of them have yielded chartbusters in the same quantity as the Maddock and YRF franchises.

The outlier is the OSTs of Sandeep Reddy Vanga's two Hindi films: 2019’s Kabir Singh, the most streamed album in Spotify’s almost six-year history in India, and 2024’s Animal, which is likely to end up as this year’s highest-played collection. All seven of Kabir Singh's tracks reached the top 11 on Spotify, but only five of Animal's eight tunes reached the top 15.

It's not surprising that Kabir Singh’s songs have outlasted Animal’s on the charts — the OST plays like a mixtape of sad love songs curated by a stereotypical Indian lovelorn man. Millions of his counterparts account for perhaps the largest contingent of music listeners in our country.

Animal’s tracks represent a hodgepodge of male emotions, and some feel derivative of their predecessor. Their success, however, is likely to encourage labels and production houses to stay on the multi-composer route for now, consequently increasing the importance of the music supervisor, as opposed to the music director, in ensuring that a soundtrack’s songs flow into each other seamlessly.

After all, it’s not like multi-composer OSTs haven’t been around for decades. Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) had no less than three composers, but perhaps only music nerds know who made which hit. That they complemented each other so well worked in the film's favour.

There’s arguably a deeper concern to be addressed regarding the tendency to opt for multi-composer soundtracks where each contributor is chosen for a particular kind of song. For instance, the pensive piano ballad or the percussive party track. The GOATs of Hindi film music had the ability to create a tune for any kind of mood or moment. If today’s composers are asked to deliver the same sonic template over and over again, Bollywood might plunge even further into the creative and commercial crisis it has been grappling with for the past few years.