About SaareGane

Why it exists

Every streaming service has these songs. None of them has them arranged the way anybody remembers them. Search for “90s Hindi songs” and you get an algorithmic playlist that mixes Kumar Sanu with whatever charted last week, refreshed weekly by a machine that has never been in an auto with the speaker blown.

SaareGane is the opposite arrangement. There are 9 rooms, each one a place rather than a genre: a bar where people go to be miserable, a dhaba on a highway at four in the morning, a mehfil that has been going since before anybody checked the time. You pick the one that matches the evening and the music follows. There is no search box on purpose.

How the playlists are built

Every one of the 1,134 songs here was chosen by hand and written down with the film it is from and the year that film was released. Nothing is generated, and no room is filled out by a similarity algorithm.

The film and the year are not decoration. They are what the app matches against the catalogue at the moment you open a room, which is the only way to be sure that “Tu Pyar Hai Kisi Aur Ka” resolves to the record from Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin and not to one of the four other songs with almost that name. A line that cannot be corroborated is dropped rather than substituted, so a mistake here costs a song and never gives you the wrong one.

The years are frequently corrected by hand. A public catalogue tends to carry the year a compilation was last re-uploaded rather than the year the film came out, which is how Aashiqui ends up filed under 2014. Where the two disagree, the year written here is the film’s.

Within a room the order is a ranking rather than an accident: the canon at the top, the deep cuts in the tail. The app shuffles inside those two tiers on every visit, so the first screen of a room is always drawn from its best songs and never in the sequence it was in last time. You can read any room’s full list, in its written order, at the foot of that room’s page, or start from all nine moods.

What it costs

Nothing, and there is no version of it that costs something. No subscription, no trial, no card, no account, no advertisements between songs and no audio ads at all. There is no login anywhere on the site: your favourites, your volume and your sleep timer are kept in your own browser rather than in an account. See privacy for exactly what that means.

What it is not

SaareGane does not host any music. The player streams from a public catalogue and every song stays with whoever owns it. That is the labels, the composers, the singers and the studios who made these records. What SaareGane adds is the curation: which songs, in which room, in which order. If something here is yours and should not be, the copyright page says how to have it removed.

It is also not complete, and it is not trying to be. Six of the rooms stop at roughly 2006, the 1950s-to-1980s canon is deliberately absent, and the three rooms built around one performer each run for exactly as long as that person did. This is a particular fifteen years of Hindi film music, done properly, rather than all of it done thinly.

Who runs it

SaareGane is an independent project, not a label and not a company. It is one person’s curation, put on the internet because the arrangement did not exist anywhere else. There is one address for everything: corrections, songs that will not play, a room you think is missing, or a rights question. It is at the bottom of this page and it is read.