Why Is There No Female Arijit Singh In Bollywood? Top Female Singers Tell Anupama Chopra!

Anupama Chopra recently spoke to top female singers of Bollywood and raised a very valid question, why is there no female Arijit Singh in Bollywood? Singer Neeti Mohan, Aditi Singh Sharma, Jonita Gandhi and Neha Bhasin spoke about the politics in the music industry and sang their chartbuster songs too! Here a a few hihglights from their intriguing conversation with Anupama, along with the full video below. 

Why Neha Bhasin Doesn’t Like The Term Playback Singer
I don’t like playback singing, just call us singers. I don’t like the label. The ‘back’ part of the term is what is wrong with it. In India, there’s a lot that actors take away from singers unknowingly, and feed on it. Even a very serious film needs a good song to promote it, but what does the singer really get? Why do people not know what we look like? Why do I have to be a judge on a show to prove myself as a vocalist? It shouldn’t be happening to the top vocalists of the country.

On Why Singers Aren’t Credited In All YT Videos

Aditi Singh Sharma: The actors are more important and we are told that ‘there are only these many characters in the title, your name is too long’. I’m not going to change my name to ‘A’ so that you could fit it!

On Why Female Singers Are Replaceable

Neeti Mohan: I think everybody is replaceable. We all do (have distinct voices), but the point is that the song needs to bring something fresh, and until a couple of years ago, that was not the criteria. We had to sound like a particular voice, that was the criteria back then, and now it’s not because we are open to world music, listening to every genre. Earlier, we were restricted because you would have to travel a lot to learn any other style of music. Now, it’s on your phone all the time, and that is why you get bored faster.

Aditi Singh Sharma: The problem is that there’s too many of us, and I don’t know what happened back then but now we have so many singing shows on TV and the internet, we would hear a song and even we wouldn’t know who has sung it. It might be that I have a great success story, but what about us, as artists? I have sung certain songs which have been sung by ten singers. If I get that song, there are nine who didn’t. A lot of people have not gotten it even over a long period of time, and if we ask them this, I’m pretty sure the answers will be very different.