Hindi Films Featuring Many Playback Singers

Recent discussions around the number of playback singers used in “Dhurandhar” (Part 1 and Part 2) brought to focus a topic of great interest to Hindi film music geeks. Both ends of the spectrum are fascinating – films that use just one playback singer for all their songs versus films that use many playback singers.

I have been involved in some of these discussions online, but they have been disjointed and not concluded satisfactorily (for me). So I decided to use data from MySwar to put structure around this topic. The starting point was a list of films from MySwar, along with the number of songs and the number of unique singers in each film. I excluded films released between 1931 and 1950 since the MySwar data for this period is sketchy and work-in-progress. This list was the starting point for the following analysis.

I will list Hindi films with 15 or more singers in this blog post. Hindi films with just one playback singer will be covered in another blog post.

List of Hindi films with 15 playback singers or more:

A few observations based on this list:

• This is a recent trend. The earliest film to feature 15 or more playback singers was “Hind Ke Wali” (1975). However, this was an exception. Chronologically, the next film in the list was “Aar Ya Paar” (1997). The trend has accelerated since the late 1990s. An uptick in the number of singers credited in films may partly be the result of more detailed music credits in the last two decades. The omnipresent 'Chorus' credit of the past is probably being replaced by credits to individual singers.

• A significant contributor to the rise in the number of playback singers used in films has been the trend of multi-composer albums. It can be inferred that multi-composer albums tend to have more playback singers than single-composer albums since each composer has their own preferred singers. 68 of the 102 films in this list involved more than one music director.
• The presence of group songs is another contributor. This factor becomes apparent in films with relatively few songs. “Super 30” (2019), for instance, features 34 singers even though there are just 5 songs in the album. This is primarily due to the song “Niyam Ho”, in which 26 singers are credited!
• There’s also a correlation between the number of songs and the number of playback singers. 45 films in this list feature 10 songs or more. The film that tops this list with 37 singers, “Jagga Jasoos” (2017), is also the film with the highest number of songs, 28. It is worthwhile noting that the official “Jagga Jasoos” (2017) album had only 6 songs. The MySwar song listing for the album is longer because it includes songs from the film’s background score that Pritam released directly on his YouTube channel. Another Pritam album, “Metro...In Dino” (2025), is an instance where a high number of songs (22 in this case) translates to many playback singers being used. “Metro...In Dino” (2025) highlights Pritam’s penchant for recording multiple versions of the same song using different singers.
• It appears that some music directors tend to experiment more than others with their choice of playback singers. The following music directors appear frequently in this list:
  • A.R. Rahman - 15 films
  • Pritam - 11 films
  • Amit Trivedi - 4 films
• Let’s talk about the film that triggered this analysis. “Dhurandhar: The Revenge” (2026) features 26 singers and is 7^th on the list. “Dhurandhar” (2025) is 29^th on the list and features 18 singers. Not at the top, but noteworthy since both the films belong to a franchise.