MUMBAI: The Music Composers’ Association of India had its AGM on March 31st 2021 where for the first time it was held virtually due to the current pandemic. The interesting aspect of the AGM this time was the declaration of election results of the new committee after a hotly contested election between 2 panels of composers, spread over 3 days, online from 27th – 29th March! On one side there was a panel primarily comprising of Bollywood song composers of the 90s such as Anand – Milind, Jatin – Lalit & Dileep Sen – Sameer Sen among others, and on the other panel which called itself “The Progressive Team”, there were primarily contemporary composers from across musical sections with Ranjit Barot, Salim – Suleiman & Ram Sampath from Films, Raju Singh & Aashish Rego from TV & Webseries, Julius Packiam & Tubby Sharma from Background Scores, Rahul Ranade from the Marathi Industry, Justin – Uday, Tapas Relia & Vipin Mishra from advertising, Santosh Nair & Ambrish Shroff from TV & Pt. Somesh Mathur from the Classical/ Folk industry. In the end, the Progressive team triumphed with all its candidates winning by huge margins, and achieved a clean sweep of the elections. This was the first time ever that a total of 446 votes were cast in the elections, across 6 countries and 25 cities.

The winning results were as follows:

Film :

Salim Merchant 287 votes
Ranjit Barot 234 votes
Indrajit “Tubby” Sharma 184 votes
Julius Packiam 177 votes

TV :

Raju Singh 309 votes
Aashish Rego 276 votes
Santosh Nair 222 votes
Ambrish Shroff 187 votes

Non – Film :

Ram Sampath 284 votes
Suleiman Merchant 263 votes
Rahul Ranade 194 votes
Somesh Mathur 145 votes

The advertising composers were elected unopposed.

The new team promised to unite the association to
actively secure the rights and royalties of all sections of
composers, by treating all music with equal weightage.