GUEST COLUMN: Why the ghazal’s quiet comeback holds a loud lesson for marketers

MUMBAI: As digital media becomes increasingly dominated by short-form content, brands are constantly looking for ways to capture attention in fewer seconds. Yet the growing interest among younger audiences in older music, poetry and slower cultural formats suggests that attention may not be disappearing, but simply becoming more selective. In this guest column, Vaibhav Modi, lyricist, poet and storyteller, explores the renewed appeal of the ghazal among young listeners, why audiences may be seeking depth and meaning amid an overload of fast content, and what the form’s quiet resurgence can teach marketers about craft, patience and building lasting cultural connections.

I grew up inside the record libraries and studios of All India Radio, where my parents served as radio executives. These spaces taught me my first lesson in media theory, decades before I knew the phrase. Nobody there was in a hurry. A ghazal was permitted its seven minutes. A pause was permitted its meaning. And the listener, given time, always came back.

I have spent the two and a half decades since working in the fastest rooms of Indian entertainment, adapting some of the world’s biggest formats for Indian television, writing and producing for reality TV, streaming thrillers and microdramas engineered to hook a viewer in seconds. I understand the machinery of speed and ‘master delivery’ from the inside; I have been a part of the workflow. Which is why the quiet return of the ghazal interests me, not as nostalgia, but as evidence. When the slowest form in the room starts finding the youngest audience in the room, something worth studying is happening.

An old form, and what the data says

Let’s walk the path of the ghazal to understand what it is. The form travelled across Asia to arrive in the subcontinent and became one of the representative formats for Hindustani poetry. To put it simply, it is a chain of ‘not connected’ couplets, each complete in itself, held together by rhyme and refrain. It is an architecture of brevity: the poet gets two lines to open a wound or a window, and the discipline of the form is precisely what gives it its charge. This is a format that has survived empires, gramophones, cassettes, and the film song. Every generation has produced its own carriers of the form, from mehfils to the concert stage to the cassette boom that carried the ghazal into middle class living rooms. It has never needed rescuing. It has only needed listeners, and it keeps finding them.

Now consider the numbers, because they are stranger than the theory. The reigning assumption of our industry is that attention spans are collapsing, therefore content must shrink. Yet as per Luminate’s India midyear streaming report released in August this year, about half of all streams in India in the first half of 2026 were of deep catalogue, music older than five years, and for Bollywood music, deep catalogue accounted for more than three fourths of all streams. In the most distracted media market on earth, the largest share of listening belongs to songs that predate the distraction. And discovery is accelerating rather than narrowing: Spotify’s India report unveiled in New Delhi this September recorded over 12.8 billion discoveries of Indian artists in 2025, up 14 percent over the previous year. Young listeners are not merely receiving what algorithms serve. They are searching, and a meaningful number of them are searching backwards, toward Urdu poetry pages, unhurried compositions and the mehfil’s intimacy.

I felt this firsthand when Teri Adaa released this year, a ghazal I wrote for my album Sar e Shaam under Havells Mehfilz with Papon from the living room. I had braced for polite indifference from anyone under thirty five. Instead came messages from college students asking after the meaning of a particular word, and reels of young couples setting their fifteen second moment to a five minute composition. The form we assumed they were raised to skip seems like the thing they slowed down for.

Why slowness is working

My theory, offered from both sides of my career: when everything is fast, fast stops being a differentiator and becomes background noise. There is a reason why the term ‘doom scrolling’ exists because the thumb might be doing what it is trained to do but the heart is missing what it craves. An already exhausted audience does not want more stimulation. Strictly my belief, obviously but I see evidence everyday. The case of the ghazal strengthens my belief. It is not crafted for virality, no hook in the opening three seconds. A voice, a thought, and the confidence to take its time. There is a paradox here that marketers should sit with rather than solve too quickly: the reel did not kill the ghazal. The reel, maybe, created the need for it. Scarcity has simply changed sides. Content libraries feel like a deluge now and the race for discovery eventually ends at something that feels worthy of unhurried attention.

Four lessons for the people who build brands

I am a lyricist, not a strategist. But twenty five years of writing for audiences is its own market research, and it has left me with four convictions.

First, the length of content and the depth of connection are different axes, and we keep confusing them. A thirty second film can be instantly forgettable; a seven minute composition can be replayed for a decade. Audiences do not resent time. They resent wasted time, and they can tell the difference within moments.

Second, craft is a targeting strategy. The young listeners arriving at the ghazal are not driven by nostalgia; most have no memory of the cassette era to be nostalgic for. They are responding to the thing itself, the poetry, the composition, the restraint. Craft self selects a discerning audience, and a discerning audience is the most loyal and most premium audience a brand can hold.

Third, patience is a signal. A brand willing to tell a slow story communicates something before a single word lands: we believe what we have made deserves your time. In a marketplace drowning in urgency, unhurried confidence is a positioning few can afford to fake and fewer still can afford to ignore.

Fourth, culture is a long asset, not a campaign. The ghazals I fell in love with in the 80s have outlived every format I have adapted and every trend I have written for. Brands that attach themselves to enduring cultural forms, thoughtfully and with respect rather than as costume, buy a place in memory that no media plan can purchase.

The mehfil, after all, was the original engagement platform: an audience gathered by choice, responding in real time, the appreciation itself part of the performance, and everyone returning for more. Everything we now chase with dashboards, the mehfil achieved with meaning. Perhaps the most modern thing a marketer can do in 2026 is study the oldest room in Indian culture, and notice that it never needed to shout to be full.

Note: The views expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect our own.