iWorld
Amazon Prime Music ties up with Saregama
MUMBAI: Amazon announced its partnership with Saregama to stream the label’s catalog of 117,000 tracks on Amazon Prime Music when the ad-free music streaming service launches in India.Saregama has one of the largest and the most coveted Indian music selections across multiple Indian languages. It offers a quintessential collection of classics with a catalogue dating back to the era of first talkie film – Raja Harishchandra. Prime members will soon be able to easily discover and listen to melodies on Amazon Prime Music from movies like Guide, Don, Kati Patang, Waqt, CID; contributions from legends like Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammad Rafi, Jagjit Singh, Ghulam Ali, M. S. Subbulakshmi, Asha Bhosle, R.D Burman, Kishore Kumar, and more artists; and have fun with songs like “Ek Chatur Naar” or fall in love with “Ajeeb Dastan hai ye”.
Amazon Music India director Sahas Malhotra commented, “We are excited to partner with Saregama to add classics over the decades in several Indian languages to boost our always expanding Indian and International catalogue. At launch, Amazon Prime Music listeners will enjoy hundreds of especially hand-curated playlists across their favorite eras, genres, and artists”.
Saregama India. MD Vikram Mehra said, “Music streaming has fast emerged as one of the foremost ways of consuming music in India. We are excited to partner with Amazon Prime Music, in bringing our extensive and rich catalogue of songs from our label – Saregama, to their platform, ensuring that we reach out to the fast-growing base of Prime members. We believe this digital experience would only enhance the level of popularity of our songs across a wide demographic of people in India.”
Saregama, with a catalogue size of more than 117,000 Tracks across 15000 albums, has one of the most comprehensive collections of evergreen songs, ghazals, regional classics, Hindustani, Carnatic and devotional music in India. It has an impressive repertoire across Hindi and regional languages such as Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and many more.
iWorld
Meta plans 8,000 layoffs in new AI-led restructuring wave
First phase from May 20 may cut 10 per cent workforce amid AI pivot.
MUMBAI: At Meta, the future may be artificial but the cuts are very real. The social media giant is reportedly preparing a fresh round of layoffs, with an initial wave expected to impact around 8,000 employees as it doubles down on its artificial intelligence ambitions. According to a Reuters report, the first phase of job cuts is slated to begin on May 20, targeting roughly 10 per cent of Meta’s global workforce. With nearly 79,000 employees on its rolls as of December 31, the move marks one of the company’s most significant workforce reductions in recent years.
And this may only be the beginning. Sources indicate that additional layoffs are being planned for the second half of the year, although the scale and timing remain fluid, likely to be shaped by how Meta’s AI capabilities evolve in the coming months. Earlier reports had suggested that total cuts in 2026 could reach 20 per cent or more of its workforce.
The restructuring comes as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg continues to steer the company towards an AI-first operating model, committing hundreds of billions of dollars to the transition. Internally, this shift is already visible: teams within Reality Labs have been reorganised, engineers have been moved into a newly formed Applied AI unit, and a Meta Small Business division has been created to align with broader structural changes.
The trend is hardly isolated. Across the tech sector, companies are trimming headcount while investing aggressively in automation. Amazon, for instance, has reportedly cut around 30,000 corporate roles nearly 10 per cent of its white-collar workforce citing efficiency gains driven by AI. Data from Layoffs.fyi shows over 73,000 tech employees have already lost jobs this year, compared with 153,000 in all of 2024.
For Meta, the move echoes its earlier “year of efficiency” in 2022–23, when about 21,000 roles were eliminated amid slowing growth and market pressures. This time, however, the backdrop is different. The company is financially stronger, generating over $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profit last year, with shares up 3.68 per cent year-to-date though still below last summer’s peak.
That contrast underlines the shift underway. These layoffs are less about survival and more about reinvention. As Meta restructures itself around AI from autonomous coding agents to advanced machine learning systems, the question is no longer whether the company will change, but how many roles will be left unchanged when it does.
