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Full-Text Articles in Ethnomusicology
The Regional North Indian Popular Music Industry In 2014: From Cassette Culture To Cyberculture, Peter L. Manuel
The Regional North Indian Popular Music Industry In 2014: From Cassette Culture To Cyberculture, Peter L. Manuel
Publications and Research
This article explores the current state of the regional vernacular popular music industry in North India, assessing the changes that have occurred since around 2000 with the advent of digital technologies, including DVD format, and especially the Internet, cellphones and ‘pen-drives’. It provides a cursory overview of the regional music scene as a whole, and then focuses, as a case study, on a particular genre, namely the languriya songs of the Braj region, south of Delhi. It discusses how commercial music production is adapting, or failing to adapt, to recent technological developments, and it notes the vigorous and persistent flowering …
Democratizing Indian Popular Music: From Cassette Culture To The Digital Era, Peter L. Manuel
Democratizing Indian Popular Music: From Cassette Culture To The Digital Era, Peter L. Manuel
Publications and Research
The history of Indian popular music constitutes in itself a significant development in modern culture, as this set of genres—especially but not only in their Bollywood forms—have been cherished by hundreds of millions of listeners not only in South Asia but internationally as well. At the same time, the trajectory of Indian popular music represents a dramatic case study of media culture as well, as its patterns of ownership, consumption, and even musical structures themselves have been conditioned by technological changes. Most striking is the way that a highly monopolized, streamlined, and homogeneous popular music culture dominated for several decades …