ABSTRACT
The spread of cassette technology in the late 1970s and early 1980s had a dramatic effect on popular music in South Asia. The commercial-music industry that had previously emerged in India had been highly centralized, being organized primarily around the production of films and records. Factors such as the high cost of records, record production, and record-playing technology had enabled a small coterie of producers to dominate the entire subcontinent’s commercial-music industry (Joshi 1988). Partly because most consumers could not afford radios or phonographs but could occasionally buy cinema tickets, mass-mediated popular music from the arrival of sound film (in 1931) to the 1970s consisted mostly of Hindi-Urdu film music, produced largely in Bombay studios and disseminated throughout much of North India. During this period, the film-music industry itself was remarkably centralized, being dominated by the multinational EMI (operating under the logo HMV, “His Master’s Voice”). Further, most film songs were produced by a handful of music directors and vocalists. Though regional-language films and film songs also flourished, these tended to imitate the Bombay Hindi-film style. As a result, although the output of the film-music industry was prodigious and sophisticated, it cannot be said to have represented the linguistic and stylistic diversity of the subcontinent’s music.
