ABSTRACT
The notion of the bazaar embraces both the visible and invisible obscenity of the undressed female body as well as overdressed ethnic difference, which is the preferred mode of Bhangra's marketing inside and outside the nation. Folklorists' "discovery" of folk artists altered Bhangra as a communal tradition and displaced ubiquitous musicality by individual ownership. The questions of artistic freedom and innovation, musical purity and authenticity, and communal responsibility are repeated with unfailing regularity in the context of the standardization of culture, and the system based on stars, fan clubs and bestsellers. Building on the theory of market segmentation, Bhangra creates a niche for itself both in the national and the global music market by its unique positioning. Marketing of Panjabi music picks up the mode of racialization in which blackness is imbued with certain stereotyped traits absent in the white culture and is used in marketing black music in the West.
