ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how selling music is the performance of affective labour that crosscuts different modes of value production in neoliberalizing India. It focuses on customer service agents (CSAs), but it is important to briefly contextualize the other kinds of labor present in Music Metropolis, and indeed, in most other organized retail stores in contemporary India. Music Metropolis produced a cosmopolitan space that largely borrowed models from other parts of the world, most notably HMV and Virgin, as a way of attracting the 'high-value customers'. Tejaswini Ganti and Neepa Majumdar have noted that women's public performance has long been the site of anxiety in film and the arts. In a 2004 interview, Mehmood Curmally, the owner of Rhythm House, also stressed the importance of the clerks' role in selling and the intimacies that they created with customers. Finally, the CSA should reflect on each sales transaction and record and analyze it.
