Music Commodities, Markets, and Values: Music as Merchandise 9781138947801, 1138947806

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Music Commodities, Markets, and Values

This book examines music stores as sites of cultural production in contemporary India. Analyzing social practices of selling music in a variety of retail contexts, it focuses upon the economic and social values that are produced and circulated by music retailers in the marketplace. Based upon research conducted over a volatile 10-year period of the Indian music industry, Beaster-Jones discusses the cultural histories of the recording industry, the social changes that have accompanied India’s economic liberalization reforms, and the economic realities of selling music in India as digital circulation of music recordings gradually displaced physical distribution. The volume considers the mobilization of musical, economic, and social values as a component of branding discourses in neoliberal India, as a justification for new regimes of legitimate use and intellectual property, as a scene for the performance of cosmopolitanism by shopping, and as a site of anxiety about transformations in the marketplace. It relies upon ethnographic observation and interviews from a variety of sources within the Indian music industry, including perspectives of executives at music labels, family-run and corporate music stores, and hawkers in street markets selling counterfeit recordings. This ethnography of the practices, spaces, and anxieties of selling music in urban India will be an important resource for scholars in a wide range of fields, including ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music studies, and South Asian studies. Jayson Beaster-Jones is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Merced, USA.

Routledge Studies in Ethnomusicology

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The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance Edited by Graham St John

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Local Music Scenes and Globalization Transnational Platforms in Beirut Thomas Burkhalter

Qupai in Chinese Music Melodic Models in Form and Practice Edited by Alan R. Thrasher

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Music Commodities, Markets, and Values Music as Merchandise Jayson Beaster-Jones

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Popular Music of Vietnam The Politics of Remembering, the Economics of Forgetting Dale A. Olsen

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The Globalization of Musics in Transit Music Migration and Tourism Edited by Simone Krüger and Ruxandra Trandafoiu

Music Commodities, Markets, and Values Music as Merchandise

Jayson Beaster-Jones

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of Jayson Beaster-Jones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Beaster-Jones, Jayson. Title: Music commodities, markets, and values: music as merchandise / by Jayson Beaster-Jones. Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge studies in ethnomusicology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016000857 Subjects: LCSH: Sound recording industry—Social aspects—India. | Record stores—India. | Sound recording industry—India. Classification: LCC ML3917.I4 B37 2016 | DDC 338.4/7780954—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000857 ISBN: 978-1-138-94780-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-66986-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For Laura and Gwendolyn

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Contents

xi xiii

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgments 1

Introduction: Music Commodities and Value Discourses in India

1

Music as Merchandise 2 Neoliberal Values in India 5 The New Middle Classes 9 Marketplaces After Liberalization: The Birth of “Organized Retail” 10 The Value(s) of Music Commodities 13 Framing the Indian Music Industry 16 Measuring the Recording Industry 19 Research Methods 21 Methodological Limitations 24 Structure of the Book 25 2

Prestige and Innovation in the Indian Music Industry The Early Indian Recording Industry

30

32

The Gramophone Era 34 The Cassette Era: T-Series, Innovation, and the Expansion of the Market 37 The Digital Era: CDs and MP3s 40

Music Recordings, Materiality, and Discourses of Class The Indian Music Industry in the 2000s and a Market Correction 45

42

Piracy and Narratives of Lost Values 47 The IMI and the Social Values of Piracy 49

Rhythm House and the History of Music Retail 3

51

“Is Se Kuch Sasta Hai?”: Music Commodities, Circulation, and Value in Indian Markets The Social Life of Recordings 62 Thrift; Or, the Value of Media Commodities in Bhopal

63

59

viii

Contents The Ambiguities of Selling Music: Five Ethnographic Vignettes Amit (Owner, Sangeet Mahal, Bhopal) 67 Salman (Owner, Geet Jagah, Bhopal) 70 Kuldeep (Owner, Intersection Music Store, Bhopal) Ganesh (Hawker, Fort District, Mumbai) 75 Vimal (Anti-Piracy Agent, Madhya Pradesh) 77

Music Circulation and Sociability 4

66

72

81

Experiencing the Brand, Branding the Experience

84

The Corporate History of Music Metropolis 86 Brand, Affect, and Experience 87 Articulating the Music Metropolis Brand 90 High Value Customers 91 Overwhelming Spaces: The Audio-Visual Design of Music Metropolis 94 Promotional Efforts and Holiday Conundrums 97 Creating Spectacles 100 “They’re Pretty Ok”: The Bombay Rockers Event in Pune 103 Creating New Audiences through Events and Workshops 105 The Value of the Brand 108 5

Putting Music in Its Place: Merchandising in Space and Time

111

Genre, Space, and Time 113 Space in Bhopali Counter Stores 115 Organized Retail 119 Musical Taxonomies in Music Metropolis 121 Music Genres or Marketing Categories? 123 Privileged Positioning 124 Genre Clusters in Music Metropolis 127 The Logic of Stocking and the Tastes of the “Evolved” Customer 132 Would Bryan Adams by Any Other (Genre) Name Sound as Sweet? 137 6

Music, Passion, Knowledge: Music Retail and Affective Labor

141

New Middle Classes and Labor in Music Metropolis 145 Hiring Class 148 Intersectional Class, Caste, and Gender Norms in Music Retail 151 “The Store Is Your Stage and You Are the Actors”: Sales Training at Music Metropolis 158 Passion and the Exceptional Character of Music 164 Music, Labor, Value 166

Contents 7

Conclusion: Music Stores in the Age of Mobile Phones

ix 170

Music Commodities, Neoliberal Markets, and Value 173 Mobile Phone Culture: Music as “Value-Added Service” 178 Music Stores in the 2010s 180 Value Revisited 182 The Meanings of Value, the Values of Meaning 184 Bibliography Index

189 199

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List of Figures and Tables

Figures 2.1 Music Metropolis product training slide 2.2 Advertisement for Rhythm House from Filmfare Magazine (December 26, 1952) 2.3 Interior Shot of a Rhythm House Listening Cabin (c. 1974) 2.4 Rhythm House (Mumbai) sales floor in January 2015 3.1 Sangeet Mahal (Bhopal) November 2003 3.2 Geet Jagah (Bhopal) January 2004 3.3 Intersection Music Store (Bhopal) in January 2004 3.4 MP3-CD Hawker (Bhopal) in February 2005 4.1 Customer Browsing a CD Kiosk at the Bombay Rockers Event (Pune) May 2005 4.2 The Bombay Rockers Event (Pune) May 2005 5.1 Diagram of the Sangeet Mahal Music Store in Bhopal 5.2 Signs in a Music Metropolis store in Chennai 5.3 Diagram of music categories 5.4 The “Indian” section of a flagship Music Metropolis store (Mumbai) March 2005 5.5 Top-down schematic view of the store section photographed in Figure 5.4 5.6 Top-down schematic view of a store in Hyderabad 6.1 Classification of customers from sales training slide 7.1 A sign advertising mobile downloading services (Bhopal) 2010

36 54 55 56 68 71 73 79 102 103 117 122 123 124 125 127 162 172

Tables 5.1 Genre clusters in Music Metropolis stores 7.1 Estimates of the size of the Indian music industry

129 179

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Acknowledgments

This book was developed over a decade of research and writing. Many people have assisted me by lending me insights and perspectives that have been built into the book you see before you. In India, I would like to thank Annie Arakkal, Puneet Bakshi, Poonam Bakshi, Roshni Bakshi, Savio Barreto, Mousaumi Basu, Debrata Bhattacharya, Manish Billore, Sumit Chandok, Christy Charles, Salil Chaudry, Mehmood Curmally, Aliya Curmally, Yusuf Curmally, Savio D’Souza, Jehangir Dalal, Mahendra Dave, Kanwal Deep Kohli, Suresh Duclan, Sandeep Frederick, Andre Gerere, Ivy Gupta, Uminder Hora, Anil Jain, Vikrant Jain, Reni Joseph, Gaurav Kapoor, R. Karthik, Tarun Khanna, Mahesh Khot, Kirtan, William Klein, Shekhar Krishnan, Sameera Kulkarni, Alka Kumar, Pankaj Kumar, Santosh Kumar, Susheel Kurien, Sayed Liqquat Ali, Savio Lobo, Roxanne Maben, Ruchi Mathur, Ranjeet Meena, Nakul Mehta, Bhaskar Menan, Abhiram Mishra, Babi Mitra, Supraja Nandakumar, Sumit Parwal, S. Sunil Paul, P. Poornima, Sajal Purkayasta, Ravi Raghavan, Sudhanshu Rai, Arun Raj, Rajeev Raja, Amit Roy, Navin Salva, Persis Sathe, Rajeev Sathe, Ravi Sharma, Mangesh Shinde, Sujata Singh, Sunit Suleja, Ravi Sundaram, T. Suresh, F.A. Talafaral, Tonu, Devjeet Syam, Dhiraj Talwar. A number of people have commented on early drafts of this book as a whole or in academic presentations. In so doing they have helped me hone parts of my argument. I would like to thank Michael Bakan, Carla Bellamy, Philip Bohlman, Gregory Booth, Betsey Brada, Vicki Brennan, Fadeke Castor, Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, Vidhu Chaturvedi, Nusrat Chowdhury, Richard Delacy, Aditi Deo, Anaar Desai-Stephens, Byron Dueck, Naresh Fernandes, Stefan Fiol, Jane Florine, Jeffrey Guevin, Jocelyne Guilbault, James Hare, Niko Higgins, Brian Horne, Travis Jackson, Beatrice Jauregui, Peter Johansen, Jaime Jones, James Jones, Max Katz, Rehanna Kheshgi, Shekhar Krishnan, Joel G. Lee, Lawrence Liang, Andrew Mall, Peter Manuel, Meredith McGuire, Sean Mitchell, Jason Molesworth, Anna Morcom, Marina Peterson, Jerry Pinto, Smitha Radhakrishnan, Matt Rahaim, Valerie Ritter, Tamara Roberts, Anna Schultz, Bradley Shope, Sunit Singh, Sally Steindorf, Jonathan Sterne, Anna Stirr, Timothy Taylor, Neha Vora, Karin Zitzewitz. Particular thanks go to my dissertation committee at the University of Chicago, William Mazzarella, Ronald Inden, John Kelly, and Martin Stokes.

xiv Acknowledgments I would also like to thank my colleagues at Texas A&M University and the University of California-Merced who have provided important moral support for this project, including Ramesh Balasubramaniam, Joshua Barbour, Harris Berger, Patrick Burkart, David Donkor, Donnalee Dox, Natarajan Gautam, Judith Hamera, Laura Hamilton, Joshua Heuman, David Kaminsky, Kim Kattari, Emily McManus, Pritipuspa Mishra, Kirsten Pullen, Srivi Ramasubramanian, and Cara Wallis. Jesse Rester and Bridget Conlon Liddell provided vital commentary and assistance on the entire manuscript. Several parts of this book have appeared in previous publications. A portion of Chapter 3 appeared in Beaster-Jones, Jayson. 2014. “Music Piracy, Commodities, and Value: Digital Media in the Indian Marketplace” in Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Volume 1 edited by Gopinath, Sumanth & Jason Stanyek (Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press). A portion of Chapter 6 appeared in Beaster-Jones, Jayson. 2015. “Music, Labor, and Value in Indian Music Stores.” FocaalBlog, April 7. www.focaalblog.com/2015/04/07/jayson-beaster-jones-music-labor-and-valuein-indian-music-stores (Reprinted by permission of Berghahn Books). A portion of Chapter 7 appeared in Beaster-Jones, Jayson. 2014. “Beyond Musical Exceptionalism: Music, Value, and Ethnomusicology” Ethnomusicology 58(2):329–35 (Reprinted by permission of the Society for Ethnomusicology). This research would have been much more difficult without support from the Committee on Southern Asia Studies at the University of Chicago, the Fulbright Foundation, The American Institute of Indian Studies, The College of Liberal Arts, and the Crawley Family Foundation at Texas A&M University, and the Melborn G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University.

1

Introduction Music Commodities and Value Discourses in India

Like most of his customers, I discovered Kuldeep’s shop by following the sound of English and Hindi dance music blasting from the speakers outside his door. Located in a fashionable market in the central Indian city of Bhopal, Kuldeep’s Intersection Music Store sold refrigerators, televisions, music systems, video players, and, of course, music and video recordings. As we sat at his desk sipping tea and discussing my research project, Kuldeep abruptly stopped to withdraw his wallet and brandish his Music Metropolis loyalty card, and proceeded to speak rhapsodically about his experiences of the immense Music Metropolis flagship store in Mumbai and how he dreamed of bringing something similar to Bhopal.1 Taking a closer look at his store, I  began to notice the decorating scheme and layout he had selected—the air-conditioned space was brightly painted, with a mix of open wall racks and free-standing shelving units displaying media in various formats. Expensive Nakamichi listening posts completed the picture. In contrast to the spartan, white interiors of other Bhopali music shops, where cassettes and CDs were usually stacked on shelves behind the counter, Intersection Music was designed so that customers could freely browse and handle the music without the mediation of the shopkeeper. A security camera kept watch over the sales floor to help safeguard the wares. In short, the layout of the Intersection Music Store closely emulated that of the Music Metropolis chain—in precisely the same way, I realized, that Music Metropolis had been inspired by the design aesthetic of Britain’s Virgin Megastore retail chain. Kuldeep aspired to recreate a hip, trendy, urban music store in the moderately sized city of Bhopal. His ambition was part of significant changes that were occurring in Indian marketplaces, including the emergence of new consumer values and new attitudes toward commodities. Traditionally, most shopkeepers in Indian markets use their retail spaces to stack up the maximum number of goods possible; display and advertising are not significant considerations. Customers usually come to these stores already knowing what they need, or with the intent of engaging the expertise and recommendations of the shopkeepers. In contrast, Kuldeep organized his space to emphasize the packaging of the merchandise that he sold; his maximization of display space allowed the products to reach out for the customers’ attention. Kuldeep’s stock of Bollywood film songs, film-song remixes, and English-language pop

2

Introduction

music reflected the tastes of the customers he envisioned—the cosmopolitan, English-speaking, fashion-conscious, consumption-oriented youth who frequented this affluent Bhopali market. Most retail chains regard this class of individuals as “high value,” a phrase that refers not only to their buying power but also to their (anticipated) ability to bring prestige to a shop, thereby expanding its customer base. Kuldeep’s pride in his Music Metropolis loyalty card signaled his belief in the success and desirability of this retail model, even as the card acted as a talisman of his own status as a high-value customer. In a sense, Kuldeep was dedicated to selling a shopping experience and social identity as much as material products. As I noticed these details, Kuldeep mentioned that he had approached Music Metropolis with the idea of opening a franchise store in Bhopal. He had been refused on the basis that Bhopal’s market for “original” music— that is, for recordings that were not pirated—was so small that a franchise location could not be justified. Ironically, as I later learned, Kuldeep’s original recordings were not selling well, and most of his business did ultimately come from pirated media: high-quality counterfeits imported from Pakistan and Malaysia, as well as copies and compilations he created with the aid of his in-store computer. For the time being, this market proved to be more lucrative than the high-value commodity experience that Kuldeep would have preferred to promote. Kuldeep’s attempt to create a cosmopolitan shopping space in Bhopal ultimately failed—not because of competition from similar retail stores, but simply because he lacked business acumen and had overestimated the customer base for his product. While the Music Metropolis brand strategy had succeeded with him as a customer, the local market did not recognize the value of the shopping experience and services he provided. By the time I had completed the bulk of my fieldwork in 2005, Kuldeep had permanently closed his store due to insufficient business. Despite this failure, he had enjoyed the attempt—it had given him the opportunity to sell something that he found personally meaningful, and he was now ready to move on to his next business venture. Ironically, by the time I returned to India in 2010, Music Metropolis itself had been sold to another corporation, and nearly all of its employees had left for other positions, usually in retail. Like Kuldeep, the former employees of Music Metropolis with whom I spoke had similarly nostalgic memories about working in music retail.

Music as Merchandise This book is an ethnographic study of how music is bought and sold in contemporary India. My central argument is that different Indian retailers invoked different social values to sell music and that by studying sites of exchange we can gain powerful new insights into how economic transactions are circumscribed by broader social value systems. I will show how shopkeepers appealed to diverse values to make a sale—for example, they might invoke the prestige value of economic display that comes from

Introduction

3

shopping in a “high-quality” retail outlet. Or, alternatively, they might draw on the values of thriftiness and local identity that draw customers to informal, family-run shops. They might appeal to the values of ethnic identity, international cosmopolitanism, or the cultural values associated with specific music genres. These different social values are laminated onto the physical products (recordings) that are being sold, and they account for a great deal of the economic value of the product. In many cases, these social values are rather tangential to the musical content of the recording—one retailer might sell an album by emphasizing its trendy, international pop sound, while another retailer might sell the same album by focusing on the actors that portray the musicians in the film the album is promoting. I found that when consumers make a decision to purchase a particular recording in a particular retail context, they are “buying in” to certain ideas about the music’s social significance. Retailers, in turn, must figure out how to connect with—or manipulate—these customer values in order to stay in business. The values that circulate along with music recordings are thus nowhere more apparent than in the intimate interactions among customers, shopkeepers, and merchandise. These music store interactions reveal complex negotiations among values derived from widespread sources—those promoted by media industries, those that emerge from local and global ideologies, and those interjected by individual store owners and their customers. In this book I also document some of the ways that the values associated with music were changing in India during the first decades of the 2000s. As Indian retailers creatively mobilized cultural values to sell music, they had to navigate a complicated political and economic terrain that included the symbiosis of the film and music industries, the growing influence of international corporate business practices, the rise of the “new middle classes,” the development of new media technologies, and conflicting ideological perspectives on the social purpose of music. After the turn of the millennium, shoppers in India could choose from a bewildering array of successful retail outlets, ranging from street hawkers to family-owned shops to mobile phone providers to large chain stores. These different kinds of retailers employed different strategies to sell music and, as the story of Kuldeep’s store indicates, these strategies were not always readily portable from one social context to another. The selling strategies that generated significant revenues for a large corporate chain in Mumbai, for instance, could fail dramatically when implemented by a local Bhopali shopkeeper such as Kuldeep. One of this book’s central concerns is how the cosmopolitan value discourses mobilized by large retail chains (which were relatively new in India when I began this research) have come into conflict with the locally grounded values that most Indian shopkeepers use to sell music. Another of my central concerns is the anxiety about piracy and lost revenues that has become pervasive in the music industry after the turn of the millennium. I raise some questions about whether or not piracy is actually bad for the industry and whether it is piracy or the scope of intellectual

4

Introduction

property that has expanded in recent years. At the same time, it was clear in my research that many music sellers in India were struggling to convince customers to purchase non-pirated music. These retailers’ primary strategy was to focus ever more intently on the added value that they could provide to recordings—in other words, the social values that were laminated onto the physical merchandise and allowed retailers to sell more products at higher prices. One of these added values was simply the social legitimacy and prestige of owning “original” music. Retailers (and in some ways, the music industry as a whole) encouraged their “high-value” customers to disparage piracy as a disagreeable, low-class endeavor that reflected poorly on those who engaged in it. Shopkeepers in different contexts leveraged other forms of value. In a local neighborhood store, added value might include conversation, personalized gifts and music suggestions, and services such as format transfers that skirted the boundaries of legality. In pan-Indian chain stores, added value might include the spectacularization of the shopping experience, the opportunity to participate in a brand identity, and the prestige of engaging in a cosmopolitan form of shopping. India has undergone tremendous social changes in recent years, as the state has increasingly embraced neoliberal economic strategies (these are described in more detail in the following section). Music reproduction technologies, such as CD burning, became less expensive due to the reduction of trade tariffs and manufacturing constraints—the wider availability of these technologies facilitated both legal and illegal modes of music distribution. Policy changes made to promote private radio and television broadcasting also contributed to the effects of liberalization, as international and local media companies scrambled to take advantage of this new revenue source. The emergence of broadband Internet, 3G mobile telephony, and other wireless networks facilitated this shift in modes of music distribution. Increasingly complex licensing and distribution arrangements have caused broadcasters and producers to clash in struggles to update India’s copyright laws. One of the most visible effects of liberalization, however, has been the rise of large chain stores and shopping malls, a phenomenon that is widely referred to as India’s “retail revolution.” During the course of all this, India has become a kind of crucible for debates over the concept of musical property rights and the effects of neoliberal economic policies. As recently as the mid-1990s, the overwhelming preponderance of music shops in India was small, family-run affairs, in which customers approached a shopkeeper or assistant to inquire about merchandise stacked on shelves behind the counter. While this model is still common in India, economic policy changes in the late 1990s cleared the way for large retail chains that were based upon international models to promote a different kind of shopping experience. Outlets such as Music Metropolis presented enormous collections of music in open shelving, encouraging customers to carefully browse through the merchandise and take in the store’s copious advertising displays and elaborate product packaging. By 2003, Music Metropolis had

Introduction

5

expanded to over 100 locations and seemed to be opening new stores almost weekly. By 2016, however, most of the Music Metropolis stores had been shuttered, and even venerable stores like Rhythm House in South Mumbai had been closed. At the earliest stages of this research, I set out to explore the rise of these new Indian retail chains as an indication of the country’s changing economic structures. I soon came to realize, however, that the changes in Indian consumption patterns were far more complicated than I had imagined. They involved not only new kinds of stores, but also intense conflict among different kinds of social values. Scholars in many disciplines have investigated the diverse social values associated with music, but only rarely have we made detailed investigations into the cultural dimensions of music as merchandise. I found that the exchanges and choices taking place in music stores were in no way reducible to “mere” economics. These financial exchanges were inseparable from local contexts: they entailed performances of identity, displays of ideology, and broad social attributions of worth, importance, and desirability.

Neoliberal Values in India An important part of the historical backdrop to India’s changing dynamics of music shopping is the rapid implementation of neoliberal economic philosophies that were initiated on a large scale in the 1990s. The neoliberal system of social and economic values directly conflicted with earlier Gandhian approaches that emphasized anti-materialist austerity and promoted state solutions for many social ills. The tensions between these two social and economic philosophies account for much of the diversity and contradictions that could be found in Indian marketplaces in the 2000s. A wide array of social-scientific scholarship has documented the social consequences of neoliberal policy changes in various parts of the world, showing that economic outlooks and social value systems are largely inseparable.2 Recognizing that capitalism is a kind of cultural worldview, scholars have investigated the ways in which the global expansion of this economic ideology has transformed local cultural contexts. At the same time, however, local responses to global capitalism have led to a variegated patchwork of regional adaptations that cannot easily be summed up as a monolithic global system. In order to understand the transformative effects of economic liberalization, it is necessary to describe not only the basic parameters of this concept but also its implementation within local cultures of commerce. In its broadest definition, neoliberalism is a political and economic value system based on the idea that “human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2005, 2). Advocates for neoliberalism believe that individual initiative and market competition are the most efficient means of achieving other social goals, such as resource development,

6

Introduction

education, and the alleviation of poverty. Neoliberalism brings with it a philosophy of human nature that celebrates the intrinsic desirability and the presumed social benefits of self-interest. In this outlook, self-interest motivates people to produce effective solutions to human problems as a means of securing their own advancement. Neoliberal economists argue that, in a freely operating market, perceived social needs will attract creative and innovative solutions from entrepreneurs who are able to personally benefit from filling those needs. When the market is working effectively, these needs will be more quickly addressed through the distributed knowledge and agency of autonomous, self-motivated actors, providing solutions and opportunities where before (according to neoliberal economists) there had been only stagnation. Furthermore, proponents argue that the rational imperatives of competition will help to ameliorate prejudice, because it is inefficient for self-interested businesses to discriminate against potential consumers or employees for reasons of caste, religion, culture, etc. In a sense, neoliberal advocates tend to see market-based policies as a kind of cultural reset switch, a milieu that levels all playing fields and in which pre-existing social structures ought not to operate. One might describe this as a kind of naïve optimism that is omnipresent in neoliberal rhetoric, even while it seems to be rarely manifested in the lived experience of market activity.3 The traditional vexations for neoliberalism’s adherents are trade barriers and state-sponsored social programs, which are seen as interrupting the flow of innovation and reducing people to a condition of dependency. In neoliberal political philosophy, the state is assigned a very specific role in enforcing the rules of competition and maintaining the vigor of individual and corporate property rights. Public agencies, in this outlook, should encourage the efficient growth of trade and competition but should otherwise remain uninvolved in social life. Of course, this neoliberal ideal is usually tempered with at least some degree of tolerance for human rights—a recognition that the viability of extremely repugnant practices (such as enslavement or human organ harvesting) should not be left up to the market. The exact degree to which the state should allow people to abuse, deceive, exploit, manipulate, bully, and conspire against one another in the cause of self-interest is invariably an issue of political contention. In general, though, proponents of neoliberalism seek to devolve social authority away from public bureaucracies and to promote private prerogatives. The most important economic reforms advocated by neoliberal economists include the deregulation of industrial production, removal of national barriers to the free flow of capital, and stringent enforcement of property rights—including intellectual property rights. The latter are particularly significant, because in the neoliberal social vision, a reduction in the ability to gain an economic advantage from new ideas is equivalent to a reduction in the motivation to create new ideas. In the Indian context, neoliberal advocates had to contend with the socio-economic outlooks that had been promoted by nationalist leaders such as M.K. Gandhi and J. Nehru during the anti-colonial movement and in the

Introduction

7

era immediately following India’s independence in 1947. These leaders advocated stringent controls on industrialization and corporate power, as well as an emphasis on the personal qualities of austerity, solidarity, and thrift. The “planned economy” that was promoted after Indian independence was based around the idea of agricultural, industrial, and commercial self-sufficiency, and the state was viewed as having the moral prerogative to alleviate illiteracy and poverty through direct governmental intervention. In its emphasis on egalitarianism, however, the post-independence state restricted certain kinds of material and intellectual commerce through regulation and the disincentives of taxation. India’s founding fathers tended to regard mass media (including radio, television, and film) as volatile tools that had the potential to produce both great social good and great social harm. The post-colonial state was understandably fearful of foreign interference in local markets and took steps to eliminate the foreign extraction of local wealth. Cognizant of the brutality associated with the implementation of capitalist values during the colonial era, and wary of the promotion of these values in Western media, post-independence leaders took a protectionist stance against commercial and ideological intrusion. The central government increased film censorship, kept a close rein on broadcasting, and introduced exorbitant import tariffs and licensing requirements for media technologies. Despite a string of government corruption scandals that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s and increasing concerns about licensed manufacturers using their political clout to maintain monopolies,4 the Indian government retained many aspects of the “planned economy” for several decades. Initial stirrings of a new socioeconomic climate first began to emerge in the 1980s, when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi reduced import duties on some materials, relaxed the licensing requirements for manufacturing, and lowered income taxes on the middle classes. These initial changes were very limited, but they did result in increasing India’s manufacturing capacity for consumer electronics such as televisions and cassette players, making these items more accessible to the Indian masses.5 Broader policy changes followed in 1991, under the auspices of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister (later Prime Minister) Manmohan Singh. Rao and Singh were forced to negotiate what was at that time the largest loan in world history in order to stave off an impending economic crisis that would have undermined the country’s ability to import oil, medicine, and other commodities.6 This financing did not come without stipulations. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), which provided the loan, had long been one of the leading proponents of neoliberal economic philosophies. As a condition of the loan, this organization dictated large-scale policy changes (also known as “structural adjustments”) to the Indian government. These adjustments included, among other things, eliminating manufacturing restrictions, reducing import tariffs, devaluing the Indian currency, privatizing state-owned heavy industries, and opening Indian manufacturing and finance sectors to foreign investment.7

8

Introduction

The IMF expected economic liberalization to generate a flow of foreign capital into India and to initiate a new export-driven economy based on the models of Taiwan, China, and South Korea. As an explicit social project, the objective driving the policy reforms extended beyond reshaping India’s markets and manufacturing processes to increasing consumption and entrepreneurship among the Indian people. However, due to apprehensions deriving from the disastrous outcomes of “structural adjustment” in other parts of the world, as well as ongoing political struggles about Indian social values, some elements of the neoliberal reform program were implemented far more slowly than others. For example, foreign direct investment (FDI) is still heavily regulated in some Indian financial industries (e.g., insurance and banking), and it was only allowed in retail operations starting in the late 2000s.8 Occupancy laws still favor the rights of tenants, and it is often very difficult to disentangle the ownership of any particular parcel of land. As I will show in Chapter 3, whether police enforce existing intellectual property laws is often capricious and sometimes forestalled by well-placed bribes, especially in the context of cultural commodities like music. In other words, the implementation of neoliberal policies remains relatively weak in certain areas, and so it is better to describe India as a country that has taken a “neoliberal trajectory” rather than as being a full-fledged neoliberal state.9 In the context of this neoliberal trajectory, some people have benefited more than others. Scholars such as Barbara Harriss-White (2003) have demonstrated that the neoliberal promises of improving the life of the average Indian were deeply overstated. To the extent that India has adopted neoliberal values, Harriss-White argues that it has followed the path of other partially liberalized economies in generating a managerial class of white-collar workers who have accumulated and consolidated economic and cultural capital.10 That is, despite the assurances of neoliberal economic theorists, the stated goals of poverty alleviation and social development through private initiative have largely failed to materialize. While some observers point to new metropolitan prosperity in India as a sign of neoliberalism’s success, Harriss-White suggests that this newfound prosperity benefited only a small portion of India’s population, which she refers to as “the India of the twelve percent” (2003, 2). The remainder of the country continues to experience a stagnant quality of life and high levels of unemployment, in part due to the declining availability of civic-service jobs that aspiring middle classes might otherwise have been able to acquire (Jeffrey 2010). It is a matter of some debate as to whether this situation is a result of “incomplete liberalization,” or whether it is an intrinsic element of a philosophy in which social equality is given little a priori value. While different outlooks exist, what is certain is that—as is the case with all currently existent, nominally liberalized countries—India cannot be considered a “pure” site of capitalist values. It is, rather, a site of ongoing negotiation between neoliberalism and a variety of other social perspectives, not the least of which are the powerful anti-materialist ideologies that emerged from Gandhi’s

Introduction

9

political philosophy and several religious traditions. Needless to say, most of the business owners and company executives with whom I spoke in Bhopal and Mumbai strongly supported India’s neoliberal trajectory and could not imagine a return to the days of Gandhian austerity. As beneficiaries of the new economic regime, they were fully invested in enjoying and promoting the materialist pleasures of India’s new middle classes. During the course of their business operations, however, they still had to account for the diverse outlooks of regulators, consumers, and critics.

The New Middle Classes The social transformations wrought by neoliberalism have been especially pronounced in the changing values of India’s middle classes. This socioeconomic category was originally formed during the long years of British rule, as Western notions of social rationality and management induced the colonizers to construct a loyal class of educated civil servants to administer their interests in India. After independence, these middle classes largely became the administrators of the new Indian nation-state. Under Gandhian/ Nehruvian principles, the middle classes were expected to find solidarity with the lower classes and to make personal sacrifices for the overall good of the nation. Performing the middle class habitus (Bourdieu 1977) during this era meant concealing any form of overt signs of prosperity—ostentation was simply viewed to be in bad taste for the middle classes. The adoption of neoliberal values turned many of these middle class ideologies on their head, as national, social, and economic discourses gradually embraced consumption as a mechanism for national development. Many middle class individuals celebrated this transformation in values as a liberation from enforced mediocrity. Leela Fernandes (2006) and other scholars have used the term “new middle classes” to explain how this shift in values became the predominant evidence of the success of neoliberal ideologies in India.11 The “old middle classes” endorsed the belief that government employment was a mode of service to the nation and dutifully supported state-administered poverty alleviation and literacy schemes. The new middle classes (and those who aspired to this status) saw private-sector employment as the vibrant path to rightful wealth and prestige. They were likely to focus on English-language skills and job training as a way of enhancing their social status and competing for jobs that had been outsourced from Western countries (e.g., call centers, software development, financial services). With the financial rewards from these new jobs, the new middle classes eagerly embraced consumer electronics, washing machines, mobile phones, and fast food. One of the most important ideological changes marking India’s new middle classes is that adopting certain consumer habits and brand discourses is no longer spoken of as submitting to foreign influences (i.e., “Westernization”), but rather as a sign of India’s growing influence on “global” markets (Mathur 2012).

10

Introduction

Fernandes has noted that scholarship on the new middle classes either tends to glorify this group as talented individuals whose skills have been liberated from the regime of the “planned economy” or else vilifies them as greedy individuals who are single-mindedly focused on acquiring and displaying wealth.12 A more balanced outlook would be to regard the new middle classes as a political category of non-elites who support economic liberalization (Fernandes 2006, xviii). As such, this group includes aspirants to new middle class status as well as more established proponents. In addition, the social values of the new middle classes are far from stable. Tensions still exist between old and new values, and many middle class consumers are skeptical and/or cautious about embracing the tenets of liberalization. Sara Dickey (2012), for example, noted that many of her interlocutors in the south-Indian city of Madurai had adopted a middle-of-the-road strategy. They sought to ease into the new practices of middle class consumption, while still remaining “ordinary” and avoiding extravagances that might draw criticism from the old guard. I encountered a very similar attitude among my interlocutors in Bhopal, many of whom were flirting with the edges of new consumption patterns while still criticizing the unabashed economic displays that they saw in private media shows and new retail outlets. In sum, I would suggest that it is preferable to talk about a new middle class ideal, tendency, or script that individuals related to, rather than “the new middle classes” as a definitive social category. Aspirations and reservations toward the new middle class ideal are important in this book because India’s new organized retailers celebrated this ideal as one of the primary ways to add value to their music products. By creating a spectacular and relatively expensive shopping experience, these retailers offered customers the chance to demonstrate their new-middleclassness. Throughout the book, I will describe the ways that large music retailers greeted new middle class aspirants, the techniques that they used to create a cosmopolitan economic display, and the cultural outcomes of leveraging such values.

Marketplaces After Liberalization: The Birth of “Organized Retail” Indian bazaars (marketplaces) are sites of tremendous complexity, especially in terms of the overlapping performances of caste, religion, class, language, region, and other social affiliations that come into play in organizing the sale of commodities. These bazaars have been the subject of very little ethnographic study.13 Bazaars are concentrated sites for the local production, distribution, and sale of merchandise, and they are among the foremost geographical landmarks for residents of any Indian locality. For some, shopping in a bazaar is an all-day, every-day activity. Time is consumed by moving from one shop to another, comparing wares, haggling over prices, and performative competitions between customers and shop keepers in which

Introduction

11

nearly anything is negotiable in the process of making a deal. According to a variety of newspaper sources, India has 12 million or more retail outlets, the vast majority of which are small, family-owned shops.14 As the standard mode of retailing in India, these neighborhood stores have been labeled, sometimes pejoratively, as kirana stores, “mom-and-pop stores,” or “counter stores”. More recently, the label “unorganized retail” has emerged in the Indian government’s classification schema to designate vendors “whose activity is not regulated by any statute or legal provision, and/or those which do not maintain regular accounts” (Pradhan 2009, 22).15 The shopkeepers who comprise this “unorganized sector” include individual vendors of vegetables, chai (tea), and paan (betel leaf), as well as small-scale services like shoe and tire repair. Also sometimes included in this category, depending on how (or whether) they report their income, are numerous small stores operated by an owner and a few assistants. These stores might sell raw cloth, readymade clothes, jewelry, metal goods, provisions, consumer electronics, and/or pharmaceuticals. In the mid-1990s, the IMF-mandated turn toward neoliberal policies facilitated the emergence of a new kind of Indian retail store. This new sector of “organized retail,” understood to be “a multi-outlet chain of stores or distribution centers run by professional management” (ibid.), was a significant divergence from the conventional family-run business model. As the definition suggests, “organized retail” involves corporate management and relies on economies of scale and large distribution networks across many retail stores. Contrary to most family-owned shops, the in-store and executive managers of such establishments usually hold college degrees in business management. Because the field of organized retailing is still relatively new in India, most of these managers draw directly from Western (particularly American) models to design their operations. Often, these adaptations of international business and marketing practices result in retail spaces that precisely mimic similar outlets in the West. One of the biggest boons to the growth of organized retail in India is also one of the most visible additions to the Indian landscape in the years after liberalization—the modern shopping mall. While the construction of mall-like structures began in India as early as 1985 (with Spencer Plaza in Chennai), it is only in the new millennium that a boom in mall construction led to a massive growth of these organized retail spaces. This boom began in the metropolitan cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru (Bangalore), and Hyderabad and then later spread to smaller urban areas such as Jaipur, Lucknow, Pune, Indore, Bhubaneswar, Mangalore, and Bhopal. As temples of consumption, the centrally air-conditioned spaces of shopping malls contain a spectacular array of branded retail products that would have been considered unnecessary luxuries in earlier incarnations of the Indian economy. Oriented toward middle and upper class shoppers who have increasing disposable incomes and decreasing leisure time, the organized retail outlets in these malls rely on flashy advertising and music to call out to customers and

12

Introduction

lure them inside. If the bazaar is a sensually overwhelming mélange of human diversity and commerce, then the shopping mall might be seen as a sanitized simulacrum of the same retail experience. Malls attenuate the raw sensory dynamics of the bazaar, concealing some aspects of the commercial process while highlighting others. They are carefully designed to encourage conspicuous aspiration toward consumption and to generate a sense of security and plenty, which retailers believe will ultimately result in greater sales. The presence of organized retailing is a significant new trend in India, but institutional and political resistance has limited its influence. Shopping malls and chain stores have to contend with a not-quite-fully neoliberal Indian government that still, to some extent, protects local, small-scale industries. Direct foreign investment in retailing was severely limited until recent years (discussed above), which has made many investors cautious about expanding into India.16 This is the primary reason that the overall market share of organized retailers has remained low, accounting for approximately eight percent of the marketplace in 2014.17 The government’s economic policy is not the only issue of concern to organized retailers. They must also confront the cultural expectations of customers, which often run counter to the Western models presented in the retailmanagement literature. For example, Indian customers often have to be politely dissuaded from attempting to bargain with the clerks in these “fixed-price only” chain stores. For this reason and others, there is a widely held belief among retail managers in India that potential customers—and employees—have to be “trained” in the proper modes of shopping. In other words, the organized retail experience required that customers be enculturated into a new shopping habitus.18 Thus, on both a structural and a practical level, the implementation of neoliberalism in India is still a tenuous, but ongoing, project. Music stores provide an excellent entrée into the operation of the Indian cultures of commerce that I have described in this section. In the so-called “unorganized” sector of music sales, the prevalence of pirated recordings and format-transfer services alongside the sale of “original” recordings can be seen as an outgrowth of long-standing values of local solidarity and creative repurposing. The spread of new media formats and technologies in these venues reveals some of liberalization’s inroads on the media restrictions imposed during the earlier “planned economy.” At the same time, however, the lack of intellectual property enforcement reveals the extent to which neoliberal ideals have been ignored or resisted throughout much of Indian society. The majority of Indians still shops via the mediation of local shopkeepers and still prefers to make music purchases in an informal context. In turning to the “organized sector” it is noteworthy that music chain stores were among the first professionally managed retailers to emerge in the mid-1990s. The retail design and business practices of these flagship stores unselfconsciously emulated the American and British models of Tower Records and Virgin Megastore. Indeed, Indian music chains drew on

Introduction

13

connections to this Western pedigree as part of their marketing strategies. They emphasized Western outlooks and the novelties of size and spectacle to build a “shopping experience” as a brand strategy. As such, they offered middle and upper class Indian consumers—who were ostensibly enculturated into the ideals of solidarity and austerity under earlier economic models—an opportunity to identify with, and conspicuously enjoy, a form of overt consumerism that Westerners have long taken for granted.

The Value(s) of Music Commodities Music is sold in India on the basis of complicated and overlapping ideologies of value that are at times in conflict with one another. The values of any given recording in the context of market exchange are inflected by the operation of multiple systems of value. Some of these values might include, for example, the recording’s categorization by a music label and music store into a particular genre bearing sets of cultural associations (e.g., classical musics oriented toward cultural elites, new film songs oriented toward urban youth), its format or medium (e.g., cassette or CD, original or pirated), the meanings produced for marketing and promotion (e.g., A.R. Rahman’s “newest blockbuster hit”), the actors with which a song is pictured in the context of film or video (e.g., the songs of the actors Aishwarya Rai or Shah Rukh Khan), and/or the perceived quality of the musical content. All of these values are social phenomena layered into economic exchange. Scholars in anthropology and other social sciences have long addressed the issue of how different concepts of value are attached to objects, ideas, and behaviors,19 and the valuation of music recordings is no exception. Economic values cannot be functionally distinguished from the much broader field of social value systems, despite many economists’ claims to the contrary. Throughout this book, I will be describing the overlapping values that come into play in the buying and selling of music. By focusing on the social context of shopping in India, I am emphasizing the analysis of music as it circulates as a commodity, rather than music as social or ritual practice. However, one of the basic assumptions underlying my discussion is that the exchange of music as a commodity is not isolated from broader domains of value. Some thinkers have attempted to create such a distinction. Karl Marx, for example, has argued that human endeavors could be valued in two different ways—with an exchange value based on market relations, or with a use value based on perceived human needs (Marx 1967 [1867], 35–40). While anything might have a use value irrespective of its origin, Marx suggested that exchange value emerged only within particular social and economic circumstances, that is, within capitalist modes of production. Under the capitalist system, producers create commodities for exchange— but these only have an exchange value when they have some kind of use value to someone else, at some particular time, in a relationship mediated

14

Introduction

by a market. Thus, at every moment the social values of things are always already implicated, even when they are commodities. Part of the background that I bring to this study is an awareness of how changing media technologies are strongly linked to social transformations. In the social-science literature, there is a field perhaps best described as “anthropology of media” in which scholars have considered this relationship. These scholars ask whether the spread of particular media technologies are coextensive with the spread of particular social outlooks. One notable argument in the affirmative is Benedict Anderson’s (1991) influential discussion of how the invention of the printing press was necessary for the spread of capitalism and popular nationalism in Europe and beyond.20 Peter Manuel (1993) has made a similar claim about the role of cassette tapes in the Indian music industry. While the spread of cassette technology enabled greater popular participation in Indian music industries, he argues that it also led to drastic changes in the social life of the community: Before the advent of recording, a singer could no more be separated from his song than could a dancer from his dance. Recording technology effected such an alienation, presenting a fixed rendition of a performance as a tangible, salable, entity. Acquiring commodity status, the recording takes on a social life of its own, subject to new dimensions of economics relating to commercial mass-market pressures and incentives. (Manuel 1993, 7) Manuel joins a number of other scholars of popular music in noting that one consequence of “commercial mass market pressures” is that the commodification of music transforms musical content in order to facilitate sales to diverse audiences in ways that are frequently not in alignment with earlier systems of musical-aesthetic value.21 He goes on to suggest that the widespread availability of recordings also led to the valorization of passively consuming music over its active production in participatory performance. Manuel blames the growth of mass media (and especially Indian film song) for the “decline or even extinction of once-vital folk genres” (ibid., 7–8), and he argues that it was a factor in the deterioration of civil society in Indian villages.22 I think that Manuel’s argument overreaches a bit in terms of the onesided destructive capacity he ascribes to music-reproduction technology; however, I do agree that there is a direct connection between changes in market dynamics, changes in musical values, and the broader social milieu. A similar point has been made by Arjun Appadurai (1986), who revises Marx’s notion of commodity value (as essentially distinct from use value) and refers instead to the possibility of a “commodity phase in the social life of a thing” (13). Appadurai notes that objects and behaviors tend to oscillate between commodity status and other roles available within a cultural

Introduction

15

value system (e.g., as gifts, objects of beauty, components of religious practice). Even items produced in a capitalist system with the exclusive intention of being sold have a tendency to escape from their intended market roles and take on alternative social meanings—which then have an evolving effect on their market value. Of course, many of the values that come into play in “the social life of a thing” are those promulgated from seats of power. Some accounts of music industries have tended to focus on top-down descriptions of industry values and marketing practices, usually as a way to denounce the dominance of industry in social life and the pernicious consequences of capitalism. Many scholars have noted that the values of the capitalist system— especially the rewards it assigns to the efficient production and mass distribution of homogenous products—have had an effect on the kinds of music that are produced and the various social uses of that music.23 At the same time, however, the power of organized capital is not the only source of social value, and during the course of a music recording’s social trajectory its significance can be continually transformed as it moves from site to site—for example, from its use in promoting a film, to its role in filling the shelves of an organized retail store, to its value as part of a personal music collection, to its illicit distribution in the “unorganized” sector, to its use as background music in selling other products, to its significant role in religious ritual, to its adoption by a local subculture, to its reproduction by a live wedding band, and so on. Accounts that focus too strongly on the top-down operation of social power tend to overlook how market values emerge as a kind of “interactional achievement” in precisely the same way that participants in a discussion negotiate the potential meanings of an utterance (Silverstein 2004). Top-down accounts also tend to avoid discussing the extent of social disagreement that exists about the value-status of a particular object or behavior at any given moment, as well as the potential for established values to be reframed and subverted to suit different social contexts or ideologies (Hebdige 1979; Coombe 1998). Analyzing the exchange of music recordings brings these broader cultural dynamics to the foreground. In noting that music commodities have received a great deal of attention from scholars in recent years, the historian David Suisman (2009) argues that we need to interrogate how music is different from other kinds of commodities. While suggesting that music is, in many ways, just like any other commodity, Suisman argues that the distinctive characteristic of music as a commodity resides in the value of aural experience, that is, in the sound itself (9–11). While I largely agree with his perspective on aurality’s uniqueness, I take a slightly different approach to the differences between music and other commodities. I would suggest that while the exchange of more prosaic items (bars of soap, for example), is also mediated by complex and conflicting webs of social value,24 music has always retained a special affective status in the minds of producers and consumers alike. People tend to be more conscious of the broader social basis of music’s exchange value, recognizing that what they are purchasing is a

16

Introduction

reflection of themselves and their social commitments. I have found that this attitude of musical exceptionalism is pervasive among music sellers in both the United States and India. Those whom I have interviewed both formally and informally have expressed a consistent belief that by recommending and selling music recordings, they were doing something transcendent, something greater than selling an “ordinary” commodity like grain, soap, clothes, or electronic goods. Moreover, in the cassette era, and now the digital era, the ability to reproduce music recordings has become possible for almost everyone. Due to the rise of piracy and digital exchange, and despite rigorous efforts at moral coaching, lobbying, legislation, and enforcement, the reification of ownership rights over a recording has become tenuous at best. Music is pervasively available in the world today, and attempts by copyright owners to create an atmosphere of “artificial scarcity” (Sterne 2012) have profoundly failed. It is therefore becoming increasingly clear that what is being exchanged in the buying and selling of music recordings is nothing other than social values—among other things, customers are paying for the recognition of certain kinds of legitimacy of access, social quality, and virtue. In examining the practices of music shopping, we can see how different concepts of value are affixed to music recordings as they circulate. In music shops, we can witness the confluence of social taste-makers, corporate marketing discourses, local traditions, and individual agency as shopkeepers and customers negotiate overlapping values of music. My approach to this matrix of musical value and meaning is greatly indebted to David Graeber’s (2001) exegesis on anthropological theories of value. Graeber reviewed three theoretical approaches: sociological, economic, and structural linguistic. He attempted to synthesize these fields into a unified outlook with a broad explanatory power to clarify the diverse values present in both market and non-market societies. In a more specific vein, I also draw from Stephen Feld’s (1994) discussion of how the ever-changing interpretation of music’s significance is grounded in extra-musical experiences, associations, and discussions that provide the social framing mechanism for individual listening experiences. Yet it is important to acknowledge from the outset that these values are contingent and always subject to being reframed. This was a key site of anxiety for my interlocutors in the Indian music industry, along with the “crisis of proliferation” described by Attali (1985), that is, the stockpiling of time on music recordings, such that no individual is able to listen to the entirety of his or her own collection.

Framing the Indian Music Industry It is important to acknowledge that defining the scope and activities of a “music industry” can be somewhat tricky. Beyond the production and distribution of music recordings, there are many other institutions that are also, in whole or in part, aspects of any music industry and thus are important institutions in the production of musical value. Scholarly understanding of

Introduction

17

what is included in a music industry has evolved over time, as the industry itself has also evolved and new technologies have become relevant to the discussion. In general, however, we can define the music industry as the collection of institutions and practices that transform music into a commodity and exploit the economic value of that commodity on a massive scale.25 Scholars now tend to view the production of music recordings as just one component of industries that also specialize in the manufacturing and selling of reproduction hardware, branded merchandise, sheet music, performance experiences, and so forth. We also recognize that music industries have become deeply integrated with television, radio, film, and a variety of other media industries that make use of music as a way of generating revenue. Music is also frequently employed to facilitate the sale of completely unrelated commodities (e.g., diamonds, cars, restaurants, insurance), and through the use of music in advertising, specific songs or musical genres can become associated with these unrelated products.26 In the Indian context, the synergy between commercial music and commercial film is particularly notable, as soundtracks make up as much as 70 percent of the music sold in Indian stores. As I have noted elsewhere (Beaster-Jones 2009, 2015), music has long been a visible and integral part of the Indian film experience, as has the merchandising of film soundtracks, which has historically relied on associations with the actors who lip sync to the songs. These identifications with film stars and memorable cinematic moments are often more important to soundtrack customers than the “intrinsic quality” of the music they are buying. Thus, many of the discourses and values that accompany music recordings are produced by and for different commercial industries, each having different sets of interests and motivations. The meanings produced by marketing executives from these diverse industries overlap with the meanings produced by artists and their audiences, as well as those derived from the outlooks of broadcasters and local retailers. In broader historical contexts, hit parades on radio and television networks, often in the form of a weekly countdown show, have also long helped to establish the market synergy of hit production in the Indian industry, even as they inscribe various sets of meanings in music recordings. For example, the Binaca Geet Mala broadcast by Radio Ceylon, a 1950s-’60s hit parade, has received a lot of attention for its influence on the trajectory of Hindi film song (Arnold 1991; Lelyveld 1994; Morcom 2007). In addition to providing a straightforward way to measure the popularity and cultural relevance of songs in their contemporary moment, this hit parade likewise reinforced the hegemony of Hindi-language songs in India, while those in Tamil, Telugu, and other languages were relegated to the status of “regional” music (see Chapter 5). Insofar as the show used sales reports from prominent music stores and audience letters as the primary metrics used to establish song rankings, the emphasis the Radio Ceylon broadcasters placed on highly ranked songs reflected back to further reinforce their popularity in music stores. The Radio Ceylon broadcast rankings thus came to be used

18

Introduction

throughout the Indian music industry to streamline production and to avoid shortages or overstocking in stores (Punathambekar 2010, 194–95). Television hit parades following the emergence of the Star Network in India after 1991 similarly reinforced the popularity, marketing, and value narratives in and for film music and the emergent genres at the time.27 These television shows provided another benchmark to measure the relative success of particular recordings in the market, if not by sales, then by other proprietary criteria that measured (and generated) social influence. Broadcasters’ power in the industry also can be seen in the extent to which retail music sales came to be correlated with a song’s television and radio presence. If a song does not have a well-produced music video with regular airplay on music television and commercial radio, retailers might interpret this as an indication that either the music label lacks confidence in the product, or the producer lacks the resources to properly market the product. Accordingly, merchandising managers whom I interviewed at retail chain stores said that they would flatly refuse to stock albums that did not have a prominent marketing campaign to accompany them. When you walk into a Music Metropolis flagship store, some of the very first things that catch your eye are the inevitable television screens (some flagship stores boasted more than 30), which are usually playing one of the most-promoted music videos or film clips of the moment. The employees in these stores often told me that they used the televisions to sell music, sometimes by simply pointing up at the screen and asking, “Is that the song you’re looking for?” In this complex media environment, different industry players have different agendas that come into play in determining the kinds of music that are produced, the way that music is broadcast and distributed, and the social values and marketing campaigns that are attached to various musical products. When a music recording arrives in the shop of a local retailer, the store owner confronts choices about which of these meanings to embrace or manipulate and which to ignore. Likewise, customers arrive in music stores already cognizant of the different value-narratives that circulate along with the music, and they too make personal decisions about which of these narratives to embrace. In the context of Indian film soundtracks, for example, customers have likely encountered one or more of the narratives that accompanied the film from media representations of the songs or the general buzz that derives from big-budget film productions. If they have not, then music store owners and staff have every opportunity to reproduce or subvert these narratives in order to sell the product to customers. When customers arrive in music stores, they are already aware of many of these different meanings and values attached to particular recordings. Almost all of the music store owners whom I interviewed told me that they paid careful attention to the media campaigns associated with recordings, whether they involved a recent hit film, a newly trendy musician, or the use of the music in an advertising campaign in an unrelated industry. This attentiveness is necessary for store owners to appear knowledgeable about

Introduction

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upcoming albums. It also allows them to anticipate customer demand and organize their own advertising so that they do not lose customers to other stores. Because the multiple, overlapping meanings associated with recordings are frequently in a state of flux, staying current on these meanings allows retailers to establish a central position in the economy of values. It also provides them with opportunities to creatively manipulate these values in order to sell more music.

Measuring the Recording Industry In addition to the complexities involved in defining the “music industry” due to the cross-media commodification of music, it is also important to note that there are difficulties inherent in even measuring the relative success of recording companies, much less the industry as a whole. There is very little objective data on the market shares and revenues of various Indian music companies, especially as most of the market research is only conducted at the behest of interested parties, using metrics that are regarded as trade secrets. The most straightforward way to discuss the market activities of Indian record labels is by making use of industry self-representations in trade bulletins, the most central of which is the FICCI-KPMG Media and Entertainment Industry Report. This publication, which comes replete with stock photos, glamorous film stills, and quotations from industry leaders, is a joint effort of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce (FICCI) and the international KPMG market-research firm. Oriented toward potential investors and industry insiders, the report provides details on the past and projected revenues of various media industries, while illustrating market growth and emerging trends. FICCI-KPMG reports from 2005–’15 evince several notable themes. Perhaps the most significant is the static-to-declining revenues of the Indian recording industry, which stand in stark contrast to the reliable 10 to 30 percent annual growth of other media industries such as television and film. The brochure reports a modest increase in music revenues derived from television and radio royalties, digital sales, subscription services, and mobile phone apps, but these minor gains are overshadowed by the stagnation then rapid decline in sales of physical media. The entirety of music revenues was miniscule when compared to other media. In 2014, for example, sales of music recordings in India reportedly earned ₹9.8 billion (approximately U.S. $155 million, at the average 2014 exchange rate of ₹63/dollar), which is less than one-tenth the size of film revenues, and one-fiftieth the size of television revenues.28 In such reporting, the prospects of the music industry do indeed look grim. However, while these are significant findings, the representation of India’s music revenues in the FICCI-KPMG report do not account for the full scope of the industry. In particular, the report fails to acknowledge that hit soundtracks are absolutely essential to the financial success of Indian films. Because the film companies in turn spend a significant portion of their

20

Introduction

budgets employing musicians and producing soundtracks and music videos, a large segment of the measured film revenues should probably be considered a de facto extension of the music industry. There are even greater risks of potential misrepresentation that must be kept in mind when discussing industry self-reporting. The FICCI-KPMG publication has a specific function: providing a stable reference point for investors and executives in media industries. However, due to the lack of transparency within the music industry, and the role of self-interest in selfreporting, record company executives whom I interviewed readily acknowledged that any revenue reporting is a kind of collective fiction grounded in the negotiation of differing biases. The opacity of the metrics used in the report is profound, to the extent that some central findings are sourced only as a product of “Industry Discussions” (e.g., KMPG-FICCI Indian Media Industry 2012, 117). The number of recordings sold by most distributors is reported only anecdotally and unofficially. Some music industry executives suggested that this lax data collection is a result of the (reportedly) small size of the industry, which makes it uneconomical for companies to pay for more rigorous analyses. Other executives whom I interviewed speculated that there might be a number of less innocuous reasons for the obfuscation. For example, one music company head told me in 2002 that distributors often have strong incentives to manipulate the financial value of their companies—to report lower earnings in order to avoid taxes, or report higher earnings if the company is looking for outside investment. Similarly, distributors might also want to under-report their earnings as a way of minimizing the financial demands of producers or royalty payments to musicians (Joshi 1988). There have also been widespread allegations that financing in the film industry is permeated with black-market money—a factor that would certainly help to explain the lack of rigor in revenue reporting within the music industry (Prasad 1998; Ganti 2012). The role of industry self-reporting extends beyond the negotiations of local executives and investors. These reports are central in communicating the Indian “business climate” to a variety of international audiences. The reports become data points not only for international marketers, but also for international policy-making entities such as the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that many aspects of industry self-reporting could be influenced by a desire to conform to official discourses about the trajectory and needs of Indian business. For example, the Indian Music Industry (IMI) trade group, which helps supply some of the statistics used in the FICCI-KPMG report, has long held that pirated recordings comprise around 40 percent of Indian music sales. But in interviews that I conducted with music-company executives, reporters, and store owners, I noticed that the mention of these IMI figures induced a sense of discomfort, with many of my interlocutors becoming very careful in framing their responses. Music industry executives acknowledge the IMI as a central representative of industry interests, and most large music companies are members

Introduction

21

of the organization. But few of executives believed that the “official” statistics produced by the IMI were even remotely accurate. The majority of my interlocutors were willing to admit—in private—that the official music piracy rate of 40 percent was wildly optimistic. One executive insisted that the “real” piracy rate must be at least 80 percent in cities and close to 100 percent in smaller villages. Because music companies remain secretive about their revenue metrics, and individuals who buy and sell pirated music are somewhat reluctant to be counted, the actual rate of piracy and its precise effect on the market remains a matter of speculation. This does not prevent the “official” statistics from generating a kind of social authenticity through repetition and collective use, and it does not mean that these industry numbers have nothing to tell us. However, it does mean that such self-reporting must be considered with care when it bumps up against investigative experience. Beyond conceptualizing the waning music industry, it is important to put these narratives into broader historical perspective, especially as changing formats and disruptive technologies transformed the products, distribution mechanisms, and values associated with music recordings. Indeed, the values accrued by recordings cannot be separated from the media of their distribution and the social capital gained through ownership.

Research Methods This book is based on a total of 14 months of field research in India, conducted between 2002 and 2005, as well as additional observations made in 2010, 2013, 2014, and 2015. I focused my attention on two kinds of retail establishments: family-run stores in the cities of Bhopal and Mumbai and Music Metropolis chain stores in Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur, Lucknow, Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bangalore. My primary research location for family-run shops, Bhopal, is the capital of the central-Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. It was made infamous in the international media as the site of the Union Carbide industrial disaster of 1984, in which a chemical gas leak killed more than 3,000 residents and permanently injured many more.29 Separated by two lakes into the predominantly Muslim “old city” in the north and the largely Hindu “new city” in the south, Bhopal is home to a proportionally large share of government workers and civil servants. The socio-economic and educational demographics are decidedly middle class. At the time of my research, Bhopal’s central markets included a few national retail apparel chains, but the city could not boast of music chain stores or any other organized retail or fast-food outlets. This lack of chain stores was partially due to a perception of Bhopal (and Madhya Pradesh more generally) as being part of the Hindu “cow belt,” a way of suggesting the region’s lack of urban development and cultural provinciality vis à vis other Indian cities. By 2010, however, central Bhopal was punctuated by a major self-contained shopping mall that draws visitors from the entire region, and other shopping malls have followed in its wake.

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Introduction

Unlike Mumbai or the nearby Indore, Bhopal did not have private commercial radio stations in the early 2000s; the public All India Radio (AIR) stations were the staple for many Bhopalis. As it is the state capital, Bhopal is the center for satellite television broadcasting in the region. Two local cable television networks were vying for supremacy during the time of my principle research, although this later became a moot point when the Bhaskar TV network (part of the Dainik Bhaskar Hindi media conglomerate) entered the city in force.30 Most of India’s diverse satellite channels were available in Bhopal, and these acted as the primary locus of corporate music and film promotion. Internet cafes appeared—and often disappeared—at a rapid pace in the city, but home broadband Internet connections were still largely unavailable until after 2005, and 3G mobile phone networks were still relatively novel in 2010 but much more common by 2013. After mapping the local social geography, I regularly visited four music stores in different parts of Bhopal. The northernmost one, located in the “old city,” was called Geet Jagah (Song Spot). The owner, Salman, focused on creating compilation cassettes of Hindi film songs and distributing recordings of local muśāyrā (Urdu poetry recitals) and Muslim religious sermons. He also produced tapes for political and commercial advertising. A second shop, Siddharth’s Music Store, was located in one of Bhopal’s central markets. It had originally opened in the early 1980s, and after being closed for some years it had been revived in the new millennium by the original owner’s son. Siddharth’s was known as a destination for aṅgrezī (English) music, and it provided custom MP3 discs and video CDs. My third regular stop was Sangeet Mahal (Music Palace), located in a newer market in eastern Bhopal. The owner, Amit, specialized in selling Hindi film music cassettes. He also produced cassettes for political parties and rented out CDs, VCDs, and DVDs. Finally, in a market in southern Bhopal, Kuldeep’s Intersection Music Store specialized in selling new Hindi film songs, English music, and remixes, as well as appliances and audio-video hardware. It is noteworthy that in 2015, only Amit’s shop remains open: it is one of the very few stores in the city that does not entirely subsist on pirated music sales. Beyond these four primary locations, I conducted informal interviews with owners and assistants at a variety of other Bhopali shops that sold or rented music recordings. These spaces included small market stalls, kiosks, bookstores, and gift stores. My interaction with these individuals tended to be single interviews rather than sustained ethnographic engagements— although I usually noted what sorts of customers were coming in at the time, the items they asked for, and the variety of merchandise available in the store. To aid in my research, I hired three Bhopali assistants. These assistants helped, among other things, with the transcription and translation of Hindi film songs and ghazals (Urdu poetry set to song), as well as interviews that I had conducted in Hindi and translating a survey instrument. Each of these assistants became a good friend and contributed an extra level of depth to this research. Conversations that I had with my assistants and their family

Introduction

23

members frequently made the practices that I was observing on the streets less opaque. Two other young men introduced me to parts of Bhopal that I would not otherwise have experienced, as well as a portion of the natural beauty of central Madhya Pradesh. Although we gathered a great deal of information that does not appear in this book, all of these experiences subtly informed the outlooks and analyses that I discuss here. Another city that I spent a great deal of time in was Mumbai (formerly Bombay). This port city, created by and for British colonialism, is an intensely variegated urban space filled with immigrants from all over the Indian nation and the world.31 The most populous city in India and the primary media distribution center for the Western part of the country, Mumbai is the center for the production of Hindi-language film, music, television, and radio. It was the site of the corporate headquarters of the Music Metropolis conglomerate, and indeed, nearly all Indian media companies have at least some degree of corporate presence in the city. Mumbai is, in most accounts, the center of the Indian music industry. In addition to a large number of satellite television channels, Mumbai at the time of my research boasted six commercial radio stations, resulting in some of the first diversification of radio programming in India. In Mumbai, I interviewed executives working in many of India’s major music companies, as well as music journalists and executives of trade organizations such as the Indian Music Industry (IMI), Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS), and Phonographic Performance, Ltd. (PPL). I visited many of the established music stores in this city, as well as the central areas of informal music distribution in the street markets of south and central Mumbai. Most of my ethnographic work was concentrated in the Fort District of southern Mumbai, where I visited the Rhythm House store as well as a Music Metropolis flagship store. A bona fide institution in Mumbai, Rhythm House is perhaps the most famous music store in all of India. In Rhythm House, I passed many hours observing the shopping activities of customers, interacting with them on occasion, discreetly listening in on customer discussions with the staff, and engaging the staff directly with questions about merchandising, ordering, and customer dynamics. I also took in the ambiance of the store, noted the music that was played, and observed the physical movements of the customers and staff. I took much the same approach to ethnographic research in the Music Metropolis flagship store in the Fort district, with some necessary adjustments for the corporate environment. To gain a broader perspective on the spread of music chains, in April, May, and June of 2005 I undertook a tour of Music Metropolis stores in nine different Indian cities (listed at the start of this section). During this national tour, I spent several days in each city interviewing store managers as well as regional managers in the case of Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, and Chennai. I also casually conversed with the chain’s customer service agents and carefully photographed and videotaped these stores for later spatial analysis. The dynamics of this field research were somewhat different from

24

Introduction

my experiences in family-owned stores. Due to the corporate nature of the stores’ ownership, my meetings with managers had to be arranged beforehand, and they proceeded with a much greater formality. The interviews were semi-structured, and the topics ranged from the background of the employees in the store to what kinds of music they stocked and who they perceived their customers to be. In several cases Music Metropolis managers took me to other nearby stores that sold music and commented on the stock, the display space, and, at times, the quality of the competition. The head of Music Metropolis’ Retail Division granted me permission to carefully document the layout of each chain store I visited with photography and videography and to linger in the stores for extended periods in order to conduct my ethnographic observations. I was asked to notify the senior operations manager of each store before my arrival so that the staff could be forewarned of my activities, and it was also suggested that I should not interact directly with the store customers as it might negatively affect their shopping experience. Visiting 26 Music Metropolis stores in a period of two months gave me a more or less synchronic perspective on the day-to-day operations of the chain and provided an opportunity to understand the ways that local practices were compliant—or at odds—with the national brand ideology. I conducted follow-up interviews with former Music Metropolis employees in 2010, 2013, and 2015 and have remained in contact with many of these people through e-mail and on Facebook.

Methodological Limitations There are certain practical limits to conducting ethnographic observations in commercial spaces. Some music store owners seemed uncomfortable with my presence in their stores for extended periods of time. Although they were willing to chat with me during their slow periods (usually in the late mornings and early afternoons), they understandably felt that my presence was an inconvenience to both themselves and their customers during the busier moments of selling. At other times, especially in the holiday season (November to January), some stores became too crowded for comfortable movement, and it was next to impossible to take notes or follow much of the shopping activity. However, all of the store owners were amiable toward my documentation of their selling space with photography and video during the slower business periods. Although it would have been useful to have detailed sales information for the music stores that I investigated, this turned out to be impossible. The family-run stores kept few records of their sales, noting at most how many recordings from each music label had been sold and on occasion logging special customer requests. However, I was able to inventory three of the four stores I visited with in Bhopal. This allowed me to gain a sense of the size of their collections and the relative proportions of music genres. The organized chain stores that I investigated did keep computerized records of sales, stock,

Introduction

25

and customer demographics, but these records were considered confidential and proprietary information. The Music Metropolis managers whom I interviewed were generally cognizant of the revenues that their store generated and the broad genre breakdown of these sales, but such data were not exact and will not be directly reported here. My level of interaction with customers varied considerably among different cities and individual stores. As I noted earlier, I was asked by the corporate management of Music Metropolis to avoid direct contact with customers altogether. However, I received a very different mandate from the owner of Rhythm House in Mumbai, who perceived my work as potentially useful market research and actively encouraged my interaction with customers. As a result, I was able to conduct more than 100 short interviews with Rhythm House customers, focusing on their tastes and interests. I was also able to have numerous conversations with customers at family-owned shops in Bhopal. Due to the intimate nature of the family-run stores, the shopkeepers mediated nearly all of my interactions with customers. Most of the customers with whom I interacted were regulars who were personally known to the owners. In these instances, it was not uncommon for the shop owners to call on me as a source of expertise on English-language music genres. An additional factor that shaped my research in Bhopal was that I sometimes arrived at the music stores with a local, male research assistant. This was in many ways a valuable part of the research—while my presence as an obvious outsider was universally noted, my research assistant was more easily able to fit in, and he and I would frequently compare notes after our store visits. My assistants were invaluable in identifying customer demographics that I might have overlooked and in observing customers’ discussions and purchases. At the same time, the presence of local research assistants complicated my relationship with a couple of the music stores owners in interesting ways. One music store owner was openly dismissive of my research assistants on the basis of their middle class fashions and manners of speaking. In another instance, the “transformation” of a regular customer to research assistant led to the transference of suspicion about my motives into enmity toward my assistant. Fortunately, this store owner’s perspective shifted once he came to know me over several years, and he became more open about sharing with my assistant and me some of the details of his business practices that might otherwise have been difficult to document.

Structure of the Book In the first part of this book, I discuss the history and trajectory of the Indian music industry in the first decade of the 2000s. In Chapter 2, I examine music stores in the historical context of the Indian music industry, then I  focus upon the deep recession that the recording industry was experiencing during the time of my fieldwork. In addition to describing the various explanations that my interlocutors offered for the industry decline, I examine narratives

26

Introduction

of piracy in detail. I also look at how different record labels responded to these changes in the music market after the turn of the millennium, namely, their relative emphases on prestige and innovation narratives. I conclude with a discussion of the Rhythm House store in order to illustrate the historical trajectory of music retailing in India. I then turn to my ethnographic data on the operation of values in specific Indian retail stores. Drawing on the background information given in the first part of the book, I describe how different retailers drew on different sources of value in order to sell music. I begin Chapter 3 with an ethnographic description of family-run music stores in Bhopal, explaining the perspectives and activities of these shopkeepers and their customers. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to vignettes that demonstrate the multifarious modes of sociability that come into play during the exchange and reproduction of music recordings in the context of these local marketplaces. In analyzing these observations, I show that the economic values of both “original” and pirated recordings are unstable and strongly dependent upon broader forms of social value. I then turn to Music Metropolis in Chapter 4 to examine the ways in which this organized retailer reached out to customers. I describe the operation of brand discourses and image-promotion in Music Metropolis stores, with particular attention to the discourse of “high-value customers” within the Music Metropolis chain and the ways in which the store was designed to attract this group. I examine how brand discourses relate to in-store events organized by the retailer (e.g., workshops, promotions, celebrity appearances). I also discuss some of the obstacles encountered by Music Metropolis executives in trying to apply international retail models and establishing their brand image. In Chapter 5, I analyze how music genres are conceptually organized and spatially arranged in Indian music stores. By examining different organizational logics in different stores, it is possible to see how local socialclassification schemas are negotiated during the activity of music exchange. The physical arrangement of music (and the positioning of shopkeepers) is a means of communicating ideas about musical values and shaping customer experiences of the music. I go on to describe the justifications for particular music-ordering strategies and the prioritization of values used by store managers in their stocking decisions. Moving into Chapter 6, I shift the focus of discussion from physical merchandise to store employees and their interactions with customers. I examine some specific issues of gender and brand identity (in particular, the rationales for why there were so few women involved in selling music). I then look at the ways in which the low social status of retail labor created contradictions and hiring difficulties for stores that wanted to promote a high-value experience. The chapter goes on to discuss the emergent category of “customer service” in India and the connection of retail sales of music as a kind of “affective labor.” The chapter closes with a critical examination of the affective discourses surrounding music recordings and how executives invoked “passion” as a necessary component of selling music.

Introduction

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Chapter 7 is the conclusion of the book, in which I summarize the ways shop owners and customers negotiated the matrix of social valuation as the music recordings market continued into the era of digital distribution. I return to my main argument about the role of social values in economic transactions, while reviewing the specific evidence of how these values are evolving in India. I suggest that the new values that have emerged around music during India’s recent social and economic transformations might soon make the music store institution obsolete, as the Indian music industry increasingly focuses upon monetizing music commodities through intellectual property regimes.

Notes 1. Throughout this book I use pseudonyms for retail shop owners such as “Kuldeep” in order to protect their anonymity. In addition, because some of them were involved in activities that were nominally illegal, I have left out certain details about their stores and the markets in which they were located. “Music Metropolis” itself is a pseudonym for a major Indian music chain store. During my research I was able to obtain permission from the owners of this chain to use the store’s real name. However, after my research was conducted, the brand was sold to a new owner; thus, I have changed the name of the store in this book to reflect this change in ownership. 2. For example, see Hannerz 1989; Featherstone 1994; Appadurai 1996; and Mazarella 2003. 3. See Friedman and Friedman 1980; Friedman 1999; and Harvey 2005. 4. See Tharoor 1997 and Das 2000 for examples. Arvind Rajagopal (2011) provides a useful look at how many of the reforms were actually framed by policies that emerged in the late 1970s. 5. See Mankekar 1999; Manuel 1993; and Sundaram 2010. 6. In 1991 the Indian government had to respond to a foreign exchange reserve crisis, rising oil prices due to the first Iraq War, a decline in remittances from Indians living abroad, and the end of financial aid from the Soviet Union (see Tharoor 1997; Byres 1998; Ghosh 1998; Das 2000; Bardhan 2001; and Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2002). 7. For more details on the IMF requirements, see Das 2000 and Tharoor 1997. 8. In 2011, the Indian government allowed multinational single-brand retailers such as Levi’s and Nike to have a 100 percent stake in Indian subsidiaries; multi-brand retailers such as Walmart and Tesco were allowed a 51 percent stake. However, these regulations only applied in cities with a population of one million or more—foreign retailers were still restricted from cities with a smaller population (“The supermarket’s last frontier,” www.economist.com/ node/21541017, accessed Nov. 11, 2012). 9. See Harriss-White 2003; Harriss-White and Sinha 2007; Ruparelia, et al. 2011; and Gupta and Sivaramakrishnan 2011 for more detail on the Indian neoliberal trajectory and some of its consequences. 10. See Ortner 2003 for a discussion of the rise of this “professional managerial class” in the United States. 11. See Mankekar 1999; Liechty 2003; Mazzarella 2003; Fernandes 2006; Brosius 2010; Rajagopal 2011; and Dickey 2012.

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12. For a discussion of the “liberation” of the middle classes see Tharoor 1997 and Das 2000. For a discussion of conspicuous consumption and the new middle classes, see Liechty 2003; Fernandes 2006; Oza 2006; Varma 2007; and Chowdhury 2011. 13. Kajri Jain (2007) has published a valuable investigation of printed artworks in Indian bazaars, and Gandhi (2011) has published a short article on the Meena Bazaar in Old Delhi. But beyond this, one has to look at ethnographic research of Indians abroad to get much insight into their business practices. For example, see Miller (1997) on Indian businesses in Trinidad and Vora (2011) on Indian gold traders in Dubai. 14. Without providing insight into how this number was generated, this 12 million number became a social fact in and through political discourse. It was frequently cited in debates for and against liberalizing regulations for foreign direct investment in the 2010s which, among other things, would enable Walmart and other “big box” department stores to expand into India to compete with local outlets. The political debates reprised many of the early debates on Indian liberalization, such as the question of whether foreign competition will yield greater market efficiencies or whether it will simply destroy millions of family-owned businesses. See “FDI in Retail: Why All the Political Opposition and Rhetoric?” http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-12-25/news/30556710_1_ kirana-stores-kirana-shops-hypermarkets, accessed 11/18/2012; “FDI in Retail: Why All the Political Opposition and Rhetoric?” http://www.thehindu.com/ opinion/op-ed/article3897906.ece, accessed 11/18/2012; Bajaj (2012) “India’s Embrace of Foreign Retailers” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/business/ global/younger-indians-eager-to-embrace-foreign-big-box-stores-and-malls. html, accessed 11/18/2012. 15. This definition of the “unorganized sector” overlaps with Harriss-White (2003) and Harriss-White and Sinha’s (2007) concept of the “informal economy.” 16. “The Supermarket’s Last Frontier,” www.economist.com/node/21541017, accessed 11/11/2012. 17. KPMG report, “Indian Retail: The Next Growth Story,” https://www.kpmg. com/IN/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Documents/BBG-Retail.pdf, accessed 11/4/2015. 18. See also McGuire’s (2011) discussion of how Indian call-center workers were “trained” into appropriately Western-style bodily praxis. 19. For example, see Mauss 1990; Kluckholn 1956; Weiner 1992; Appadurai 1986; Graeber 2001; and Van Binsbergen and Geschiere 2005. 20. See also Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, et al. 2002 and Larkin 2004. 21. See also Horkheimer, Adorno, et al. 1973; Middleton 1990; Frith 1996; and Negus 1992, 1999. 22. Manuel 1993. 23. For example, Horkheimer, Adorno et al. 1973; Adorno 1991; Middleton 1990; Carroll 1998; Frith 1996; and Negus 1992, 1999. 24. See Burke 1996 on the values attributed to soap in (post-)colonial Africa. 25. The literature on the production and distribution of music commodities is quite large. For a sample, see Middleton 1990; Negus 1992, 1999; Taylor 2007; and Hesmondhalgh 2012. 26. For example, see Cook 1994 and Beaster-Jones 2011 for discussions of the use of music in television advertisements.

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27. See Mitra 1993; Saksena 1996; Shah 1997; Mankekar 1999; Page and Crawley 2001 on the rise of satellite television and its consequences in the 1990s. Juluri (2004) provides a useful account of the rise of music television in the late 1990s. 28. The FICCI-KMPG Indian Media Industry 2015 reports gross film revenues at ₹126.4 billion (approximately $2 billion in 2014), gross television revenues at ₹474.9 billion (approximately $7.6 billion in 2014) (https://www.kpmg.com/ IN/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Documents/FICCI-KPMG_2015. pdf, accessed 11/4/2015). 29. It is worth noting that the Bhopal tragedy was cited as a reason against liberalizing manufacturing regulations for foreign companies in India. For accounts of this horrific moment in Bhopali history, see Fortun 2001 and Lapierre and Moro 2001. 30. See Jeffrey 2000 on the history of the Dainik Bhaskar media empire. 31. Scholars have taken a variety of approaches to analyzing this cosmopolitan global city, including Seabrook 1987; Breckenridge et al. 1995; Appadurai 2000; Mazzarella 2003; Pinto and Fernandes 2003; Mehta 2004; Masselos and Fernandes 2009; and Fernandes 2013.

2

Prestige and Innovation in the Indian Music Industry

I began the Mumbai component of my music store research in earnest in September 2004 at Rhythm House. Located in the Kala Ghoda (“black horse”) district, Rhythm House had long been an important landmark in South Mumbai and the first store that came to many Mumbaikers’ minds when they think of local music stores. The store was a venerable institution in the city and had long attracted a large celebrity clientele, ranging from famous musicians such as Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar; music directors such as Anil Biswas, C. Ramchandra, and A.R. Rahman; and film actors such as Shammi Kapoor and Nargis. It was only a couple of months before I was to have my first celebrity sighting in the store. As I watched customers shopping from what would become my usual place in the northeast corner of the store that afforded the best view of the racks, a store clerk sidled up to me and noted in a low voice that Mumtaz, a famous actress of 1970s Hindi cinema, had arrived. There was no fanfare to announce her entrance, and she was largely left alone; yet her presence was quietly acknowledged by store employees who had seen her—and other celebrities before her— shopping for music. Like workers in other service industries who often catered to well-known clientele in Mumbai, Rhythm House’s workers had undoubtedly been coached in the proper response to celebrities: be polite and respectful, but do not behave like fans. Customers expected excellent customer service and music recommendations by knowledgeable store clerks in this similarly famous institution. As such, Rhythm House very much exemplified the notion of “class,” in several senses of the word. As it is a store that had been in operation for more than 80 years, the act of shopping at Rhythm House conferred a certain sense of prestige, the same kind of prestige that Music Metropolis attempted to manufacture as a component of its brand strategy (see Chapter 4). Music purchased at Rhythm House retained a special affective value in the customers’ minds, just as a purchase in any celebrated institution generates a mnemonic value that becomes affixed to certain products. As a historical presence in South Mumbai, Rhythm House navigated the Indian music industry’s long history, through the landmark (and overlapping) technological and musical innovations, as well as its artists, genres, and recording formats: 78 rpm records to LPs to cassettes to CDs; Anil Biswas to R.D. Burman to

Prestige and Innovation in the Indian Music Industry

31

Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy; big band jazz to ghazal to Indipop. As an archetype of Indian music retailing, Rhythm House had been able to succeed through reciprocal acknowledgment of its customers’ desires and adapting the store to serve these desires in ways that appear seamless. Nevertheless, Rhythm House, like the entire Indian music industry, was experiencing a substantial decline in revenues in the early to mid-2000s, a condition that continued throughout the rest of the decade. While the ongoing liberalization of the economy brought about many changes, including the advent of organized retailing, it was clear that circumstances were less than spectacular for music sales. Many of my interlocutors continued to hope that the pendulum would soon swing in a better direction for the music industry—though at times they could barely contain their anxiety about the trajectory of the market. In their attempt to explain the crash in physical sales in the 2000s, people in various positions within the music industry pointed toward several culprits that facilitated a decline. One of these was the rapid spread of private radio and television broadcasting, which provided customers with greater opportunities to listen to music without purchasing it. Another oft-cited factor was market speculation in which music labels tended to overbid on the distribution rights of film soundtracks, leading to unjustified market expectations and tremendous losses for a number of music distributors. Some of my interlocutors argued that the overall quality of music had greatly declined in the 2000s, leading to a loss in customer interest. And, of course, one of the most-cited culprits was a resurgence in music piracy brought about by the widespread availability of digital reproduction technologies. These explanations were often described as interconnected aspects of an overarching negative-feedback loop. Ephemeral, unoriginal music was not worth buying in a legitimate format, which contributed to customers turning to piracy, which exacerbated the losses caused by speculation and overbidding, which made music companies less willing to take risks on diverse musical styles, which led to more unoriginal content, and so forth. While not especially new, these arguments do operate as convenient tropes that music sellers use to justify low sales, especially when new disruptive technologies like cassettes and the MP3 encoding format emerged. In this chapter, I focus upon the economic and social values associated with the formal distribution of music (on physical media by recording companies) and informal circulation through narratives about piracy. In so doing, I will illustrate the volatility of the media landscape at the turn of the millennium and the range of media formats that were available at the time I conducted my research, which will be fundamental in interpreting local retail practices in the remainder of the book. The chapter begins by providing a brief history of the Indian recording industry. While this discussion is not intended to be comprehensive, as there have been some groundbreaking studies by Peter Manuel (1993) and Gerry Farrell (1999), among others, this brief overview will give some necessary background for readers

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unfamiliar with the particularities of the Indian context. After providing insights into the commodification of music recordings in the first decades of the 20th  century, the chapter offers an overview of three eras that are centered upon the technologies of music distribution: the gramophone era, the cassette era, and the digital era. As I have argued elsewhere (2014c), music and media formats typically overlap over large swaths of time, thus this subdivision by format should not be viewed as discrete periods as much as the emergence of new discursive practices. The chapter contrasts two companies’ music industry philosophies and business practices, addressing how they navigated prestige and innovation in the pursuit of new audiences. The first company, Saregama (formerly the Gramophone Company of India, or GCI), has a long and convoluted history. Relying on its production monopoly, it entered into the new millennium with a relatively conservative, low-risk strategy and relied strongly on the repackaging and promotion of its large catalog of “evergreen” (classic) recordings. Saregama thus appealed to notions of quality, tradition, and prestige, marketing its products primarily to an audience of urban, middle class shoppers. In contrast, T-Series approached the new millennium with a higher-risk strategy: distributing diverse genres of new recordings, which were regarded by some connoisseurs as being of questionable quality. T-Series put less emphasis on the prestige of its artists and sound quality of its products, preferring instead to market new and innovative content and formats to a broader audience. Through this focus on innovation, T-Series had become the single largest music company in India in the 2000s and was distributing the soundtracks to many of the highest-profile Hindi films, while Saregama suffered stagnation. I go on to suggest that the spectrum between valuing prestige or innovation provides yet another central axis for understanding the value negotiations that circulate around the consumption of musical recordings in India. These values interact closely with broader industry perspectives, especially with debates about the effects of piracy on the media marketplace. In the third part of this chapter, I discuss the narratives of music industry decline, with a particular emphasis on the discourse of “lost values.” Through a discussion of the Indian Music Industry (IMI), a trade federation that is charged with fighting music piracy, I suggest that the recording industry asserts that buying authorized/authenticated recordings is a moral imperative, which is ultimately ignored by many music consumers. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Rhythm House store as an exemplar of the Indian music industry’s values writ large and as an entrée into the later discussions in the book.

The Early Indian Recording Industry Like other new technologies of late 19th and early 20th centuries, the technologies that enabled music production and distribution were present in colonial India at approximately the same time they became available elsewhere

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in the world. Also like international contexts, the music industry generated social and economic values through the collaboration and coordinated messages of a number of interrelated institutions, including record companies’ hardware divisions, newspaper advertising, retail stores, and record company catalogs. The battle to commodify music was quite intense in the first decades of the 20th century, just as it was at the beginning of the 21st century. In this early period, as many as a dozen record companies offering several competing recorded formats (e.g., wax cylinders and shellac discs) were vying to attract the attention of India’s wealthiest residents. These clashes were largely waged by international companies—and their local cultural intermediaries—who attempted to exploit the seemingly untapped (and profitable) Indian market for talking machines and media to play on them. In the late 19th  century, ownership of a gramophone machine conferred great prestige, in large part because they had to be imported from abroad. The beautiful cabinetry of the first machines had great display value in elite households, which meant that in many ways ownership of media (i.e.,  recordings) was secondary to ownership of the hardware. By the beginning of the 20th century, the machines could be produced locally with imported parts, which reduced the production cost and the price; by the 1920s, imported Japanese machines significantly reduced the purchase price of gramophones (Joshi 1988). Nevertheless, even when the price dropped due to the saturation of the market, most Indians could still not afford to purchase the gramophone machines and their media for personal or household use (Hughes 2012, 454). Inasmuch as the market for these records and the associated hardware was decidedly upper and upper middle class, music companies oriented their advertising imagery toward the aspirations of these “high-value” customers and the musical content that they desired.1 Not surprisingly, demand for gramophone machines and their media had to be constructed through careful and elaborate marketing in print media. Thus, like other parts of the world, the Indian recording industry always had deep ties other mass media, notably print media, radio, and television, each of which has layered additional meanings onto recording formats. In  the early years, the main job of music companies was to sell the idea of the new music reproduction technology to the Indian public by way of print media advertising. As such, the focus was first on novelty and the status boost afforded by owning a “talking machine.” Only later did advertising begin to focus on the social uses for the hardware and content (i.e., as parlor entertainment, as a way of learning music performance, as a way to hear world class artists, as a spatial-temporal connection of Asia to Europe, etc.). Coupled with the promotion of hardware and formats came the promotion of new celebrities (i.e., “gramophone stars”) to sell the recordings. As Stephen Putnam Hughes (2012) notes, each of these media promoted the values associated with the embodied practices of music listening among bourgeois publics, who gradually became accustomed to encountering music as distributed

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as a material commodity.2 In essence, to borrow Michael Warner’s (2002) language, newspaper advertising created new “publics” for the experience and prestige of owning recorded musics. In so doing, these advertisements played to the aspirations of the other upper and middle classes that desired outward signs of prestige. The material circulation of music commodities had a number of consequences for other widely practiced Indian music genres in the early 20th century. While the first recordings made available by these companies were entirely from an international catalog that appealed to the wealthiest cosmopolitans, local agents understood that there was huge potential in selling vernacular recordings to local audiences. For music companies, their first catalogs were primarily developed around investing it with new values in order to encourage customers to adopt the format. One way that music companies attempted to capitalize on this demand was by sending foreign recording engineers on sponsored “expeditions” to India and other parts of Asia in order to collect recordings of musics in various vernacular styles and languages, later setting up local recording studios in order to expand their catalogs. These recordings were shipped to Europe for mass production, then reimported for sale to India’s elite classes. The fact that music companies used local intermediaries to help track down local musical content from traditions that were completely opaque to them suggests that they took this role seriously, even if these executives made decisions that ultimately reduced the heterogeneity of the musical practices that they encountered (Farrell 1999).3 This created a feedback loop in the early recording industry in India: as more recorded varieties of local content became available, customers became more willing to invest in a music reproduction platform. Viewed in slightly different terms, one can say that the cooperation of social and economic value systems was apparent even in the first moments of the sound recording medium. For customers, large catalogs of local musics provided a way to experience musical events that might not otherwise be accessible due to spatial or temporal constraints. Indeed, as many scholars have noted, the material circulation of music recordings afforded listeners the ability to divorce the sounds of music from the spaces, times, and contexts of their live performance. This new technology’s social prestige value and (emerging later) entertainment value were the foremost features promoted in advertising. Customers had to thus be convinced through all available media of the values that accompanied their investment in this expensive luxury technology. The Gramophone Era The period after the early 1930s has long been described as a moment of consolidation in the Indian music production industry, with the ensuing dominance of the Gramophone Company of India (GCI) until the 1980s. Founded in 1902, The Gramophone and Typewriter, Ltd. (GTL) was an offshoot of the British company of the same name; the company name was changed in 1908

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to the Gramophone Company, and GCI began to produce gramophone discs in its factory outside of Kolkata. By the 1920s it was clear that the Berliner discs had emerged as the clear winner in the early format wars, and this move to local production of albums positioned the company to respond to Indian market conditions, in addition to reducing many of the costs incurred by shipping recorded media around the world for reproduction. Ownership of the sole record production factory enabled GCI to gradually displace its competition through consolidation and the acquisition of distribution rights from other music companies into the 1930s. The Gramophone Company exploited its monopoly on record production and distribution in India through its HMV (i.e., His Master’s Voice) label. The majority of the recordings in its early catalogs were Indian classical and folk musics in a variety of languages that were intended for consumption by an affluent audience (Kinnear 1994). Inasmuch as it remained a subsidiary of a British company, GCI also used its HMV label to locally produce and distribute international recordings that were owned by the conglomerate and sold by music stores like Rhythm House. In addition, stage musics from the Bengali, Marathi, and Parsi theaters in Bombay and Calcutta comprised a significant portion of music catalogs over time. These theatrical songs, coupled with new categories of “light music” that fused Indian and international sounds in the 1930s, enabled the acceptance of the new film songs genre (Hughes 2002). By the end of the 1930s, the expanded reach of the Indian film industry created a market for film songs in various languages, and film soundtracks provided a relatively safe investment for the label during the early postcolonial period. Initially, GCI only released the soundtracks of already-successful films, but the favorable licensing paradigm of the time meant that the company did not have to make large investments in studio time or soundtrack copyright acquisition. GCI simply delivered a cut of the royalties for handling the distribution of material that was owned by successful film studios. Not surprisingly, GCI gradually invested more of its resources into distributing soundtracks; by the early 1980s, film soundtracks distributed by GCI were reported to make up as much as 90 percent of the recordings sold in India (Manuel 1993). GCI’s dominance in the mid-20th century was facilitated by the capitalintensive nature of the industry—and by the fact that the company owned the only record-pressing plant in India. This situation would not outlast the rise of audiocassette technology described in the next section. Whereas gramophone records were expensive to produce and difficult to transport over India’s often patchwork transportation infrastructure, cassette recordings were much easier to manufacture and distribute widely. GCI did not adapt well to the new medium. It ignored cassettes even as demand began to rise and continued to invest in the soon-to-be-obsolete technology of vinyl records (Manuel 1993; Kohli-Khandekar 2010). Industrial maximumproduction quotas that the national government had established for cassettes impacted HMV as a state-registered industry but not its smaller competitors. By the mid-1980s these quotas were lifted, due to GCI’s lobbying and

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other large-scale economic changes (discussed in the previous chapter), and the music distribution market had fragmented into numerous small domestic recording companies. GCI’s losses mounted as the behemoth struggled to adjust to this newly competitive environment. By 1987 GCI had been classified by the Indian Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction as a “sick” company and placed in receivership. A controlling interest in the company was eventually purchased by the RPG Group, an Indian manufacturing conglomerate known for producing tires and chemicals, among other things. RPG restructured the company in order to return it to profitability in the mid-1990s and changed name of the label to Saregama-HMV. Despite its financial troubles, the company holds the rights to reproduce and distribute nearly all of the Hindi film soundtracks produced from the 1940s through the early 1980s, and it aggressively repackages this catalog to sell in music stores. This prestigious repertoire includes the period widely known as the “evergreen” era of Indian film song; Saregama executives whom I interviewed frequently referred to this catalog as an Indian “national treasure.” The evergreen songs have proven to be very profitable for Saregama through re-releases and repackaging physical recording formats into various themes (see Figure 2.1), as well as through licensing arrangements for their use in advertisements, radio and television broadcasts, and remixes.

Figure 2.1 Music Metropolis product training slide—This slide (c. 2006) illustrates Saregama’s repackaging and compilation strategy for exploiting its back catalog. The recordings (from left to right) include individual films and “2-in-1” or “3-in-1” film combination soundtracks that incorporate the most popular songs of multiple soundtracks; artist-based series that are differentiated by “popular” and “premium” packaging; emotionally thematic collections (e.g., pain, love, romance); classic film songs that have been remixed and/or remastered; and standalone albums that might not necessarily come from a film.

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In the first decade of the 2000s, the company’s business strategy was firmly grounded in the development and exploitation of this material, as is indicated by the discussion of the “OHF” (“Old Hindi Film”) market in a 2005 Letter of Offer issued by Saregama: In April–September 2004, catalogue sales accounted over forty percent of music revenue. The Company has been exploiting its OHF catalogue in different ways, describing them as “themes,” “moods” and “eras.” The Catalogue sales have been providing steady cash flow for the Company for funding the acquisition of fresh music rights. The Company has launched a new packaging strategy to strengthen off-take through trendy inlay cards and launched new look videos to popularize old melodies. The Company has been actively licensing these tracks to other music companies, which on the one hand generates the licensing income and on the other hand popularize OHF music further. (http://www.sebi.gov.in/dp/saregama.pdf, accessed 10/31/15) Saregama went to great lengths to promote the notion of the “evergreen song” and to market the company’s illustrious history as a way to distinguish itself from its competitors, which adds another layer of meaning to the phrase “old is gold”—not only are these evergreen songs deemed the aesthetic pinnacle of film songs, but they are also lucrative. In the RPG-owned Music World retail outlets, the “evergreen” music category was physically separated from contemporary recordings, and it was intensively promoted with in-store displays and advertising. Saregama’s strategy of repackaging past glories as a way of investing in the future has kept the company afloat in turbulent times. However, the shift from selling evergreen songs to uncovering newly prestigious works has been tenuous at best. Shareholder reports since 2005 document the company’s increasing reliance on the revenue generated by licensing evergreen songs to broadcasters. Saregama’s attempts to expand into more current music have for the most part been financially unsuccessful. By the 2010s, the primary economic value of Saregama lay less in its distribution of physical recordings and more in the value of its intellectual property.4 The Cassette Era: T-Series, Innovation, and the Expansion of the Market As Peter Manuel (1993) has extensively documented, the arrival of audiocassette technology led to drastic changes in the Indian music industry, changes that extended well beyond the disruption of the GCI monopoly. The democratizing effects of this relatively inexpensive medium resulted in a significantly greater range of musical styles appearing on the shelves of Indian stores in the 1980s. Cassettes made it possible for many varieties of non-film music to be profitably circulated by smaller companies attuned to the tastes

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of local audiences.5 New Indian music companies that surfaced during this era included Tips, Venus, Magnasound, and a plentitude of labels that catered to very local audiences, sometimes only a single city district. Some of these companies took advantage of the new promotional opportunities offered by privatized television and radio as a means of stimulating interest for panIndian audiences in musical recordings that had been previously unavailable. The Magnasound company, for example, “discovered” and promoted independent pop artists such as Dahler Mehndi, Alisha Chinai, Shaan, and Lucky Ali and thereby became central in the creation of a new genre that became known as Indipop (or Hindipop). Indipop artists created a respectable niche market with the help of music-television channels, but they encountered an uphill battle against the vast marketing power of film. By the beginning of the 2000s, much of the novelty of Indipop had worn off—and as audiences waned, many Indipop artists “went filmi” (i.e., “sold out”) and were incorporated into the soundtrack production industry (Kvetko 2009). A similar history was repeated with other music genres like bhangra and “Sufipop.”6 Throughout the rise and fall of these pop music fashions, film songs managed to remain dominant in India, due in part to film studios adapting and incorporating new musical trends into their prodigious promotional apparatus. As India’s liberalization proceeded and the restrictions on foreign direct investment were lifted, a variety of multinational companies also became more involved in the “development” of the Indian market for cassette recordings. CBS, BMG, Warner, Sony Music, and Universal Music all either created Indian divisions, or partnered with local companies to distribute their catalogs of international pop musics.7 The expansion of the Indian market also provided an ideal opportunity for these companies to extend the profitability of music that was slightly past its prime in the Western world. In Indian music stores, a flood of international, usually English-language, compilation albums appeared (e.g., “Hits of the ’80s”), as well as a few of the newly released albums by major Western artists. Satellite music television channels also exuberantly incorporated these international hits into their playlists, alongside Indian film songs and newly popular local genres.8 The main beneficiary of the audiocassette boom, however, was an Indian upstart called Super Cassettes Industries, Ltd. Founded by Gulshan Kumar in 1982, Super Cassettes expanded quickly, avoiding the stringent government quotas that plagued GCI by mobilizing its production operations in India’s informal economic sector. In addition to manufacturing and distributing audiocassettes and playback hardware, the company soon branched out to develop its own music label, which it named T-Series. By distributing to its vast network of small-scale vendors, such as tea stalls and grocery stores, Super Cassettes quickly surpassed the declining GCI to become the largest music company in India. The success of Super Cassettes and the T-Series label was based on the company’s targeting mass audiences that GCI had virtually ignored in its attempt to capitalize on the film recordings as a cash cow. T-Series distributed its cassette production among quasi-legal

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operators in cities all over India who quickly and inexpensively copied the tapes for sale in local markets (Manuel 1993; Sundaram 2010). The company also focused on discovering and developing new inexpensive musical content, which helped to keep its costs down. The label became one of the prime movers for popularizing previously uncommercialized, indigenous, non-film genres such as the pop ghazal (Urdu poetry set to song), the devotional genres of the Hindu bhajan and the Sufi qawwali, and many regional folk genres that had been neglected under GCI’s conservative business model. T-Series executives were also pioneers in exploiting lacunae in India’s copyright laws by, for example, marketing cover versions of popular film songs to which they did not own the intellectual property rights. These “unofficial” copies were frequently sold in deceptive packaging that closely emulated the cassette jackets of the original recordings. My interlocutors in the music industry widely believed that this practice of creating misleading cover versions and undermining the sales of other domestic music companies led to the 1997 assassination of Super Cassettes’ founder.9 The astonishing success of the T-Series label was mentioned by nearly every music company executive whom I interviewed in the 2000s. These interlocutors expressed mixed feelings about the company’s business practices. Many of them admired T-Series for innovatively developing new music markets. These same executives, however, frequently derided T-Series for appealing to India’s “lowest common denominator” and for flooding the market with what they perceived to be low-quality recordings. One of my interlocutors at Music Metropolis euphemistically referred to T-Series executives as “traders”—meaning that in his opinion, the company’s managers lacked any real interest or taste in music and were only interested in making money by exploiting the market. These music-loving executives expressed anxiety about the proliferation of cheap T-Series recordings turning Indian music into a commodity in the classic economic sense (i.e., making it into a fungible, undifferentiated product like crude oil and sugar, which tend to be sold at fixed prices regardless of their source). Despite these critiques, industry executives found it hard to deny the economic success of the T-Series model, and many of these who snubbed T-Series in private conversations felt obliged to adopt some of the label’s mass-market practices in their own business strategies. In truth, the representation of T-Series as a backward and low-class company is largely a caricature, especially considering that T-Series has for many years remained the largest and single most powerful music label in India. Furthermore, the prestige of T-Series is relative. As  Stefan Fiol (2010) has documented, some regions of India have long been ignored by all but the most local of music labels. From the perspective of these marginalized areas, T-Series is a cosmopolitan company, and garnering its interest is seen as a prestigious step for local artists. Nonetheless, for many industry observers T-Series epitomizes capitalizing on relatively quick-and-cheap mass marketing, in contrast to the prestige-based marketing strategy adopted by Saregama.

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The Digital Era: CDs and MP3s In the early 1990s, international music industries began to earnestly undertake the transition from analog media (cassettes) to the large-scale manufacturing of digital media (compact discs, or CDs).10 There were several reasons for this change. One of them was the lower production cost of digital media, which allowed music companies to improve their profit margins. Another was the possibility of creating a new prestige market in which “high-value” customers could be encouraged to upgrade their collections and playback equipment to take advantage of the purportedly higher audio quality of CDs. An additional motivation, which is less openly acknowledged, was the international recording industry’s attempt to regain the centralized control of music reproduction that they once had with gramophone records, but had lost in the cassette era. During the 1990s the technology for burning compact discs was not yet widely available. Many music retailers felt that the audio CD format would be their savior, bringing a return of the substantial profit margins they had enjoyed before the introduction of the easily copied cassette. Needless to say, the spread of inexpensive CD writers on personal computers made this dream evaporate in less than a decade. In India, audiocassettes remained the dominant music format throughout the 1990s and even into the new millennium. The high price of CDs, and the inability of local music stores to create CD compilations to suit customer needs, meant that digital media remained a novelty item for many years. While cassette players were—and still are—present in many households, standalone CD players were not widely purchased in India. Digital formats began to take off only after CD writers became available in the 2000s, creating a new avenue for piracy, down-market competition, and lower prices. Many Indians, in fact, leapfrogged completely over the audio CD era and switched directly from cassettes to MP3 players in the mid to late 2000s. The new MP3 format, which was made possible by advances in digital compression technology, allowed as many as 15 albums to be copied onto a single disc—which by that time could be produced by local distributors, at music stores, or even by individuals working at home or in a cybercafé. Standalone multi-format players (i.e., MP3-CD-VCD/DVD), which never really took off in the United States, became ubiquitous in India in the 2000s. The shift toward the MP3 format was facilitated by the ongoing liberalization of laws that had in earlier decades regulated the importing and manufacturing of electronic components. The lowering of restrictions led to a boom in “grey-market” manufacturing, the assembling of media hardware from imported or unlicensed components using informal labor (Sundaram 2010), repeating the history of the “talking machine” during the 1920s. This mode of quasi-legal, unregulated production flooded the market with inexpensive media players and became an important sector of Indian manufacturing. Most family-run music retailers welcomed the development of the

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MP3 format; by the mid-2000s they were cheerfully using home computers to convert their stocks of cassettes and CDs, continuing to extract value from their collections. After storing the music on computer hard drives in MP3 format, these business owners were able to provide made-to-order compilation MP3-CDs, when they had previously used audiocassettes. Store owners also offered format-conversion services for customers who wanted to upgrade their old cassette and videotape collections to the more current formats. Technically speaking, these compilations and format transfers are a form of music piracy, albeit one that is an extremely low priority for enforcers. Unsurprisingly, the spread of inexpensive CD burning and the rise of the easily transferable MP3 format were not greeted with enthusiasm by the music industry. Despite the more economical encoding of the MP3 format, most music companies tried to ignore it for as long as they could—much in the same way that GCI initially tried to ignore the easily reproducible cassette format. Large music retail chains also resisted carrying MP3-CDs in their stores. They did this as a way to delegitimize the format in alignment with industry wishes, but also because the retailers faced a pricing dilemma when a single MP3-CD could contain as much music as 15 ordinary CDs. Thus, through the late 2000s, most industry players continued to act as if the market in MP3s did not exist. This resistance ultimately proved to be futile: the MP3 became the format of choice, and the unwillingness of industry players to embrace it only encouraged their customers to turn to less legitimate distribution channels. In my observations of music store customers in the mid- and late 2000s, few buyers of original CDs bothered to disguise the fact that they intended to convert the music to MP3s and share it with their friends and family. The spread of the MP3 format and associated reproduction hardware led to a boom in the informal music market, just as cassette technology did in the early 1980s. A few industry players, such as (unsurprisingly) the T-Series label, have come to wholeheartedly embrace the new format, using it as a means to reduce costs and undercut their competitors. Other music companies have reluctantly followed suit, creating budget lines of MP3-CDs that are frequently tucked away in hard-to-discover nooks at the back of retail chain stores or in high traffic aisles that discourage browsing. Meanwhile, the rapid development of MP3 technology and distribution networks continues to drive the Indian music market. Home computers and proprietary portable music players (e.g., Apple’s iPod) remain beyond the reach of most Indians, but mobile phones have now become the technology of choice for music playback. Legitimate and illegitimate “mobile downloading” to these phones has become a predominant mode of music exchange, as I discuss in Chapter 7. The MP3 format, cheap recordable CDs, the rise of cybercafés, and the spread of inexpensive mobile phones have all accelerated the price declines that first began with cassettes, to the point at which the price for listening to or otherwise acquiring an individual song is rapidly approaching zero.

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Music Recordings, Materiality, and Discourses of Class Much of the discussion that I encountered regarding the content and sound quality of T-Series recordings was based around the notion of “class” as prestige, respect, and sophistication. My interlocutors in the recording and retail sectors frequently invoked this idea of class as a way to pander to the buying power of the new middle classes of urban India, at the cost of ignoring less affluent and more rural markets. Executives that I interviewed at Saregama, Times Music, and the local offices of international companies took pains to portray most domestic recording companies as being oriented to the “masses” rather than the “classes,” a dichotomy commonly deployed by elites in print and in conversation. It  would not be an exaggeration to suggest that these Mumbai-based music executives viewed their T-Series counterparts—and the nominally provincial tastes of T-Series customers—with a certain level of contempt. The upshot of this discourse was the insinuation that the musical catalogs of the long-established urban and international music labels were superior to the musical content sold by their new competitors. However, this distinction between superior and inferior musics was somewhat limited by the high-status companies’ desire to move into, and profit from, the market for the very same genres T-Series promoted, albeit packaged for the urban middle classes. As a result, the debate over musical quality was frequently deferred to debates about sound quality and the relative prestige of different packaging and formats. Saregama, as I described above, was a paragon of class to many of my interlocutors. The company’s executives and others in the industry frequently argued the superiority of Saregama products’ musical content, sound quality, and the physical media that they distributed. Saregama’s focus on the evergreen classics—the products of a time when soundtrack purchases were largely limited to the social strata that could afford gramophone records—also helped to ensure that the company’s image remained firmly grounded in class sensibilities and associations. Sony Music was another frequently cited example of a company that produced high-quality media, if not high-quality content. Cassettes and CDs produced by Sony were reputed to have higher production values and to be much more durable than locally manufactured media. The higher value placed on a foreign company and the media it produced was, in many ways, tied to a collective tendency to consider imported products superior to those that were locally produced during the early years of India’s economic liberalization. Moreover, Sony was one of the few companies to include song lyrics and lists of musicians and production staff in the packaging of all of their Indian recordings. These combined factors attempted to justify the higher prices that prestige companies placed on their products, in contrast to the lower prices set by their domestic competitors. Companies like Saregama and Sony also attempted to conflate the recordings’ musical values with the quality of the physical recording medium,

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citing their superiority over domestic companies like T-Series, albeit in ways that were not always accurate. For example, the recordings of the T-Series catalog produced in the 1980s and ’90s were frequently reputed to be of such low quality that they would only survive 30 plays, just enough time for the next new release to become available (Reddy 1997). Yet my retail interlocutors nearly all agreed that every major label suffered from serious issues of quality, and quality control, during the 1980s. The reputed shoddiness of T-Series products was mainly a marketing illusion. Some retailers went so far as to say that the pirated cassettes of the time were sometimes of better quality than those distributed through legitimate channels. For example, Salman, a proprietor of a cassette-dubbing shop in Bhopal, attributed this fact to the use of mediocre manufacturing facilities by nearly every major label in the 1980s. He pointed to reports that legitimate labels had in some cases even outsourced their production to pirate networks when the demand for a particular recording exceeded manufacturing capacity. It has also been alleged that some companies distributed their own licensed and professionally manufactured material for sale through pirate networks as a way of evading taxes (Sundaram 2010). This same shopkeeper (who, it should be noted, dealt in cheap copies and thus had a vested interest in nonprestige narratives) also pointed out that most consumers do not maintain their audio hardware in anything resembling a pristine state. Thus, whatever sound-quality differences actually existed in the more expensive prestige media would have a tendency to be lost during playback on such equipment. The status distinction between music companies, which partly originated in the transition from gramophone to audiocassette, continued into the new millennium. The Yash Raj Music label, for example, embraced a similar prestige strategy in the release of many of its soundtracks. As I have described elsewhere (2009), the soundtrack to the 2004 Yash Raj film Veer-Zaara sought to capitalize on associations with the notable evergreen music of classic Hindi films, and the soundtrack was presented in attractive printed-cardboard packaging designed to stand out from more prosaic recordings on music-store shelves. Another example of prestige marketing can be seen in Times Music’s line of Indian “spiritual” albums, which offer high production values, upscale packaging and liner notes, and the added value of having been recorded in famous temples. These spiritual albums have a vastly different production history and intended audience than everyday recordings of Hindu devotional music (baktī gīt)—a genre that had already been appropriated and marketed by T-Series and other domestic labels. Times Music also partnered with Putamayo (a high status recording company) in bringing “world music” to India, a category that attracted only the highest-end customers. There is a built-in irony here insofar as the world music category was created as an Other to Western popular musics, as a catch-all for non-Western musics (Feld 2000; Frith 2000). As such, Putamayo’s strategy of repackaging non-Western musics appealed only to a miniscule audience in India.

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In the context of the materiality of music recordings, Jerry Pinto (2011) has pointed out that the video- and audiocassette era was the first time that most Indians had an opportunity to “own” music or movies, rather than just consuming them through theaters, radio, and television broadcasts. In  the much same way that owning a gramophone machine and a record collection became a status symbol for upper middle class families during the earlier years of the twentieth century, the ability to own playback hardware and a collection of recorded media became a form of prestige for a much larger portion of the population through the display value of the recordings. In my own experience, music collections were foregrounded in many of the households that I visited in India in 2004–05, and a number of my friends used their collections to paint a picture of their personal histories and memories that were designed to give me insights into their identities. However, as the reach of new media expanded and the range of formats multiplied, establishing the prestige value of this ownership became a more complicated task, especially since the display value of recordings waned in the era of the mobile phone. The prestige value associated with distinctive packaging has also proven to be somewhat ephemeral in other ways. After the rise of cassettes, the production of professional-looking inlay cards that included photographs and liner notes was a mark of company prestige. It was not long, however, until the spread of cheaper copying and printing hardware made the production of such materials routine for all record labels, and even for pirate distributors. By the 2000s the computer reproduction of counterfeit inlay cards had become a relatively simple matter, and cashing in on the “display value” of such labeling was not difficult for counterfeiters with access to an inkjet or laser printer.11 Moreover, in the Indian context it was very rare for cassette manufacturers to include any print directly on the cassette that provided much information about the recording: most cassettes were simply labeled “See inlay card for details,” along with the name and address of the recording company. My retail interlocutors suggested to me that this practice was perpetuated not only to save on printing expenses, but also so that unsold or obsolete cassettes could be erased, recorded with new albums, and re-packaged by the manufacturer. Even for companies like Saregama, this practice remained common well into the new millennium. In many ways, rerecording cassette tapes enabled companies to sidestep a problem that plagues retailers: unsold stock. By the 2010s, most music retailers were sitting on single-write media, unsold—indeed, unsellable— CDs, which cluttered store shelves and warehouses and could not otherwise be reused by music companies. The cumulative unreliability of labeling in distinguishing between prestigious “original” media and cheaper pirated or re-recorded cassettes similarly undermined the value of packaging as an index of prestige. This unreliability was only partially alleviated when companies began to affix an IMI hologram of authenticity to the inlay cards of original recordings starting in the early 2000s.

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The Indian Music Industry in the 2000s and a Market Correction Like other international music markets, India’s recording industry crashed in the early 2000s. At the time of my research, retailers were still reeling from a dramatic drop in the number of physical recordings sold and from the pricing cuts they felt obliged to make in order to retain their customers and compete with pirate media vendors. The music company executives whom I interviewed were reluctant to discuss exact figures, but some suggested, unofficially, that since the turn of the millennium their revenues had declined by a third or more. My interlocutors generally divided the blame for this crash among four different factors—each of which was weighted differently depending on the individual’s perspective on the industry. One locus of blame was the competitive frenzy that developed when the film industry moved from royalty-sharing arrangements to an upfront bidding system for advance soundtrack distribution rights, which enabled smaller music companies to break into the soundtrack distribution that GCI had historically dominated. In this narrative of the crash, retailers suggested that music companies essentially destroyed themselves by artificially inflating the value of their catalogs. The companies’ excessive optimism led to bidding wars in which soundtrack distribution rights became so expensive that there was no way for most of the bidders to realistically recover their investments. The search for the next big hit led to market oversaturation; there were not enough purchasers to buy all of the copious expensive soundtracks that would each require millions of units in sales to be profitable.12 This volatile situation was made even worse by the arrival in India of international conglomerates; they brought their considerable resources to the table in an effort to compete with local labels in the risky, lucrative film soundtrack market. My interlocutors in the Indian recording industry pointed out, for example, that in the late 1990s Universal Music India indiscriminately bought the rights to nearly every soundtrack released by the film studios—leading to massive losses for the company and its ultimate departure from the genre. Like other international brands that believed that the prestige of the international brand alone would appeal to customers (e.g., MTV, GM, Ford), Universal mistakenly believed that they could exploit their name to buy into local markets rather than adapt their product to suit local needs. By the beginning of the 2000s, the cumulative spending on soundtrack rights had become unsustainable. Many companies that had taken severe financial losses stopped bidding for soundtracks altogether, which led to rapid deflation of prices and significant losses for the film industry. As a result of this chaotic time, a number of companies went out of business or withdrew from the market, while others began to gravitate toward consolidation. Film production houses such as Yash Raj opened their own music labels in the mid-2000s, and by contrast, music companies like Saregama and T-Series opened their own film production divisions. Whether this

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strategy of consolidation will lead to long-term stability for these companies in a declining market is yet to be determined. Another frequently cited explanation for the industry crash was that by the early 2000s, contemporary Indian musics were simply not good anymore and not worth purchasing. This “lack of quality content” narrative was most often voiced by film music fans who looked to the evergreen era as an aesthetically superior moment in Indian media (see Beaster-Jones 2009). According to this narrative, which I have heard expressed by music fans of all ages, the rapid proliferation of recordings for sale edged out quality artists, whose prestige could no longer earn them a respectable living. In  other words, music produced by more recent artists was not worth buying and repeat-listening. Customers often used such explanations to justify their turn to pirated versions of new releases—but even some music-store owners confided in me that they could hardly blame their customers for not making purchases, given the lack of quality in the new recordings that were on offer. This narrative of declining quality can certainly help explain the industry crash of the 2000s, but it also leads to something of a chicken-and-egg problem. Are people not spending money on the music because it is bad, or is the music bad because people are not spending money on it? The rise of music television on satellite networks, private commercial radio, and later, streaming sites like YouTube, was cited as another reason for this decline. At the moment of popularity of any given hit song, one would not have to wait long for it to appear on a radio or television playlist. According to this logic, the oversaturation of music that this engendered became a disincentive to purchase music, especially because these songs nominally lacked the “staying power” (i.e., were of lower quality) of evergreen film songs. By the 2010s, the emergence of 3G mobile networks enabled people to stream music from a number of websites (e.g., YouTube, Saavn, Pandora) ostensibly for free. This transition signaled an important shift from customers paying for content to paying for access and bandwidth, a move toward the commoditization of music: that is, in classical economics, the transformation of goods or services into simple (unbranded, fungible) commodities that are sold as a mass. As I will suggest in Chapter 7, this transition was not entirely negative for music companies, as the shift from the value of music to music as a “value-added service” enabled them to license their catalogs directly to mobile phone companies and other vendors, which created a new revenue stream that was significantly more lucrative than revenues generated by physical sales of music recordings. Everyone whom I interviewed in the Indian music industry cited piracy as a fundamental concern; it was the most frequently offered explanation for the sharp decline of industry profits after the turn of the millennium due to the surge in piracy brought about by the MP3 encoding format. While several scholars noted the existence of gramophone piracy in the 1920s and ’30s until GCI cornered the market (Farrell 1999; Parthasarathi 2005; Hughes 2014), and audiocassettes opened the door to a mass distribution

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of illegitimate recordings in the 1980s and ’90s (Manuel 1993), the spread of recordable digital media in the 2000s made the process even cheaper and faster. By 2003, Indian markets were flooded with hawkers selling MP3CDs, frequently with 10 to 15 newly released albums on a single disc that would sell for ₹20 (about $0.50 in 2003–2005) (Beaster-Jones 2014c). The question many retailers began asking at this time was, “what will motivate my customers to buy ‘original’ albums?” Most of my interlocutors in the recording industry of the mid-2000s believed that 80 to 90 percent of the recordings sold in India were pirated, which made piracy a substantial issue that had to be addressed by the Indian trade federations. Piracy and Narratives of Lost Values In a book about the values of music commodities, piracy is a central topic because it carries a narrative of ostensibly lost values. The view that piracy created an industry crash is, on the surface, straightforward—revenues that would have otherwise been collected by the music industry disappeared because unethical customers had turned to pirated media. However, the most immediate effect of piracy is not to decrease the value of the music, but rather to change the calculus of who reaps the greatest benefits from this musical value (e.g., artists, customers, manufacturers, distributors). Piracy can be understood as activity that prevents intellectual property holders from leveraging the ownership rights from which they would otherwise be able to benefit. Thus, the success of piracy results in a decrease in the value of owning music. The piracy issue reveals how a product’s exchange values (in this case, as music recordings) is fundamentally sutured to social/moral values (the belief that intellectual property holders should be compensated for the use of what they own). Discourses about piracy are grounded in social beliefs about how “public goods” come into being, how the benefits of these goods should be measured and distributed, and how the various individuals involved in the creation of the goods should be compensated. Anti-piracy advocates focus on the (supposedly) pernicious consequences of failing to protect the intellectual property blueprint that maps the moral calculus of social and economic values. The cultural historian Adrian Johns (2009) has documented the long history of intellectual piracy. Practices that might be labeled as piracy were around, Johns points out, even before the more expansive notion of intellectual property emerged. The term has been used to describe any number of seemingly disparate activities, from the reprinting of books and sheet music, to the production of counterfeit pharmaceuticals to the enjoyment of broadcasts on unlicensed radio sets. What constitutes piracy has shifted as understandings of intellectual property have developed and expanded in scope, largely through extensive lobbying on the part of copyright owners. For example, the unlicensed playback of recordings in restaurants and small businesses was not considered to be a form of piracy until relatively recently in India. In general, the range of what constitutes piracy has greatly

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expanded over time and with the development of new technology. The meaning of the term has shifted from originally describing only modes of production (e.g., reprinting or counterfeiting), to later encompassing modes of distribution and reception (e.g., pirate radio or downloading). Anti-piracy advocacy is most often presented to the public as a means of protecting the interests of creators. However, the social belief that the ownership of intellectual property can be bought and sold means that most anti-piracy legislation is geared toward protecting the economic interests of powerful owners and distributors—which benefits the individual creators of the intellectual property only (at best) derivatively. A number of critics have argued that the existing intellectual property paradigm has contributed to stagnation and economic monopolies, while piracy, despite the moral and legal imperatives against it, has contributed to creativity, new cultural practices, and, at times, important structural transformations. For example, Lawrence Liang (2005) has argued that the growth and diversification of the Indian music market in the 1980s would not have been possible without cassette piracy. The GCI monopoly had a vested interest in maintaining its monopoly on gramophone distribution; it also had a strong interest in marginalizing the cassette market to prevent the rise of competitors. The disruptive cassette technology enabled the existence of music labels like T-Series, who created this mass market through the reputed business practices of pirating GCI’s catalog and outsourcing production to networks of small-scale counterfeiters. The end result was an explosion of creativity and interest in new musical forms, as well as a more competitive marketplace that responded to a much broader range of customers. Similarly, as a manufacturer of blank media, Super Cassettes as a whole benefited from the growth of the cassette market. The same situation is largely true today with user-generated content, such as song mashups, in which fans of particular artists or genres create endless combinations with existing material for YouTube and other streaming sites, albeit under the threat of takedown notices because the use of the content is unsanctioned by copyright owners. Regardless of the ongoing arguments about how piracy affects the creative output and robustness of the music industry as a whole, it remains the case that central industry players have a vested interest in trying to reduce piracy in order to strengthen their individual profits. These corporations banded together to finance the trade group known as the Indian Music Industry (IMI), which is charged with maintaining and enhancing the value of its member companies. As the representative voice of the music industry in India, the IMI works with independent copyright societies, including the Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS) and the Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL), to spread anti-piracy messages and promote copyright enforcement. It also furthers the interests of its constituent companies by encouraging investment, searching for new opportunities to leverage ownership rights, and lobbying local and national governments for greater industry protections.

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The IMI and the Social Values of Piracy Despite its name, the IMI does not represent the entire Indian recording industry, much less the entire Indian music industry. Its membership is comprised of about 70 large companies, which are a mix of domestic labels and international subsidiaries. Many of India’s recording companies have chosen to remain aloof from the IMI and its anti-piracy message (this includes a large portion of smaller regional labels and those that distribute music in languages other than Hindi or English). The most noteworthy absence from the IMI fold is the T-Series label. The IMI has long had an antagonistic relationship with T-Series, largely because of the label’s complicated history of creative end-runs around copyright law, but also partly because several times T-Series embraced new, less restrictive music formats before they were sanctioned by the IMI. The non-participation of T-Series has sapped the IMI’s leverage to effect copyright expansion and enforcement, especially because T-Series continues to be the largest and most successful music company in India. The IMI and its member companies tend to be positioned toward the “prestige” end of the music value spectrum. These companies mobilize discourses of social status and link them to the intellectual property paradigm by proclaiming the “class” (ethical value) of purchasing legitimate, original recordings. T-Series, for its part, has been reputed to enforce its own antipiracy operations through intimidation practices similar to those I describe in one of the ethnographic vignettes in Chapter 3. In our conversation in 2005, Savio D’Souza, the Secretary General of the IMI, referenced the IMI’s association with the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). This link to international trade groups imbues the IMI with an authoritative position to deliver industry reports and statistics that will be acknowledged around the world. It also means that the IMI is responsible for promoting certain internationally affirmed doctrines, including the idea that “everybody should pay the authors their royalties.” However, it is quite rare in India for artists to retain a royalty stake in their works. Even in the international context, scholars have frequently noted that the lip service granted by music labels to protecting artists’ rights rarely translates into equitable business practices (Joshi 1988). In such a context, it is difficult to measure the extent of the IMI’s interest in promoting artist compensation. Despite the best efforts of the IMI and its member companies, the organization has struggled against popular disinterest and, somewhat ironically, a lack of funding. In my research I discovered that very few Indians outside of the music industry even knew of the existence of the IMI trade group. I asked D’Souza about the prospects of conducting anti-piracy public-awareness campaigns, but the cost of such campaigns are considerable, and D’Souza was pessimistic as to whether they would have enough of an effect to justify the expense. He noted that a vast swath of Indian consumers did not respect the moral imperative, much less the fear of legal consequences that intellectual property advocates were seeking to instill. I had frequent conversations about

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piracy during my field research with a number of people who confirmed D’Souza’s perspective. For example, one of my Bhopali research assistants could not understand why I was so interested in the question of music piracy: from his perspective when he purchased a mixed tape, he was paying for the medium and the services of the vendor, not the content. This attitude was not limited to Bhopalis who perceived music as a luxury: I frequently observed employees of Music Metropolis—whose livelihood was tied to selling legitimate recordings—sharing MP3-CDs and Video CDs that they had created on a home computer with other employees. Similarly, in 2010, when I asked Geeta, a former Music Metropolis employee, about the ethics of downloading recordings, she noted that despite having seen the public service announcements about piracy, and despite owning a large music collection that she views as a reflection of herself, piracy (downloading) did not bother her, nor did it even arise as a conversation point within her network of friends: What we do talk about, is which website will give you great quality downloads … sometimes I download [a song], and if I like it, I’ll go out and buy it. Okay? I’ve heard it, it grows on me, I go out and buy it. But most of the time, popular music is just popular music. (personal communication) As such, Geeta reinforced something well-known within the industry: anti-piracy PSAs simply do not work. Beyond that, she is also invoking the “lack of quality content” trope (i.e., “just popular music”) as a justification for purchasing some recordings, but not others. In other words, Geeta and my Bhopali friend described above, many people that I talked to were simply unwilling to accept the idea that buying original recordings was a moral responsibility (i.e., a social value). D’Souza perhaps rightly felt that an advertising campaign would be a waste of resources, and he insisted that the only way to get Indians to accept the copyright paradigm would be to forcibly impose it through litigation. As a potential strategy, he pointed to the actions of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which filed thousands of lawsuits against consumers of pirated material during the 2000s, with the goal of instilling fear among the populace. But for the IMI to mimic such efforts would require both tremendous resources and the cooperation of the firm majority of Indian music companies, neither of which seemed likely. Widespread litigation would also require coordinated police efforts (hard to obtain when most officers viewed piracy as an insignificant distraction from more important issues, such as violent crime) and a smoothly operating court system (the time-frame for prosecuting a typical piracy litigation was seven to eight years, during which time any potential deterrent effect would be lost). Thus, the IMI’s attempt to combat the tide of piracy seemed to be stymied on all sides. In August 2010, I had an opportunity to check back with D’Souza for an update on the progress of the IMI’s efforts. In this second interview,

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D’Souza took a much more nuanced stance toward piracy, noting that both the IMI’s approach and his own personal perspective had shifted. Acknowledging that music piracy is not a phenomenon that can be contained under the current conditions, the IMI began to push for a revision of copyright laws that would make the discourse of intellectual property more comprehensible to the public. D’Souza acknowledged that Indian artists have, at best, an ambiguous stake when it comes to seeing their work (for which they have already been paid) widely distributed through pirate networks. This situation could be improved, he said, if laws were put in place to ensure that everyone involved in creative production maintained a royalty stake in the product. Thus, he argued, it would be possible to motivate particular actors, music directors, and musicians to appeal directly to consumers to acknowledge the value of their copyright. Consumers would then be more likely to respect intellectual property laws if they could put a face on them. If these laws could be changed, and the blueprint adjusted toward a more equitable distribution of benefits, then perhaps consumers would be more likely to embrace the copyright paradigm as a moral imperative.

Rhythm House and the History of Music Retail As I pointed out in Chapter 1, there is a tendency to view the music industry from a top-down (i.e., the recording companies’) perspective, and not in its entirety. Retail sales of these recording companies’ products have largely been ignored in India and elsewhere. Thus, there is relatively little information on the birth of the retail side of the Indian music industry. Most of the information about the earliest period comes via the scholarly analysis of advertisements and record company catalogs from the turn of the 20th century.13 From these advertisements, it is apparent that the first stores selling music hardware and recordings in the late 19th century were traders selling European luxury items (e.g., bicycles, sewing machines, umbrellas, perfumes), along with stores that sold Western instruments. These stores also entered exclusive distribution relationships with foreign music companies to sell the various playback technologies and content on multiple media formats. In a number of cases, once it became clear that the potential market for commodified music was huge, the retail business expanded to more local firms and their agents. In essence, these music companies co-branded themselves with these retail outlets in ways that benefited each company.14 Vibodh Parthasarathi has noted three key developments in the emergence of music retail (once again based upon advertising narratives). These provide insight into the early record stores in urban India: dedicated retail music stores that focused exclusively on the niche market of music machines and recordings; traders who built distribution and retail networks outside of the major cities in ways that suggested the beginnings of a pan-Indian music industry; and exclusive contracts negotiated by foreign lifestyle-goods companies, including HMV with Spencers in Chennai, and Orr’s Columbia

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House (2005, 184–85). As I noted earlier in this chapter, the first stage of the Indian recording industry was the battle over competing music reproduction formats based upon novelty value and the status that came from owning a luxury machine. Record companies paid less attention to the content of the recordings, at least until retailers communicated that many of their customers desired to play local content on their machines. Insofar as advertising imbued machines and recorded content with anthropomorphic features, it provided ideas about how these new products would fit into consumers’ social world. To this extent, Parthasarathi notes, retailers became critical intermediaries between customers and the music industry, not only by pointing out the feedback loop between machine sales and record sales (which became more apparent as catalogs expanded) and thus relaying their perceptions of customer desires, but also in “constructing a personae for the merchandize [sic]” (ibid., 186–87) in much the same way that Music Metropolis created a brand persona around which to sell music (see Chapter 4). As one of India’s longest running music stores, the Rhythm House store in Mumbai served as an outlet for producing and reinforcing musical values. The store was situated in an affluent area among many of the colonial and postcolonial architectural landmarks, which operated as the artistic and tourist center of the city.15 It is also conveniently located near the former HMV studio in the Fort district, where many famous evergreen Hindi film soundtracks were recorded for distribution on gramophone discs. The area is also known for the annual Kala Ghoda Arts Festival showcasing live music and dance performances along with other artistic displays. As such, this district operates as one cosmopolitan center in a global city.16 In terms of the prestige and innovation narratives explored above, Rhythm House was uniquely situated: it had the prestige of being one of India’s longest running music stores with a long list of celebrity clients, but it had also embraced innovations in genres and recording formats, as well as a distinctive sales presentation (from the Indian context) to weather the music industry’s historical transitions, as recordings shifted from being status objects to their contemporary ubiquity. Over the decades, the physical space of the store had undergone a number of spatial transformations that have suited the changing customer expectations, and evolving media formats, as the store adjusted to new forms and ideologies of retail in cosmopolitan India. Founded in the 1930s by Suleman Nensey, the store moved to its current location in the early 1940s. Unlike other music retailers of this period, the earliest shop focused on selling recordings rather than playback hardware and had a showroom with chairs and a table for customers to browse record catalogs. Two salesmen sat behind a counter, interacting with customers who would request albums to be played on a large hand-wound gramophone, or listen to them in a small, enclosed room near the store entrance. Recordings were stored on a mezzanine level; the salesmen downstairs called up the catalogue number of the desired record, which would be sent down to the showroom area

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through a dumb waiter. In 1948–49, the British Army Library occupying the adjoining shop vacated their portion of the building as the British demobilized after Indian independence. Suleman and his partner acquired the space, effectively doubling the size of the store. After extensive remodeling, the listening booth at the front of the store was demolished and four airconditioned listening cabins were built at the back of the store beneath the mezzanine level. In  addition, a radio department was established and many radio brands were stocked toward the front of the new area. In the early 1950s, Mahomedhussein “Mammoo” and Yusuf Curmally bought out Suleman’s partner and became half-owners with Suleman. Once vinyl-based 33 rpm, 45 rpm, and, later EPs became available, the store began to display album covers in the front showroom along with record catalogs, thus adding the potential for albums to be promoted through their accompanying visual representations. Later, in the 1950s, the four rooms in the rear of the store were repurposed as offices, and seven listening stations were built toward the front of the store. Rhythm House became famous for these private, air-conditioned listening cabins that afforded a space to listen to music (and to pursue other activities that often accompany music listening). Indeed, the cabins were a key feature of the store in one of the few advertisements that appeared in national print media (see Figure 2.2). Heavily graffiti-covered spaces containing a turntable, speakers, and a couch that could seat three or four customers, these cabins were one of the few spaces in the city that provided a private space for people to meet and achieve various states of intoxication, musical or otherwise. As the owner Mehmood Curmally related to me in 2013, in addition to being an important space to hang out for local Elphinstone College students on break, the cabins were likely the site of at least one conception and one memorable divorce (officiated by his uncle). Friends who remember this era appreciated that they could check out several demo albums from the front counter to listen to in the booth with their friends, without necessarily being expected to purchase the albums. For students in the nearby colleges, Rhythm House provided a place to meet between classes; for music lovers, it was one of the places to receive reliable advice on new music releases and albums to add to their collection (Nakul Mehta, phone interview with the author). While Rhythm House primarily sold international recordings in its early years, Hindi film music also entered the sales mix, eventually comprising approximately 30% of the store’s sales. In addition, the store began to develop its collection to serve other kinds of customers, including the niche clientele for Western classical musics. Due to high tariffs on certain kinds of imports after Indian Independence in 1947, locally pressed HMV records largely dominated what was sold in the store. That said, Rhythm House also imported albums, primarily EMI international recordings from England and Western classical recordings from Deutsch Gramophone. Beyond selling music recordings, Rhythm House was also a focal point for

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Figure 2.2 Advertisement for Rhythm House from Filmfare Magazine (December 26, 1952)—In addition to promoting the air-conditioned listening cabins, the ad creates an ironic juxtaposition of Gandhi’s spinning wheel (charkha) and a gramophone record. The spinning wheel is associated with the Indian Independence movement, particularly the socioeconomic ideals of national self-sufficiency through individual production, valuing basic human needs over commodity desires. By contrast, the gramophone record epitomizes dependence upon a recorded medium that is produced and distributed as a luxury commodity for music consumption. The HMV (His Master’s Voice) logo featuring Nipper the dog listening into a Gramophone horn is particularly noteworthy in this image. In addition to indexing the availability of HMV products in the store, the logo has a long association with the international record company and the period of centralized, capital-intensive distribution music recordings that waned in 1980s India.

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Figure 2.3 Interior Shot of a Rhythm House Listening Cabin (c. 1974)—Pictured from left to right are Ajay Desai, Himanshu Choksi, and Nakul Mehta, all of whom were high school students at the time. Photograph taken by Abhijit Ganguli.

live performances in Mumbai. For decades the store had been a ticket vendor for musical events at the National Center for the Performing arts and other performance venues in Mumbai. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, the store distributed Rhythm-House labeled cassettes of Indian classical musicians, with the liner notes written by one of the co-owners. Like other retail spaces, the 6000 sq. ft. store had undergone a number of dramatic changes in the organization of its sales space and the formats that it sold. After having been a counter store catering to a specialized clientele, then later using bin organization with listening cabins, the store shifted to its last configuration in the late 1980s, after HMV sponsored the current owner for travel to London in 1985 to learn the business and help update the store’s selling practices. On his return to Mumbai he argued that the listening booths were no longer necessary and that the store could sell more albums by opening the space to the possibilities afforded by the cassette era’s proliferating music labels and catering to a new kind of customer who was not interested in hanging around the store to listen to albums. This third major transformation of the space led to another renovation: the removal of the listening booths and the shift to the rack and shelving system that existed in 2015 (see Figure 2.4), even though the racks’ locations and the recording formats they contain changed over time. In its final incarnation, Rhythm House might best be labeled a media store as much as a music store. While music recordings on various music formats (e.g., CD, MP3-CD, vinyl) comprised a significant amount of the

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Figure 2.4 Rhythm House (Mumbai) sales floor in January 2015—The photo is taken from the northwestern corner of the store, pointing toward the mezzanine level where back office operations take place. Photograph taken by author.

space, music was not the only product or service available in the store. The last iteration included a collection of thousands of films on DVD and Video CD (VCD), a small selection of books on music and film, and electronic audio accessories.17 Thus, it is not surprising that by 2015 music recordings occupied only 30% of the total floor space. Of these recordings, the store’s core music business largely revolved around international genres, Hindi film songs, and Indian classical musics. Despite the transformations in the Indian music industry, Rhythm House remained an archetype of a particular moment in retail sales, even as it served as a prototype that organized retail chains emulate. That is, Rhythm House’s location, clientele, and history made it an attractive model not only for music stores, but also for other kinds of retail. For example, as one bookstore entrepreneur based in Kolkata noted in a 2014 newspaper article, “My vision is to make this one of the best bookstores in the country. Like Rhythm House in Bombay is a benchmark for certain things in India. Or the former HMV store on Oxford Street in London” (Chakraborty 2014). Equating Rhythm House with the internationally famous Oxford Street HMV store might be a bit hyperbolic, yet it indexed the landmark status of this institution in Mumbai until it closed in February 2016. In the following chapters I turn to my ethnographic research in more Indian retail and market contexts. The outline of industry narratives and their historical context provided in this chapter will be vital to understanding

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the choices and value associations that confronted local shopkeepers and their customers. Understanding how individual music shoppers navigate these issues will in turn deepen our understanding of the different value narratives that adhere to music commodities. In short, even as different industry stakeholders often disagreed about the value of music recordings, one of the central disagreements emerged from the tension between how prestige and innovation are valued. In various retail contexts, shopkeepers and customers mapped out their own interpretations and responses to these social negotiations as they adapted to a music industry that was already in a state of decline in the early 2000s.

Notes 1. For more discussion of this period of the Indian music industry, see Kinnear 1994, 2000; Farrell 1999; Parthasarathi 2005; Hughes 2002, 2014. 2. As Gerry Farrell (1999) has noted, the alienation of music from the socially questionable bodies of courtesans, as well as Indian classical musicians, created new opportunities to hear music divorced from its urban social contexts and liberated these new audiences from the social taint that came from interacting with performers from dubious classes. 3. See also the discussion of contemporary music genres in Chapter 5. 4. In 2010 the music label was hived off from the rest of RPG as a dimension of a family feud following the patriarch’s death. By 2013, one brother’s company offshoot had licensed the entirety of the Saregama reproduction rights to Sony Music. 5. Peter Manuel (1993) has documented this democratizing effect in his influential book on Cassette Culture. Manuel does include some caveats about this proliferation of new commercial music—for example, he describes how the mass marketing of certain genres of Indian folk music via cassettes led to an eroticization of these genres that was not a component of song performances in more traditional contexts. Manuel also suggests that the spread of cassette technology may have abetted the dissemination of Hindu nationalist ideologies. 6. For more discussion of the bhangra genre of music and dance, see Roy 2010 and Schreffler 2012, 2013. For a discussion of Sufipop, see Manuel 2008 and Beaster-Jones 2014a. 7. See Keith Negus (1992, 1999) for details on the marketing strategies that multinational conglomerates used to peddle a small portion of their catalogs to large, heterogeneous populations. 8. See Juluri 2004. 9. Hit men were hired to assassinate Kumar, it was alleged, because T-Series had produced and distributed counterfeit cassettes of the soundtrack for the 1994 superhit Hum Aapke Hain Koun…!, thus undercutting what would have been a record-breaking success for a rival domestic music company. 10. For more on the analog/digital distinction and the transition from cassettes to compact discs, see Garafalo 1999 and McLeod 2005. 11. The production of this counterfeit packaging was not even illegal under Indian copyright laws, according to Savio D’Souza, Secretary General of the Indian Music Industry trade group (interview with the author).

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12. See also Morcom 2008. 13. For excellent descriptions of this early period, see Kinnear 1994, 2000; Farrell 1999; Hughes 2002, 2014; Parthasarathi 2005. 14. Vibodh Parthasarathi (2005) notes, however, that GCI was also willing to undermine local stores by selling directly to local agents, thus undercutting the prices that it gave its authorized dealers. 15. These landmarks include the National Gallery of Modern Art, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum), and the Jehangir Art Gallery, as well as the nearby High Court Building, St. Thomas Cathedral, Bombay University, Elphinstone University, Gateway of India, and Taj Mahal Place and Hotel, among many others. 16. See Zitzewitz 2014 for more details on this district and its arts festival. 17. In describing the history of the store, Yusuf Curmally noted to me that the proprietors of Rhythm House also brought the first Wurlitzer jukebox into Mumbai and turned it into a side business. They founded the Music Machines company to import jukeboxes for Irani restaurants, but ran into conflicts over revenue sharing. In addition, the Maharaja of Baroda also saw the jukebox and was interested in installing one in his palace; Mammoo and Mehmood traveled to Baroda to show him how to use it. Once the maharaja realized that he no longer needed to hire an orchestra, he bought two machines for his palace (interview with the author).

3

“Is Se Kuch Sasta Hai?” Music Commodities, Circulation, and Value in Indian Markets

Central Bazaar is a busy market in the central-Indian city Bhopal, one of the cosmopolitan centers of the state Madhya Pradesh. The shop-filled alleys are crowded and narrow; scooters, motorcycles, and autorickshaws struggle to make their way amid pedestrians and the occasional cow. Bollywood film songs and Hindu bhajan (devotional songs) echo throughout the market from competing sound systems. The rich smells of food, spices, and incense often mix with the metallic overtones of car exhaust and the stench of ripe sewage. Brightly colored cloth adorns the men and women in the market as well as the clothing merchants’ stalls. The shops are mostly clustered together on the basis of what they sell: one area is oriented toward dry goods—small spaces filled with large jute sacks of flour, beans, sugar, and spices; a nearby portion is dedicated to metal and kitchen wares; another area includes stores that sell books, gifts, and stationery. Near this latter area was Siddharth’s Music Store, a fairly typical place to shop for music recordings and other media in urban India.1 The exterior of Siddharth’s Music Store was nondescript: a wall of wood and thick glass that displays promotional posters and a few of the DVDs and CDs sold in the store. Above this window was a sign indicating the name of the store and, hidden above the sign, steel shutters that were pulled down and padlocked to the ground each evening in order to make the shop all but impenetrable when it was closed. A single glass door opened to a 600  square foot space painted white and illuminated by bare fluorescent bulbs. In order to maintain a reasonable temperature during business hours, the door remained open, while ceiling and box fans facilitated air circulation. Consequently, road noise occasionally filtered into the shop, along with the dust that is endemic in this part of India. Siddharth’s was known for having Bhopal’s largest collection of aṅgrezī (English-language rock and pop), Bollywood film songs, and remix albums. On an early Sunday afternoon in 2010, the store was filled with customers in their teens and twenties. They might have been browsing for a classic Bryan Adams recording, dropping off a list of songs to be added to a custom cassette or CD, shopping for videos of their favorite Bollywood songs, or browsing the collection of counterfeit Sony-PlayStation games. Siddharth had a relatively large collection of “original” music in stock, and he was able

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to acquire almost any industry product that one might have wanted from local distributors (albums that were not regularly available in Bhopal might have taken a little longer to arrive). In addition, however, a complex of electronic equipment was hidden from customer view: a stereo system, CD player, cassette dubbing deck, television, and computer with a broadband Internet connection. This equipment was used for checking the quality of recordings, making mixed cassettes and CDs, downloading songs and videos from BitTorrent sites, and transferring digital media to mobile phones. A wooden display counter with a glass top bisected the room and enabled customers to browse a portion of Siddharth’s music collection. Yet the counter contained only a fraction of the music available there: most of the store’s physical media was hidden away in cabinets or stored digitally on the hard drive of the shop computer. There were no signs to indicate categories of music, but the recordings were organized based on genre, with one genre gradually flowing into the next. Regular customers usually knew where to search for music they might like, or they were able to come directly to Siddharth or his assistant to ask for help in finding an album. Siddharth did not keep an inventory of his store, but his memory was quite good and he was usually able to find a specific customer request within minutes. Customers who asked about a genre of music rather than a particular album would have received a drawer of media to browse through on the countertop. Incongruously resting among the stacks of cassettes and CDs on a back counter of the store was an electric clothing iron. While Siddharth provided many services for his customers, clothes-pressing was not one of them. Rather, like other Bhopali store owners, Siddharth and his assistant frequently opened new, “original” recordings to make copies for customers and friends. They also preserved this music on their computer’s hard drive so that they could continue to make copies as the need arose. They used the clothing iron to melt the shrink-wrap and re-seal the album’s packaging, thus (ostensibly) disguising this use. The re-sealed recordings were sold at the same price as new, unopened albums—but customers who knew how to ask were able to receive copies of these media at a fraction of their original price. This example of clothing-iron-enabled reproduction indicates the multifarious and sometimes conflicting values that adhere to cultural commodities in what Indian economists have labeled the “family-run” or “unorganized” retail sector. Obtaining cheap, counterfeit media is desirable to some customers, but many others continue to prefer fully packaged, industry-produced recordings. The manifestations of these diverging values were apparent in the spaces where the goods were displayed as well as in the interactions between sellers and customers. Music store owners like Siddharth distinguished between—and spatially separated—their “original” music from their counterfeit/copied stock, reinforcing the greater social and economic value that is assigned to original media. Like my interlocutors, I use the term “original recordings” to refer to the shrink-wrapped media that the store

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owner had purchased from a local or metropolitan distributor, which was lawfully manufactured by the author or by the author’s legal representative. Because original recordings ostensibly have the highest-quality packaging and sound, and because they are unambiguously legal to distribute, they were the goods that were displayed most prominently in the store. Original recordings are marked as legitimate by an Indian Music Industry (IMI) hologram, verifying their status within traditional modes of circulation, where customers identify with the commercial system and profits flow back to music companies (and sometimes artists). Yet it was extremely common for local retailers to covertly sell counterfeit recordings alongside legitimate goods. Compilation albums (i.e., “mixed tapes”) were an important part of this market, but many of the “non-original” recordings were straightforward copies of industry albums that were sold for significantly lower prices than the originals. While these counterfeit copies might be good enough to deceive some customers, most often the purchaser is fully cognizant of—and complicit in—this subversion of copyright law. The distribution of counterfeit media in India is nominally illegal, albeit rarely punished. The practice takes place with varying degrees of conspicuousness in different markets. For instance, Ravi Sundaram (2010) has noted that the underground Palika Bazaar in Delhi can be a treacherous site for anti-piracy crusaders, and my own experience in that location verified that there was no attempt to hide the existence of pirated merchandise. In Bhopal and other Indian locales, however, transactions for counterfeit media are likely to be more surreptitious. A customer’s phrasing and body language could reveal an interest in counterfeit material and initiate such a transaction. For example, a customer might ask for the soundtrack to a film, “Rang De Basanti ki DVD hai, kya?” (Do you have the Rang De Basanti DVD?). Then, upon being handed the recording, she might ask, “is se kuchh sasta hai?” (Do you have something cheaper than this?)—a covert way of asking for a counterfeit copy. After evaluating the customer, the shopkeeper might provide a copy, or might disavow the existence of any such material in his store. In other sales contexts, a shopkeeper who senses that a customer is reluctant to part with her money on a particular recording might suggest, “copy bhi milega” (Copies are also available). This suggestion might lead to price negotiations, or it might lead to the departure of a customer who is only interested in buying “original” recordings. In addition to distributing original and counterfeit media, local music stores provided a number of different services to customers in their neighborhood and city. Many music store owners created compilation recordings that drew from disparate albums and formats as a kind of value-added service for their customers. They used the music collection in their store as a repository and mobilized it to create custom albums that suited convenience, thrift, and customer needs. Another common service was the conversion of media from one format to another to suit the hardware that the customer owns. This might have included ostensible “upgrades”

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to new technology (e.g., vinyl to cassette, cassette to CD, videocassette to video-CD), or it might also have included “downgrades” to older technology (e.g., CD to cassette, DVD to video-CD). Local music stores were also frequently a site for exchanging music and media without the expectation of cash payment (i.e.,  gift exchange) as a way to reinforce personal relationships and to demonstrate shared interests and tastes. When all of the various practices of family-run music stores in India are taken into account, it is reasonable to assert that these shopkeepers functioned not only as music distributers, but also as local producers of new products and new kinds of musical community.

The Social Life of Recordings In this chapter, I describe the exchange, reproduction, and sale of music in a variety of “unorganized” market contexts in Bhopal and Mumbai. These locales, including family-run shops, kiosks, and street hawkers, are familiar shopping experiences for people all over India. In the first section of this book, I described some of the values that are already under negotiation long before music recordings reach the shelves; in this chapter, I track the additional values that come into play as music commodities circulate in local markets. Following Arjun Appadurai’s (1986) interest in the “social life of things,” I unpack what one might call the “social life of musical recordings,” that is, the way these recordings take on new values through their participation in specific cultural contexts. There are two interlocking arguments that I make about the construction of musical value in these markets. The first is that the availability of sophisticated music reproduction technology has led to profound and at times paradoxical changes in the way that music recordings are valued. If we acknowledge (as most consumers have) that the economic value of an “original” recording is now almost purely defined by its packaging and legality rather than by its sound quality, then it is easy to see that the values assigned to “original” music are derived from aspirations toward certain kinds of social legitimacy and ethical positioning. The values assigned to counterfeit media follow the same parameters but emerge from different outlooks on social utility. My second argument is that shopkeepers in the “unorganized” sector respond to these conflicting values by enacting a complex and creative dance that blurs the lines among the distribution, consumption, and production of musical goods—rendering the divides between these commercial processes ever more ambiguous. By examining the circulation of music recordings from the perspective of everyday business practices, we can see the silhouettes of human sociability as people assign values and meanings to these material objects. The exchange of money is only one aspect of these interactions. Following the work of Marcel Mauss (1990 [1950]), anthropologists have traditionally distinguished between gift exchange (transactions that reproduce social structures through the maintenance of debt obligations and reciprocity) and

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commodity exchange (a system mediated by the marketplace that is ostensibly liberated from most social obligations).2 However, a number of scholars have taken an interest in the way that objects can blur the line between being commodities or gifts as they circulate through social networks, moving fluidly in and out of commodity status to suit differing social purposes (Appadurai 1986; Weiner 1992; van Binsbergen and Geschiere 2005; Taylor 2007). Rejecting the purported lack of obligation in commodity transactions, I work from the assumption that social relations are requisite for the performance of any kind of transaction in the marketplace. Some transactions might downplay, though not eliminate, these social relations—such exchanges emphasize the commodity status of a music recording and require only a minimum of interpersonal recognition in order to proceed. Other market transactions, however, subvert or entirely supersede this commodity definition and its economic narratives. For instance, depending on the relationship with a shopkeeper, a customer might have different options presented to him when he arrives at the store, in addition to different prices. A regular customer who has developed a loyal relationship with the store owner might have access to the CD compilation service that is unavailable to another, unknown customer. A friend might receive an MP3-CD for free (or for the cost of a blank CD), a service that a store owner would not provide to a well-dressed customer who could clearly afford to buy original recordings. This ethnographic perspective on transactions in local music stores is a useful contrast to the official discourses of intellectual property promulgated by the Indian Music Industry (IMI) that I described in the previous chapter. From the perspective of this institution, many of the practices described here would be unequivocally labeled as “piracy” and regarded as blatantly immoral. Here, I would like to focus on the street-level perspective and the way that easily reproducible music has been mobilized to create and reinforce new modes of sociability. In the following section I provide an overview of the discourses of musical value in the Bhopali marketplace and the diverging desires that come into play in evaluating music recordings. I then present five ethnographic vignettes that reveal the ways in which shopkeepers negotiate these desires and how their practices eclipse the fuzzy boundaries of distribution, consumption, and production.

Thrift; Or, the Value of Media Commodities in Bhopal When I asked about the production of unauthorized copies in the local markets, Amit (one of my shopkeeping interlocutors) stated unambiguously that the motivation of customers who buy pirated media was to avoid the much higher cost of buying originals. In addition, he suggested, the distinction between original and copy was not a matter of great concern for many customers. Amit was giving voice to a typically unstated assumption held by many Bhopalis: that music and media were simply not important enough to merit a serious investment of household resources. This outlook

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was especially true of new Hindi film songs, in an era where the proliferation of new music means that hit songs make only a momentary impact on the public consciousness. Amit succinctly described a new film song: “āyā aur gayā. Bas!” (It came, it went. That’s it!). He went on to further explain his customers’ intransigence: “Original recordings are more expensive and piracy is endemic. CDs that you buy from me are 150 rupees, and you can get pirated CDs for 20 rupees. It’s not something that you eat … it’s something you listen to. So a man thinks, ‘fine, if I can enjoy it for 15 or 20 rupees, why spend 150?’” (interview with the author, in Hindi). Arguments about media pricing are commonly heard throughout the contemporary world either in support of unauthorized reproduction (as a form of resistance to global media oligarchies) or in opposition to such reproduction (to maintain the industry and make music profitable).3 In the Bhopali case, comparing the cost of media to daily wages helps to explain why a large portion of the Indian public elected not to buy original material. In 2003–2005, the minimum wage for day laborers in Bhopal, after commissions were paid, was approximately ₹80 per day (or about U.S. $1.78 per day at the median exchange rate in 2003). The cost of an original cassette for a Hindi film soundtrack averaged about ₹50, and other music genres were even more expensive. From the perspective of a laborer, it made little sense to spend most of a day’s wages on a single original cassette, when it was possible to obtain 10 to 15 pirated albums on an MP3-CD at a much lower cost. This economic justification was readily acknowledged by Indian music store owners as a legitimate concern of the laboring classes. But not everyone in Bhopal belongs to the laboring classes, and the absolute economic argument only goes so far in explaining the prevalence of counterfeit recordings. Many Bhopalis who could have easily afforded to buy original music chose not to do so. To a large extent, the difficulty of selling original music in Bhopal stems from local attitudes. Indian economists euphemistically label cities like Bhopal “price sensitive markets”—a statement that describes not only a perceived lack of buying power but also a local cultural ideology in which thriftiness is regarded as more admirable than luxury consumption of certain kinds of commodities. Whereas cities of comparable size such as Jaipur, Nagpur, and Lucknow are perceived as having a more cosmopolitan atmosphere, Bhopal is widely regarded by economists—and residents of metropolitan cities—as being “provincial,” making it less attractive for organized retail chains like Music Metropolis.4 Local commentators largely reinforce this perspective. When I was discussing the Bhopali market with Siddharth, he noted that among the business community, locals had a reputation for being so parsimonious (kaṅjūs) that “they would try to barter a five-rupee meal (thālī) down to three.” A five-rupee meal is affordable for virtually anyone, thus Siddharth was suggesting that Bhopalis are people who enjoy getting a bargain regardless of the original price. Kuldeep, the owner of Intersection Music Store, pointed out with amusement that Domino’s Pizza had tested the Bhopali market in 2003 but

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had closed within a month because customers were less excited about the novelty of eating at this international restaurant than they were about discussing the price of the pizza. “Bhopal is India’s largest village,” he lamented, albeit with a certain pride. Young shop owners like Siddharth and Kuldeep who belonged to India’s “new middle class” often compared Bhopal unfavorably to Indore, a city they also called “Little Mumbai.” Four hours away by car or bus, the manufacturing city Indore has approximately twice the population of Bhopal, and its market supported multiple large music stores, international fast-food chains, car dealerships, luxury hotels, and so forth. In the estimation of these Bhopali shopkeepers, the attitude of Indore’s consumers was different—more sophisticated, more cosmopolitan (which in their terms meant that customers spent money on non-essentials)—and hence Indore could support a greater variety of retail stores. The figure of the parsimonious and provincial Bhopali consumer was thus offered as an explanation for why sales of original media in local markets were eclipsed by pirated content. Siddharth frequently suggested that “people in Mumbai might buy things at maximum retail price (MRP), but they definitely won’t here.” In addition to justifying the sale of counterfeit material, this statement highlighted one of the peculiarities of shopping for goods of any sort in India: customers expected local store owners to sell their stock for at least 10 percent below the listed price. Insofar as bartering for nearly everything is a part of the daily routine in Indian markets, the MRP on pre-packaged consumer goods is understood as merely a starting point for negotiations. This expected discount is compounded by the convoluted route that recordings often take to reach a local market, with each middle man extracting profit from the music commodity so that an original ₹50 cassette might ultimately yield only ₹5 in profit to the store owner. As I will show in Chapter 5, organized retailers such as Music Metropolis developed more direct supply chains with music companies and could thus extract higher profit. By contrast, the sale of cheap, unauthorized copies was fairly lucrative for local shops, especially if they were produced in the store. A ₹30 CD containing MP3s from 10 different film soundtracks could provide as much as ₹20 in profit to the store, generating a greater value for both retailer and customer. In addition to the value that Bhopalis place on thriftiness, sellers of original media also have to confront the widespread assumption that entertainment as a whole was of lesser value than other displays of prosperity (e.g., clothing, jewelry, etc.). As I noted in Chapter 1, many cultural elites in India have long considered commercial entertainment as an unnecessary luxury, if not an outright danger to the national fabric. Some Bhopalis certainly adhere to this view, and by refusing to spend a greater portion of their income on original recordings they give voice to an attitude about social priorities: quality of food, clothing, and shelter ought to come before commercial entertainment. This attitude, widespread throughout India, also helps to explain why copyright enforcement has been lax, even while entertainment taxes are as

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much as 60 percent of a film’s ticket price (Ganti 2004). Although they might not explicitly decry the discourses of commercial media institutions, some consumers certainly resist music industry narratives by insisting that entertainment has a relatively low social value and by ignoring the moral imperatives claimed by anti-piracy campaigns. The spread of music reproduction technology in Indian markets dovetailed with these social attitudes that downplay the value of commercial entertainment, creating a collapse in the prices of physical media. As counterfeiting became entrenched, music companies and retailers reduced their prices to compete with pirates, which led pirates to reduce their prices even further, and so forth. As a consequence, as one merchandising manager at Music Metropolis pointed out to me, the profit margins for music in India shrank dramatically in the 2000s. In his words, music sales shifted from being a “value” (high profit) market to being a “volume” (low profit) market.5 This transition to a volume market for original recordings was potentially navigable for well-established retailers in larger cities; for smaller, family-run music stores, such a transition was a near impossibility. One result of the very low profit margins on original music was that family-run stores had to branch out into other goods with better profits, such as clothing or audio-video accessories. Of the store owners whom I visited regularly in Bhopal, Amit sold clothing and maintained a video-CD and DVD rental business, Kuldeep sold appliances such as refrigerators and air conditioners, Siddharth had plans to begin selling gifts in addition to music, and Salman operated a small recording studio. Many local music store owners also felt that they were obligated to participate in selling pirated media in order to keep their businesses afloat and remain competitive with the hawkers who, in some cases, were squatting just outside their doors. Store owners were well aware of the illegalities involved, which is why they were cautious and did not deal openly in counterfeit media. But they also needed the revenue, and they felt that if they did not distribute pirated material they would soon be overwhelmed by those who did.

The Ambiguities of Selling Music: Five Ethnographic Vignettes Commercial products do not end their lifespan at the point of sale; to the contrary, it might be argued that the continued circulation and use of these products is the most interesting part of their existence. Arjun Appadurai has emphasized this point by stating that “consumption is more than a terminus for production, and more than a footnote to its social logics” (2005, 61). The following ethnographic vignettes flesh out this insight, showing that consumption takes many different forms, and industry products continue to have a vibrant social circulation long after they are ostensibly “consumed” (i.e., purchased from the manufacturer or distributor). Each vignette describes quotidian shopping experiences to reveal the complexity

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of consumer expectations in different Indian marketplaces—from the highly specialized knowledge of a local shopkeeper who serves connoisseurs, to petty commodity production by a cassette dubbing shop, to counterfeit media sold by street hawkers. From the standpoint of intellectual property, each vignette illustrates different modes of distribution, ranging from legitimate to quasi-legitimate to outright illegitimate. These examples reveal how sellers circulate differing information about their products, engage in diverse forms of sociability, and develop a variety of relationships with their customers—ultimately demonstrating the slipperiness of terms like distribution, consumption, and production when used to describe their activities. Amit (Owner, Sangeet Mahal, Bhopal) Sangeet Mahal (Music Palace) music store is located in Madhya Market in central Bhopal. The main roads leading into and out of this market are paved and carry a heavy traffic of trucks, mini-buses, cars, and rickshaws; however, most of the interior roads and alleys of the market remain unpaved and are often full of pedestrians. Like other Indian markets, the geographical center of Madhya Market is a movie theater, which is surrounded by snack and juice shops, computer and mobile phone shops, midrange hotels and restaurants, and jewelry and clothing stores. Sangeet Mahal is located near this central area, on the ground floor of a shopping complex. It shares many characteristics with family-run stores all over India. The exterior is nondescript, with a few displays of promotional posters, a sign indicating the name of the store, and steel shutters that can be rolled down at night. A single glass door opens to a 400-square-foot space that was once painted glossy white but has become stained and smudged over the years. Bare fluorescent ceiling lights illuminate the glass counter that bisects the room, creating a barrier between the customers and the shelves of media.6 The cassettes that fill the shelves on the wall behind the counter are stacked 12 high, two stacks deep (see Figure 3.1). As was the case in Siddharth’s shop, there are no signs to indicate how the media is organized. Amit, the store’s owner, has a penchant for classic Hindi film songs and ghazal (a genre of Urdu poetry set to song), and these recordings make up the bulk of his stock. In addition, however, Amit keeps a small selection of more recent Hindi film soundtracks and aṅgrezī albums (English-language pop) to fill in the gaps. Media that cannot fit into his store space are kept in a nearby warehouse, and Amit can fulfill a much larger range of customer requests through his monthly meetings with distributors in Mumbai. Due to the store design and spatial limitations, Amit and his two assistants mediate all customer interactions with merchandise. In my visits to Sangeet Mahal, I frequently observed customers asking for an obscure playback singer and Amit finding three or more cassettes almost immediately for them to peruse. For regular customers, he would often suggest recordings of other, related singers or films that he believed they might find interesting.

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Figure 3.1 Sangeet Mahal (Bhopal) November 2003—Note the stacks of cassettes and CDs behind the counter, the titles of which are largely unreadable by the customer. Cassettes were stacked two deep on most of the shelves. Photograph taken by the author.

Amit’s encyclopedic knowledge of Indian popular music, a result of the 35 years he has worked as a music retailer, is one of the central draws that keep customers coming back to Sangeet Mahal. This expertise is indexed by the deference that his older customers give to his recommendations. Even teenagers who come in to ask for the latest Bryan Adams compilation acknowledged Amit’s connoisseurship. However, he told me on several occasions that he preferred to work with connoisseurs and collectors, who would ask about a little-known recording of a Hindi film song. And during our conversations at his counter, these connoisseurs readily acknowledged that Amit was the man who could find even the most obscure songs from the most obscure films, who had deep knowledge of music hardware and could make purchasing suggestions, and who had a network of contacts all over northern India to acquire items that were not otherwise available in Bhopal. Amit’s shop was thus the first place that well-educated Bhopali music fans visited to fill their needs. As a connoisseur, Amit expressed a distaste for piracy and a desire to sell only original music; however, he sometimes found himself overwhelmed by the demands of the local market. His dilemma is best illustrated by

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an interaction that I observed in 2004. One afternoon a woman in her late 20s walked through the door, along with a young girl. After waiting patiently for Amit to finish the order he was taking over the phone from one of his regular customers, the woman stepped forward. She explained that she was a teacher in a local school and was looking for a specific song to use in a play that her class was performing. Amit quickly navigated the stacks of cassettes on the shelves behind him, located the recording, and set it down on the front counter. The teacher picked up the cassette and turned it over to confirm that the song that she needed was listed on the back. Then looking up at Amit, she mused out loud that she had only a small budget to work with. Couldn’t he just make a copy of the song for her? This is not possible, he told her, because his store does not make copies. But if she wants, he could give her the cassette on credit. This customer was gauging the availability of copy services in his store, but because he did not know the customer—and likely because I was present in the store at the time—he refused her request. After briefly consulting with the girl, the woman agreed to buy the recording on credit. Asking for the woman’s name and the name of her school, Amit wrote out a receipt for the cassette and asked her to sign it. In all of the transactions I had seen that day, this was the first receipt I had seen him create.7 The teacher took the cassette and her copy of the receipt, thanked Amit, and ushered the girl out the front door. As Amit and I resumed our conversation that had been interrupted by the phone call, he mentioned in an offhand manner that this sort of request for copied music happens almost every day. Indeed, in the two hour period that he and I talked about music that afternoon, three other customers came in asking him to make “mixed” cassettes for them and were refused. My observation of Amit’s assistant recording a compilation cassette on the other side of the shop, however, belied the owner’s claim that his store did not make copies. At other times, I overheard interactions between Amit’s assistants and customers that suggested an order was being placed for a dubbed cassette. And when he told customers that he did not produce compilation cassettes while I was present in his store, more than one customer expressed a little surprise. Like many of the music store owners that I met in Bhopal, Amit was understandably suspicious of my motives. Developing trust with Bhopali music store owners proved to be a long-term project. At the start, most were willing to discuss some of the basics, such as their ordering procedures, which cassettes were selling well at a particular moment, what sorts of customers they saw in the store, what sort of (original) inventory they carried, and so forth. But they were hesitant to comment on some of the other activities that I observed in their stores. With several of my interlocutors, there was an absolute disavowal of any activities that could be construed as piracy until I had worked with them for over a year. As time passed, some of the other store owners became more open about the scope of their activities and provided more details about the services they provided in their store.

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For fully plausible reasons, however, Amit was never willing to discuss his likely participation in this informal economy. Amit’s store represents one ideal of the local, family-owned shop in India, insofar as he provides the kind of legitimate services one might expect to find in an Indian music store, including the sale of original media, video rental, good advice, and special ordering. Even if he does provide the occasional mixed cassette for his customers, Amit clearly focuses on the sale of original recordings and has, on some level, a moral repugnance toward pirated media. Moreover, he has a solid reputation as being the most knowledgeable music store owner in Bhopal. His customers are loyal, and they trust his advice. Amit is thus one of the cornerstones of the culture of music connoisseurship in Bhopal. His customers are unusually enthusiastic about paying for original recordings, and they regard time spent discussing music in Sangeet Mahal as having a significant social value. Because of these attributes of customer loyalty and perceived social value, stores like Amit’s were among the few in Bhopal that were likely to survive the entrance of an organized retailer like Music Metropolis or the disruptions created by the rise of mobile phones as a playback technology. Salman (Owner, Geet Jagah, Bhopal) Geet Jagah (Song Spot) was located on a busy intersection in Bhopal’s old city. This store did not sell any original media at all, but rather provided cassette dubbing and compilation services for the local market. Two walls of the tiny converted barbershop were lined with cassettes, each of which had a colored tag attached to the spine (see Figure 3.2). A third wall contained two dubbing cassette decks, a record player, and a number of LPs. Although Salman, the owner, cleaned the space frequently, dust constantly filtered in from the road outside and a thick layer of it covered most of the cassettes. Salman accounted for each recording in his shop in well-worn books that not only provided a quick reference to each and every album, but also enabled him to find individual songs as needed. An entrepreneur who operated several small, affiliated businesses, Salman opened Geet Jagah in the late 1980s. He first made a business of converting LP records to audiocassette for his customers, transferring music from an expensive medium to a more accessible, inexpensive format. His business gradually transitioned toward cassette-to-cassette dubbing, but he still maintains a stock of old LPs in the store. When I talked to Salman in 2005, he recognized that his customers’ technological needs were changing yet again—he needed to be making MP3-CDs, but he did not yet have a computer that would allow him to perform such conversions. Geet Jagah operated almost explicitly as a lending library for music, from which customers were able to obtain songs to suit their short-term needs. Salman’s core business was the creation of personalized compilation cassettes drawn from the stock of albums in his store. For example, one morning two young boys entered the shop, one of them clutching an unlabeled

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Figure 3.2 Geet Jagah (Bhopal) January 2004—The number system on the spines of these cassettes corresponded to an inventory notebook that the owner kept, in which he cross-listed items by cassette, song, artist, and music director. All of these records were written by hand. Photograph taken by the author.

cassette. Thrusting the cassette at Salman, the boy requested that a new film song be added to the end of it. Familiar with this currently popular song, Salman selected a cassette from his archive, removed the dust cloth covering his old but reliable dubbing equipment, and cued the cassette to the song. After a brief period of high-pitched squealing from the equipment, he returned the tape to the boys, accepted a five-rupee coin (approximately $0.11), and replaced the dust cloth. As the boys left, Salman reminded me that few of his customers are interested in more than one or two songs from any particular Hindi film soundtrack, so it makes little sense for them to spend ₹50 or more on an entire cassette. In essence, his clients rejected the album-centric production strategies of the music industry, as well as their pricing structures. These customers see little value in owning full, original cassettes, especially considering the transient popularity of many songs. It was quite likely that before long, these boys would be back with the same battered cassette to record yet another new song over the one that they had just purchased from Salman. For more than 15 years, Salman had kept meticulous hand-written records in which he tracked his stock and cross-referenced it by song name, music director, singer, etc. As a result, he had a tremendous knowledge of

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the history of Hindi film songs, as well as the merits of particular brands of audiocassettes, their relative longevity, the parts that tend to fail, and how to repair them. Salman’s business relied on this knowledge and meticulous recordkeeping, along with his ability to provide fast and inexpensive alternatives to buying expensive soundtracks. As a kind of local music producer, he used his own knowledgeable purchases of industry recordings to augment his collection and provide value to potential customers. Salman’s practices decisively undermined the standard models of production-distributionconsumption. Because he did not sell his original recordings, he would generally be considered a consumer rather than a distributor; however, he was clearly an entrepreneur and the recordings that he owned re-entered circulation through his business practices. Salman’s music-reproduction hardware enabled him to generate additional value from his recordings, not only through direct copying but also through creative uses by which he could reasonably be regarded as a producer. In addition to this dubbing business, Salman mobilized his music collection in the course of recording and distributing Islamic sermons, Urdu poetry readings (mushaiyra), audio advertisements for shopping centers and political candidates, and special effects for local theatrical productions. These secondary uses, which are widespread throughout India, disrupt any attempt to measure the actual size of the Indian music industry or the rate of unauthorized reproduction. Kuldeep (Owner, Intersection Music Store, Bhopal) Dakshin Bazaar (South Market) is a crowded shopping center in Bhopal that caters to the new middle classes, and especially to the more youthful subset of this demographic. Most of the shops in the area sell clothing, jewelry, and consumer electronics; the market also boasts of two gyms, several cybercafés, and a variety of fast-food vendors and restaurants. The local business owners embrace a vibrant and edgy atmosphere in an effort to capture a portion of the disposable income of the local youth—and, judging by the crowds, they are largely successful in this endeavor. Dakshin Bazaar contained several kiosks that had small collections of cassettes and provide dubbing services similar to Salman’s. In addition, however, this market was home to Kuldeep’s Intersection Music Store. As I mentioned in the first chapter, Kuldeep attempted to emulate the cosmopolitan feel of the Music Metropolis chain stores in order to attract the attention of affluent youth who might otherwise shop for music in Indore, Delhi, or Mumbai. He painted his shop in trendy orange and black, used similar fonts for his signs, incorporated fashionable metal shelving, and provided two expensive Nakamichi listening posts on the opposing walls. In contrast to other music store owners in Bhopal, Kuldeep encouraged his customers to browse and handle his stock directly, rather than mediating their interactions with the music (see Figure 3.3). This merchandising strategy was not without anxiety; prior to its closure, Intersection was the only music store in Bhopal that had a video camera set up to monitor the floor space.

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Figure 3.3 Intersection Music Store (Bhopal) in January 2004—Note the similarities in store design when compared with the photographs of Music Metropolis in Chapter 5. Also note the listening post with headphones on the left side of the frame. Photograph taken by the author.

While Kuldeep made every effort to emphasize his original stock, Intersection ultimately became an important location for the sale of counterfeit media. There were roughly the same number of unauthorized albums available as originals—however, the counterfeit goods were not displayed, but were instead kept in an inconspicuous gym bag on the back counter. The contents of this bag only rarely strayed to mingle with the legitimate collection. Kuldeep and his assistants were able to easily access the gym bag to present counterfeit wares to known customers, but they could also quickly remove the bag if they should hear from other shopkeepers that an anti-piracy team was in the area.8 Next to the bag, Kuldeep had set up a new personal computer that enabled him to make the occasional in-store copy of a CD for sale to a customer, as a gift to a friend, or for his own personal use. During my interactions with Kuldeep, I learned more about the quasi-legal practice of remixing original content (i.e., altering and recombining audio elements from original works to create new, often lengthier and more danceable songs). In December 2003, I mentioned to Kuldeep that I would be making a quick trip to Mumbai and asked whether he wanted me to purchase anything for the store. After a moment of thought, he responded with

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a request for what he described as the two latest “Bootlegger” CDs and an album named “SDA Underground Remixes.” He told me rather cryptically to buy these CDs at a particular shop number (not a shop name) at a particular mall in Mumbai, as they would not be available anywhere else. When I arrived at the mall a day later, I observed that most of the shops specialized in “grey market” goods: electronic gadgets that had been manufactured, smuggled, or imported through informal production and distribution networks. In the back of the shop to which Kuldeep had directed me were several racks of CDs, most of them remix albums. However, none of the CDs that Kuldeep wanted was available. I phoned him so that he could negotiate with the Mumbai shop assistant, and he ended up making three alternative choices. I was startled to find that each of the CDs was priced at ₹400, relatively high even compared to the cost of original imported albums. But these were clearly local productions—the inlay cards were printed with a simple generic background pattern, name, and song list. The actual CDs had identical patterns with the words “I Love You” printed on them and were indistinguishable from each other except by their color. When I returned to Bhopal, I sat with Kuldeep and another friend in his car as he briefly previewed the songs on each album, his binary aesthetic evaluations alternating between “good” and “bullshit.” He came to realize that he had inadvertently picked two CDs that had been created by a local Bhopali DJ (i.e., remix producer), most likely because the series name was the first to come into his mind during our hasty phone call. Although these particular CDs were not available for sale locally, their Bhopali origin undermined some of the value that would have come from associations with the underground Mumbai scene. Familiarity with the remix genre was limited to only a small network of cosmopolitan fans in Bhopal, so these potential customers would likely recognize the artist as one of their own. Kuldeep had intended to stay up all night mass-producing copies of the Mumbai CDs, but as two of them had turned out to be local artifacts he would have to settle for making intermittent copies for trusted customers. I heard nothing more about these recordings for a couple of weeks. Then one day when I dropped by the store, I saw that two headphone-wearing customers sat at stereo systems listening to the remixes. Each had a notepad, and as they listened to a minute or more of each track they jotted down the names of particular songs that they wanted to have burned to a compilation CD. Kuldeep claimed that he was not charging these two for the service because they were regular customers, but that he had been selling copies of the full CDs for about ₹150 each. By his reckoning, he had already made a clear profit from the recordings. Visiting the store one afternoon a couple of days later, I encountered Kuldeep at his desk slipping freshly photocopied, black-and-white inlay cards into inexpensive CD cases. He had subcontracted the CD copying process to a local distributor and had commissioned 300 copies of one of the remix CDs at a cost of ₹3 each. He then photocopied the original inlay

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card with another tag on top: “Compliments Intersection Music Store.” These copied CDs were intended for distribution as a store promotion at a New Year’s Eve party at the local country club. Tickets for the event cost a hefty ₹1000, so Kuldeep could be assured of the affluence of the recipients. He directed his assistant to give a CD to anyone who asked for one (but especially to girls, as he also saw this event as an opportunity to acquire a girlfriend). As part of the promotion, he went on to raffle two video-CD players at the party. Kuldeep’s assistant reported that the entire set of CDs had been distributed by 11:30 p.m. The advertisement had served its purpose, but judging by the lean times that followed, it was not enough to noticeably improve his business. I met the author of these remix recordings about a month later in Siddharth’s Music Store. I was curious to see how he felt about Kuldeep’s re-use of his work. He was reluctant to discuss anything in depth with a stranger, but I did learn that he had a distribution arrangement with the Mumbai shop where I had purchased the CDs. He was compensated ₹10,000 for making a remix album but relinquished all of his rights to the recordings—which were dubious anyway, considering his use of unlicensed material. By the standards of Indian copyright law, his own productions were nominally a form of piracy as he was remixing very recently released songs without the permission of the original copyright holders. While I did not get an opportunity to confirm whether or not Kuldeep had asked permission to duplicate his work, this artist had no expectation of royalties, and he would likely see the prospect of someone else distributing his albums as a valuable opportunity to spread his work and build a following. He explained that he was hoping for sufficient exposure to develop a reputation in Mumbai that would, ideally, allow him to move there and work full-time in the club scene.9 This example of underground remix distribution illustrates how the social uses of music recordings have begun to drift away from top-down production models, into a realm of complex transactions that alternate among licit, illicit, and something in between the two. Technology has enabled local entrepreneurs to manipulate the available cultural resources in ways that entail both new economic models and new forms of artistry. Kuldeep’s production of cheap, copied remix albums that were otherwise unavailable in Bhopal generated a significant profit. Later, his mobilization of the recordings in compilation albums for friends and loyal customers acted as a kind of gift exchange and served the interests of branding his store, albeit with limited success. Ganesh (Hawker, Fort District, Mumbai) Like other Mumbai districts, the commercial area that lines Dadabhai Naoroji Road juxtaposes the extremes of wealth, in the form of banking institutions and well-dressed office workers, with the lives of the least

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affluent, who often live and sleep on the sidewalks. As is the case in other parts of the city, regular hawkers claim certain sections of the sidewalk, selling clothing, small electronic gadgets, stationery, fruit juices, cigarettes, software, and a variety of other products. Media hawkers make up just one portion of this vast informal economy.10 They advertise their wares on thin plywood displays with narrow shelves, filled with CD cases and inlay cards. More often than not, the actual media resides in a gym bag next to or beneath the table, allowing these informal merchants to evade periodic anti-piracy raids by quickly absconding with their goods. Ganesh, one of the local hawkers, stood next to his display chanting in a low voice, “Movies? Games? Software? Music?” as potential customers passed. If a pedestrian should pause, that is, be interpolated as a customer (Althusser 1971), Ganesh would repeat the chant and gently guide the customer toward the display table. At this point, he encouraged the customer to look through the goods if they were already on the table, or he might have removed a handful of CDs and DVDs from the gym bag and thrust them at the customer to peruse. Ganesh usually remained close at hand to keep the customer supplied with goods as he or she looked through them. If the customer asked for something that Ganesh didn’t have on hand, he would confer with nearby hawkers to see if any of them had a copy. If not, he sometimes sent a friend to check a nearby repository, such as a cache of DVDs stored in the basement of a back alley that could only be accessed through a ground level window. Relationships between hawkers on the same street are usually amicable, even if they sell different wares. It is common for one hawker to hold the space of another (and even sell his wares), when one of their number needs to run an errand. Yet like most hawkers, Ganesh was also aware that he was in direct competition with others on the same street. While asking around for the desired goods, he would usually pressure the customer to purchase something else that he had in stock. If the customer had already established a relationship with Ganesh, then he would sometimes suggest that the customer give him a chance to track down the desired items and return at some specified time to purchase them. The selling prices of Ganesh’s goods were generally contingent on the perceived affluence and bargaining skills of the customer, but the goods sold by hawkers invariably cost far less than they would in their original form at a retail store (or even in their counterfeit form at a retail store like Siddharth’s). In essence, hawkers provide media at the lowest possible price that the local market could support, the absolute nadir of the economic value of music. Moreover, the prices are based more on the cost of the physical media than on the value of the content. In 2004–2005, depending on a variety of factors, such as the location of the hawker, one could reasonably expect to pay ₹20 per CD regardless of the content of the CD. Thus, a single CD filled with MP3 songs would have cost ₹20, while a three-hour Hindi film would have cost ₹60 because the format required three CDs for the entire film. Similarly, Ganesh offered the same price for a video game that might cost $30 in a

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nearby store as he did for a $3000 drafting program.11 Depending on his assessment of the financial ability and desires of the customer, Ganesh might have charged a premium for an English-language movie or for computer software, but this would have added only about 10 percent to the price. Ganesh also frequently alluded to the country of origin of these counterfeit materials to make (dubious) claims about their quality. CDs encoded in Malaysia, for example, were attributed a higher value than those encoded in India or Pakistan. All of these factors came into play in establishing ongoing relationships—as soon as a customer negotiated a per-CD price from Ganesh, this became the fixed price should the customer return. Ganesh cemented these relationships by calling out to customers whom he recognized, announcing to other nearby hawkers his right to the repeat business. One widely recognized problem with purchasing unauthorized wares from hawkers like Ganesh is that at the moment of purchase, there was usually no way to verify that the contents of the CD/DVD actually matched those of the packaging. Nor was there any way to verify the quality of the merchandise, other than perhaps a brief external survey to check the discs for scratches. Tacitly acknowledging this, Ganesh was usually willing to exchange a faulty or mislabeled CD/DVD if he recognized the buyer. His attentiveness to such concerns helped him build a base of regular customers. In addition, for media that was clearly counterfeit, an unexpected amount of effort went into packaging the contents in a professional manner. From the perspective of maximizing profits from illicit copies sold on the street, one might not expect that using nicely printed labels and inlay cards would be deemed worthwhile. Nevertheless, there was a certain display aesthetic that went into the presentation of this cheapest of counterfeit media. For customers who were reasonably suspicious about the quality of the merchandise, the professional appearance of a hawker’s packaging was one of the only avenues through which the quality of the reproduction could be estimated.12 Customers who bought media from Ganesh were almost inevitably aware that they were participating in illegitimate modes of circulation. It is an economic exchange grounded in a relationship of complicity, even while it fits within the parameters of a commodity transaction. This complicity is grounded in specific social outlooks and positioning—and from some perspectives, the practice of “buying on the street” is regarded as low-class and socially undesirable. Indeed, in music stores all over India, middle class customers frequently noted, with distaste, that this was a very low-status shopping practice. Vimal (Anti-Piracy Agent, Madhya Pradesh) Guruwara Market in Bhopal’s old city is a central site for the wholesale distribution of music hardware and media. Original and counterfeit sales take place in bulk here, exemplifying the ways in which legal and illegal distribution, as well as formal and informal economies, are deeply intertwined

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in small Indian cities. As in most traditional Indian markets, the shops lining the narrow alleys are clustered according to the types of items that they sell. The heart of the electronics market contains shop fronts centered on an intersection, spreading approximately 100 meters in the north-south direction and 50 meters in the east-west direction. Stores selling entertainment hardware and parts intermingle with repair stalls and media distributors. Much of the media is counterfeit, and most of the hardware available in this district was either made domestically at factories near Delhi or is cheap, unbranded Chinese imports marked with names meant to index well-known brands (e.g., Sonny for Sony, Panaphonic for Panasonic).13 Guruwara is a site of media distribution rather than media retailing—that is, most of the customers in this market are music retailers (or their agents) rather than end users. Because of this client base, the shops are even less conducive to browsing than other retail spaces in Bhopal. Customers usually arrive with shopping lists. Some of these customers have traveled an entire day through the Madhya Pradesh state bus network to purchase cassettes for local tea and paan (betel nut) stalls in Bhopal’s outlying villages. These messengers are very frank about what they need from the distributors, and the merchandise they require is rarely on display. For example, while I was interviewing the owner of one of the smaller Guruwara shops in 2003, our conversation was frequently interrupted by couriers from nearby villages with handwritten lists of cassettes and other media. As a courier read out loud what he needed, the shop assistant pulled bundles of cassettes from the shelves behind the counter. Then blank cassettes and CDs. Then a stepladder was pulled from another location, a tile in the false ceiling removed, and counterfeit video-CDs, MP3-CDs, and promotional posters emerged. The ceiling tile was replaced, the ladder was moved, and everything was bundled together to be sent off with the courier. All of this took place without any comment on the part of my interlocutor, but the unusual security precautions indicated the frequency of anti-piracy raids in this district. Another evening a few months later, Kuldeep brought me to a different distributor in Guruwara who had box after box of counterfeit DVDs and video-CDs imported from Pakistan and Malaysia. These illicit media were supplied to local hawkers and music stores in and around Bhopal. I was not surprised to learn a few years later that this store had been raided by the police, and its stock seized. Yet, in our discussions of the local market for music, Siddharth and Kuldeep frequently mentioned that disreputable music stores paid regular bribes to the police to be tipped off when a raid was being conducted. This distributor had apparently fallen short in negotiating such an arrangement. As I explained in Chapter 2, the Indian Music Industry (IMI)—India’s analog to the Recording Industry Association of America—has largely been ineffective in curbing piracy. But the IMI is not the only institution that files complaints and initiates raids. Many national media distributors and music companies have taken anti-piracy actions into their own hands by maintaining

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agents in each region of India to investigate local markets and cajole the local police.14 One of these agents was Vimal, an anti-piracy representative for a major DVD distributor. Vimal was responsible for tracking the movement of counterfeit media in this part of Madhya Pradesh, filing police reports when he discovered caches of such goods, and encouraging the authorities to raid pirate distributors. I first met Vimal in August 2010 in Siddharth’s music store. Although he was well aware of the blend of legal and illegal activities that took place at Siddharth’s, Vimal told me that he turned a blind eye to the store because his company’s sales records indicated that Siddharth regularly placed orders for original media. However, other stores and vendors in the region had to be reminded that the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted media is illegal (see Figure 3.4). Sometimes this reminder took the form of intimidation, as I observed on several occasions with Bhopali hawkers. Vimal effectively bullied vendors into leaving the area by openly taking photographs of the hawkers and their wares, while threatening to call the police if they did not pack up. These confrontations were mostly just for show, Vimal confided to me; he had no illusions that the hawkers would stay away. After one such incident, he expressed sympathy with the hawkers, whom he said often had no other way of supporting themselves and their families.

Figure 3.4 MP3-CD Hawker (Bhopal) in February 2005—All of the recordings on this cart were counterfeit CDs, most of them produced locally in the Guruwara district. Photograph taken by the author.

In other contexts, however, Vimal was much less sympathetic. He said that he often helps to organize police raids, sending a boy into a store to ask for pirated media and then following up with an enforced seizure. The counterfeit goods that the police confiscated in such raids were kept as evidence in cases that may take up to four or five years to prosecute, and the recordings gradually became worthless as they sat in police warehouses and their

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contents lost value as “new releases.” After a short time, both the record companies and the hawkers lost interest in most of the seized goods, which were ultimately destroyed or sold by the police. Meanwhile, the people who were arrested in these raids were generally released the same day, usually after paying a fine for their freedom and the return of any electronic equipment (e.g., CD dubbing decks, computers, etc.) that may have been seized.15 Vimal explained that he had cultivated a relationship with a police inspector at the Railway Branch in Bhopal and that they frequently worked together to organize local raids. I asked him whether the police were ever reluctant to conduct a raid. Yes, he noted, some police outside of Bhopal occasionally asked him, “mujhe kya phāyda hai?” (what’s in it for me?), which is more or less an explicit demand for a bribe to perform the raid. Vimal’s company was aware that bribes were sometimes necessary to get local officials to act, and his employers were willing to authorize such bribes up to the amount ₹3,000. Sometimes this was not enough to counteract pre-existing bribes from pirate vendors, in which case the police might have refused to conduct a particular raid. Such refusals are often voiced as a kind of respect for individual freedom, such as “it’s this guy’s livelihood [kārobār]; it’s none of our business.” At other times, Vimal noted, police rationalized their non-interference by explaining that pirates generated local income and stimulated the economy. Vimal countered that the sale of original media provided a greater stimulus and more tax revenue for government services, but it seems that his arguments frequently fell on deaf ears. Vimal stated that by his company’s estimate, at least 80 percent of the DVDs sold in Madhya Pradesh were counterfeit. His company’s immediate goal was not to eliminate piracy—that is widely regarded as impossible—but rather to reduce its profitability by creating a form of market scarcity through seizures and harassment. As I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, Siddharth’s pirate practices carried certain risks and, as it turns out, even befriending an anti-piracy agent was insufficient to mitigate these risks. I returned to Bhopal in 2013 to visit Siddharth’s store and found that the space was now occupied by a liquor store. After asking around the market, I was able to contact Siddharth and arrange to meet him. I had suspected that he had found business in music to simply be unprofitable due to the phenomenon of mobile downloading (a practice in which he himself had participated) or the emergence of 3G networks that allowed customers to listen to music for free with the price of mobile data (see Chapter 7). In other words, I had presumed that, like most of the other music stores in the area, he had moved into another line of business. I learned, however, that his shop had been reported by Vimal in 2012 and a police report (FIR) had been filed on behalf of his company, undoubtedly due to pressure arising from his company’s need to show progress in the war on piracy. Since Siddharth was out of town at the time, he was unable to fight the charges and make the necessary bribes; the police had seized the entire contents of his store. These goods were now

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languishing in a warehouse. Siddharth made it clear that he was not particularly concerned by his stock of physical recordings, which would largely retain their value, and he was probably happy to be relieved of his stock of 10-year-old cassettes that took up so much space in his store. He was more concerned about losing the contents of the hard drives that had been in the store, into which he had invested many hours of labor developing his collection to suit the needs of his local market. The return of these hard drives would have enabled him to continue his business as a vendor of mobile downloading, likely as one dimension of a new mobile phone business. It would take years, he noted at the time, to recover his goods due to the pace of the judicial system, if the police had not already disposed of his music and computer equipment. Vimal had apparently expressed regret for the incident, as he had miscalculated the risks of reporting Siddharth and had not anticipated the ultimate collapse of Siddharth’s business. But the damage had already been done: Siddharth did not have the resources to start fresh, so he would have to await the results of the court case before resuming his music business.

Music Circulation and Sociability In each of these vignettes, sociability was performed as a part of commodity transactions—from the expert musical knowledge and advice that Amit offers his customers, to Salman’s attentiveness to local needs through his neighborhood compilation services, to Kuldeep’s ties to an underground network of remix distributors, to Ganesh’s interest in cultivating repeat customers, to Vimal’s mobilization of state resources to protect his company’s interests. Each site of commodity transaction is embedded within different customer expectations, shopping experiences, and communities of value. The differing modes of circulation represented here by Amit, Salman, Kuldeep, Ganesh, and Siddharth illustrate how the spread of music reproduction technology and new media formats has profoundly reshaped these social contexts, as new technology and formats have enabled a cottage industry of businesses that extract additional value from recordings in ways that would not have been possible in the gramophone era. Today, many Indian retailers, and even government institutions, are fully complicit in the circulation of nominally unauthorized media. This fact is acknowledged at every level in the Indian music industry, as well as by the customers who shop in the stores. Customers are fully cognizant of the fact that any copy, whether legitimate or not, is still a copy, and many are unwilling to expend additional resources on the “original copies” produced by the authorized music industry. The circulation of authorized and unauthorized media in Indian markets is an interesting test case for the fate of intellectual property in a context relatively free from state intervention. These recordings arrive at prices that are not directly controlled by those involved in their production. Their pricing becomes consistent with the social values of consumers. Because

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the dominant mode of valuation in Bhopal is thrift, music labels have been forced to lower their prices, and local retailers feel obliged to participate in the counterfeit market in order to keep their businesses afloat. The declining profitability of original recordings was a genuine source of anxiety for many music retailers. Still, despite the desire for thrift, original recordings and their packaging retain a social status and legitimacy value that counterfeit media do not have. For certain consumers, the additional cost represents an almost “pure” investment in connoisseurship and legitimacy, as well as the display value of an individual’s collection. The allure of original recordings also stems in part from the desire to reward artists for their work— although, despite industry narratives, it is hard to claim that piracy in India significantly disenfranchises artists. In addition to these values, the experience of shopping for music in legitimate venues has become an important component of the performance of class in India. Customers who enjoy an organized shopping experience as much as they enjoy the music that they purchase are precisely the targets of the Music Metropolis retail chain that I discuss in the next chapter.

Notes 1. Throughout this chapter, the names of the markets, stores, and individuals are all pseudonyms. 2. See also Beaster-Jones 2014c. 3. For arguments that address the costs and benefits of unauthorized reproduction, see McLeod 2002; Laing 2004; Bishop 2004; Larkin 2004; Yar 2005; Sundaram 2010; Sterne 2012. 4. This part of the state of Madhya Pradesh is frequently referred to as a part of the Hindu “Cow Belt,” which has similar connotations of conservative religiosity as the “Bible Belt” in the southern United States. 5. In a sense, this manager was unwittingly supporting Jacques Attali’s (1985) argument that economic value declines with the saturation of copies in postindustrial economies, creating a “crisis of proliferation.” The consequences of proliferation are discussed in more detail in Chapter 7. 6. See Chapter 5 for further discussion of the spaces of family-owned “counter stores.” 7. It is common for music and electronics retailers in India to ask their customers “bill, or no bill?” when completing a transaction. The “with bill” price is higher than the “no bill” price because the no-bill transactions will go unrecorded, thus lowering the retailer’s income taxes. However, original receipts are required to get warranty work on electronics, so customers who buy goods without the bill are on their own if problems arise. 8. As a mode of circulating small commodities of any sort (e.g., pens, stationery, children’s toys), the gym bag is used as an anonymous mode of conveyance all over India. In Kuldeep’s gym bag, there was an additional plastic bag that contained pornographic video CDs that could be easily removed and spirited away by an assistant. Kuldeep noted on one occasion that local officials could usually be bribed to look the other way when it came to distributing counterfeit media; pornography distribution, on the other hand, was considered to be a serious crime.

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9. Manuel (1993) notes similar perspectives on the part of classical and folk musicians in India in regard to the distribution of unauthorized recordings of their live performances (i.e., “bootlegging”). It was unclear whether this Bhopali DJ was aware of this double meaning when titling his CD. 10. See Liang (2005) on hawkers’ claims of space as an element of the “porous modernities” of metropolitan India. 11. The pricing of these wares (based on the value of the medium rather than the content) suggests an end-point of commoditization. In the neoclassical definition of commoditization, the term refers to products that are virtually indistinguishable from each other and are valued only on the basis of volume, rather than content. The prices that hawkers assigned to counterfeit media indicate the relative value of media in the local economic landscape, where the excess of use value over exchange value was palpable. 12. The overlap between counterfeiting and compilation in these wares is also noteworthy. Ganesh sold collections of MP3-CDs that were clearly mass-produced, yet consisted of arrangements of different original media that producers had deemed desirable. The economical MP3 encoding of the media often allowed for the compilation of entire albums, not just collections of songs. 13. See Sundaram (2010) for a description of the distributed, quasi-pirate networks that manufacture such equipment. 14. Adrian Johns (2009) describes how music companies adopted similar measures in the late 19th century to curb sheet-music piracy. That is, they hired agents, often former policemen, to investigate and disrupt pirate networks in ways that were sometimes illegal. Ravi Sundaram (2010) shows that some Indian music companies have recently resurrected this practice in an attempt to protect their interests. 15. Savio D’Souza, the Secretary General of the IMI, mentioned in an interview in August 2010 that equipment used to create pirated media has an ambiguous status in the Indian legal system, and it usually has to be returned to the counterfeiter. He noted, however, that a precedent-setting case is gradually making its way through the courts that will determine whether or not the police can legitimately keep such equipment.

4

Experiencing the Brand, Branding the Experience

In May 2005, Music Metropolis1 flagship stores in Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, and Bangalore hosted the Bombay Rockers, a Danish hip-hop/R&B duo, for a short performance and autograph session. Two songs from this group’s debut album—“Rock the Party” and “Sexy Mama”—were blanketing the airwaves and rising in India’s Top 20 charts. The Rockers’ sound emerged from a European dance vogue in the mid-2000s in which R&B tracks were fused with Punjabi bhangra music (Marshall and Beaster-Jones 2012). As a result of this ethnic flavor, the Rockers joined other rising Indian-diaspora artists, such as Jay Sean and Raghav, who were marketed as “Indian” while performing in Europe—and as “International” while performing in India. This multi-directional exoticism had proven to be a great success in the popdance environment, and extensive media campaigns had already established the Bombay Rockers as a widely known phenomenon (especially in India). By hosting the duo at their flagship stores, Music Metropolis executives hoped to mobilize the Rockers’ celebrity as a way of reinforcing the retail chain’s own importance in the “International” music scene. The appearance of the Bombay Rockers in Music Metropolis retail outlets was part of a growing trend toward media-industry consolidation in the 2000s. The performers were in the midst of a live concert tour organized by their music label, which was owned by the same media conglomerate that owned Music Metropolis. The advertising campaign for the Bombay Rockers tour deployed the resources of this entire media empire, soliciting public interest in the group through the company’s newspaper, magazine, television, and radio outlets. Part of this campaign involved plugging the Bombay Rockers in Music Metropolis stores. The cross-promotional possibilities afforded by media consolidation created a brand synergy in which all sectors of the conglomerate (e.g., retail sales, concert events, broadcast licensing, product merchandising, etc.) could contribute to and benefit from the creation of celebrity. From the perspective of the conglomerate-owned music label that was organizing the tour, the artists’ visits to Music Metropolis stores provided an opportunity to promote upcoming concerts and, almost incidentally, to sell a few copies of the album. From the perspective of Music Metropolis executives, the celebrity appearance was a way of bringing potential customers into the store and convincing them that it was the

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right place to shop if they were the kind of people who liked the Bombay Rockers. This is a central example of how the various stakeholders in different industry sectors have a tendency to negotiate their sometimes-conflicting interests and to cooperate in the production of celebrity. Tensions remain, because each sector has a different way of leveraging the commodity value of popular music—but the process of media consolidation helps to limit these conflicts by better organizing the branding process. In the previous chapter, I discussed the social values that circulate along with recordings in India’s so-called “unorganized” retail sector. I pointed out that thrift was the predominant operational value in Bhopal’s local market and that in this context many middle class consumers turned to pirated media even though they could have readily afforded the expense of nonpirated versions. This situation leads to a vexing question for retailers: “how do you convince people to buy original music, when cheaper alternatives are widely available?” The answer, according to Music Metropolis executives, was that you add value to the recordings by supplying a branded identity and a shopping experience that promotes desires for class-based prestige. When retailers successfully emphasize the performative dimension of shopping, music purchases can become a mode of conspicuous consumption that legitimizes and reproduces class standing. Customers will spend additional money on the music simply as a way of buying a stake in this performance. As I described in the book’s introduction, many new middle class consumers, such as Kuldeep, were attracted to the prestige of shopping in Music Metropolis. In addition to cherishing his Music Metropolis loyalty card, Kuldeep went so far as to replicate the chain’s model when he opened his own independent store in Bhopal. However, Kuldeep faced an obstacle that was even more serious than the tendency toward thriftiness in his hometown’s hierarchy of values. He lacked one of the necessary conditions for the shopping experience he aspired to produce: retailers must already belong to one or more prestige networks that will enable larger-than-life displays. The Bombay Rockers event in Music Metropolis stores was precisely the kind of event that a conglomerate-owned chain could create but Kuldeep could not. In this chapter, I extend my discussion of musical value by examining the operation of brand synergy and shopping-as-performance. These strategies have gained ground in India as liberalization has expanded and large media conglomerates have entered the retail sector. The ethnographic locus of my investigation into these forms of value is Music Metropolis, an Indian retail chain that by 2004 had grown to encompass more than 100 outlets. Music Metropolis operates facilities that range from immense flagship stores in metropolitan cities to small kiosks located inside other retail spaces. In all of these operations, the company tried to maintain a consistent, polished image that set it apart from the more everyday shopping experiences that I described in the previous chapter. The Music Metropolis brand image was upheld through design aesthetics, marketing, and promotional events that

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were intended to offer a “world-class” shopping experience to middle class Indians. In creating this kind of economic-status-display experience, Music Metropolis attempted not only to outdo the shopkeepers of India’s informal sector, but also to entice a class of “high-value” customers to shop in ways that were novel in India at the time. In contrast to the utilitarian attitudes toward music consumption that had long been predominant in India, the chain encouraged customers to savor the experience of shopping. In this, Music Metropolis joined a stream of marketing and broadcasting ideologies that had been building in India since the 1990s. Branding, in these outlooks, is not just name-recognition, but also a form of total immersion in which consumer experiences are carefully constructed and managed, experiences that themselves could be sold.

The Corporate History of Music Metropolis The Music Metropolis retail chain was founded in the late 1990s, during an era of profound transformations in the Indian economic environment. This period in Indian history has often been described as the “retail revolution,” when ongoing liberalization reforms created the conditions for organized retail chains to emerge and expand.2 The 1990s were also an era of transformation in the music industry. Privatized television and radio were providing expansive new marketing opportunities, film soundtracks were showing increased revenues, and new music genres such as Indipop were gaining audiences. A variety of domestic media conglomerates looked for ways to capitalize on this environment. Music Metropolis was one such effort. It was the creation of an Indian media conglomerate that also owned radio stations, television channels, a music label, and newspapers and magazines in several languages. Within a few years, Music Metropolis stores were opening in most of India’s major cities, and the chain had begun to diversify its offerings to include movies, video games, books, t-shirts, and audio-video accessories. The creation of Music Metropolis was an important milestone in Indian retailing, but the emergence of the chain also epitomized a misplaced optimism about the trajectory of the music industry. The first Music Metropolis flagship stores mirrored the larger-than-life aesthetics of Britain’s Virgin Megastore chain—complete with coffee bars, celebrity events, jukeboxes, listening posts, and video walls. These stores were designed to be entertainment destinations in their own right. It was a marketing strategy that made sense at the time, but when the music industry began to decline in the 2000s, the chain was forced to scale down its ambitions. By the end of 2003, most of the flagship stores had been reduced in size and re-engineered to make more economical use of space: the coffee bars were removed, back offices were downsized, and display spaces were reduced to save on product storage costs. This was coupled with the opening of smaller stores as the chain continued to expand into new cities. During the early 2000s the concept

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of centrally air-conditioned, self-contained shopping malls began to take hold in India, and Music Metropolis eagerly colonized these new suburban spaces. As the chain expanded into malls, the size of the stores continued to shrink, and many of the new outlets were simply branded spaces situated within larger department stores (these were called “Music Metropolis Satellites”). As part of their attempt to create a “classy” shopping experience, Music Metropolis executives devoted a great deal of effort to establishing the chain’s reputation for “international” music (i.e., Western rock and pop). This genre was seen as having a great potential to attract India’s affluent metropolitan population. Music Metropolis executives acknowledged that competing chains were better positioned to sell Hindi film music, Indian classical recordings, and regional musics. This orientation toward international genres was particularly relevant in South and East India where Music Metropolis was late in expanding. Store managers whom I interviewed in Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Chennai acknowledged that their competitors had already staked out the best retail locations and were doing brisk business. But by focusing on international genres, Music Metropolis took up a strategic position in social space—one that corresponded to the company’s physical strategies of designing a shopping experience oriented toward India’s new middle classes. This discursive strategy sometimes succeeded, and sometimes failed.

Brand, Affect, and Experience When I began interviewing senior managers at the Music Metropolis corporate offices in Mumbai, I quickly learned that most of my interlocutors had a firm understanding of “the brand” that had been adopted from international management and marketing literature.3 A brand is a coherent bundle of meanings generated by a corporation’s marketing apparatus through various kinds of communications with customers (including advertising, design decisions, packaging, etc.). The brand mediates the interactions between consumers and producers by establishing a set of social meanings and values that are laminated onto the practical uses and pre-existing significances of the product. For example, the Music Metropolis brand contained elements of “edginess,” as the company’s marketers adopted and developed the notion that purchasing international music is a form of youthful rebellion against the confines of Indian traditionalism. In her scathing history of late-20th-century capitalism, Naomi Klein (2002) noted that branding first arose as a way to add personality, and therefore value, to generic, mass-produced goods that would not otherwise be differentiated by consumers.4 By the mid-20th century, however, the significance of the brand had expanded from the identity of specific products to the social image of the company as a whole. Branding became an overarching process in which all of a company’s products and communications

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were expected to present a unified front and through which the signs and slogans of the brand were protected as a form of intellectual property. As branding became increasingly central to selling products, a growing share of a company’s value came to reside in its image. The brand became a conceptual product that contributed a significant portion of the overall economic value of any given sales transaction, and that even had an economic value in its own right. In my research, it became apparent that the branding efforts of music retailers in India were not as successful as some of the marketing literature (and some of the critical literature) would suggest they should have been. Just because a company touts its brand as a “lifestyle” does not necessarily mean that consumers will adopt the message.5 I have found, for example, that music store customers are only marginally cognizant of the recording company that distributed the music they were buying, regardless of the energy used in producing the brand image of that company. Similarly, despite the Music Metropolis brand campaigns, the brand messaging seemed to be ignored by most of its customers. Nevertheless, the majority of musicindustry executives whom I interviewed were completely sold on the importance of courting this process. Music Metropolis hired brand managers to craft a unifying message that would be voiced in all of their products and services. As was the case with Music Metropolis’s “edginess,” these brand messages were invariably tailored to voice the identities that they desired their customers to perform while shopping at their stores. The process of branding makes material products (music recordings) into fetishes in the anthropological sense, as those objects are imbued with values, hopes, human attributes, and sometimes even supernatural transformative powers (Pietz 1993). Following Karl Marx’s (1967) critique of commodity fetishism, I would also argue that the intellectual entity of the brand becomes a fetish in its own right, to the extent that brand identities are personified as having human attributes (e.g., gender, age, class, etc.) and transformative power for those who embrace them. When product branding is successful, the characteristics of the brand are transferred to the consumer—you are the brand (and the brand is you). The brand desires your loyalty and emotional attachment, even as you desire the social status conferred by brand identification (Mazzarella 2003). The fetish character of the brand is further heightened in the context of retail spaces, which do not produce any kind of material products at all. Rather, they produce spaces and opportunities to consume. The reason many consumers prefer to buy an identical item at one retail outlet vs. another is frequently a matter of cost and convenience—unless the retail outlet manages to successfully brand the shopping experience. Retailers are confronted with the task of creating a store brand that can encompass a polyphony of pre-branded products, tying these together under the umbrella of the retail brand. Marketing executives attempt to find points where different brand personalities converge, while rejecting those producers that do not fit under

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the umbrella and ignoring those aspects of the selected brands that clash with the retailer’s image. In the case of an album promotion, for example, Music Metropolis’s advertising campaign might maintain the store’s “edginess” by featuring certain attributes of the artist (e.g., her international celebrity) and eliding others (e.g., her reputed behaviors that run counter to Indian traditions). Decisions about whether or not the retail chain will carry and promote a particular product are heavily influenced by marketing executives who evaluate the degree to which the product’s pre-existing branding is co-extensive with the retail chain’s desired image. Similar considerations extend to all aspects of the chain’s activities, from where to locate its outlets, to what font to use in advertising to which holidays to promote. My interlocutors at Music Metropolis expressed a particular interest in the concept of “experiential branding.” This idea has been expounded by influential marketing scholars such as Bernd Schmitt (1999), who described branding as a kind of practice in which the affective qualities of objects and symbols provide a central basis of social identity. Schmitt sought to convince corporate executives that customers do not base their purchasing choices on rational decisions about the “features and benefits” of a product. He argued that customers are not so much interested in the practical realities of such features as they are with the enjoyment and meaning that can be obtained in the moment of consumption. Thus, Schmitt argues, brand managers should focus on creating sensual and affective experiences for the customer. Briefly citing phenomenology and cognitive psychology, Schmitt goes on to stress that customer experiences are induced by external stimuli that can be manipulated by marketing executives. Following Sigmund Freud, he suggests that emotional experiences have the potential to become encapsulated in objects in ways that are transferrable to people and their experiences. Creating a sensational selling space becomes very important in this form of marketing—if the product can be associated with an (orchestrated) moment of fulfillment, power, and prestige, then opportunities abound for entertaining, stimulating, and selling to the customer. This approach to selling commodities encourages customers to see beyond their immediate needs, so that they seek brand entities in the world that will enrich their lives and give them lasting affective or memorial value, as I noted in Chapter 2. Using a slightly different terminology, we might say that experiential branding is one way in which meanings and values are affixed to—and circulate along with—commodities. People who buy and sell music recordings see them as something more than material objects. They are bundles of social resonance derived from the various aspirations of everyone involved in their creation, from musicians to distributors to retail managers to customers. When Music Metropolis executives make investments in branding their stores—creating an “edgy” aesthetic, promoting international genres, etc.—they are producing layers of social value that they hope will transform the chain from a mere collection of retail outlets to a place where consumers come to have a meaningful shopping experience.

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Articulating the Music Metropolis Brand The brand experience created by Music Metropolis executives was intended to distinguish the chain from more mundane local music stores, and this goal justified business practices and expensive store features that would have been deemed uneconomical by the chain’s unbranded competitors. Most of the executives whom I interviewed had been coached in communicating the Music Metropolis brand image and could explain how this image translated into store features. Roshni, a senior marketing manager, was particularly articulate in weaving a composite sketch of the brand that she and other marketing executives had developed: Music Metropolis, the brand, is very youthful, funky, a little bold, a little rebellious. It’s futuristic; it’s high-tech. That’s the kind of personality. And this personality is abided by, whether we are doing any communication, or whether it is in the structure of the store … the features available in the store, everything is synergistic with this personality. So, for instance, we are futuristic and young, so the interiors are very funky, the ceilings have got these fixtures, rockets and skeletons, the flooring is metallic, the stairs are metallic … We have a radio jockey, we have a console with a radio jockey, and allied to that is the stage. So we have a fully functional sound system, we have airplay going on all the time, which is now a basic thing that is there in many other stores, too. But we have a radio jockey who makes announcements, to pep up the whole shopping experience. And we do a lot of events, so therefore there’s a stage in all of the bigger stores … So it’s about making the whole experience of buying music interesting, bringing music to life. Having some of the brand experience. Really everything being synergistic with the personality, nothing but the brand experience. Making the person experience the brand in more ways than one … The moment that you walk into the store, all of these things are hitting you without you realizing it … So it’s a really exciting and interesting way to shop. And mostly, at least I feel it and a lot other people have said that they feel it, you walk into a Music Metropolis and there’s a lot of positive energy, it’s a dynamic environment. So that’s a reflection of the brand personality, very vibrant. (Interview with the author) The first idea that Roshni articulated in this statement was a concise description of the Music Metropolis brand identity, which was repeated by most of the executives whom I interviewed: “youthful, funky, a little bold, a little rebellious.” These brand characteristics were ostensibly built into the design of the stores; they were regarded as possessing a subliminal communicative power (or “energy”) that shaped customers’ behavior without the customer’s knowledge. The youthful consumerist spectacle of Music Metropolis stores was consciously tailored to overwhelm its customers with the pleasures of consumption and thus to break down any residual thrifty impulses that they might have.

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Like other senior managers in the chain’s corporate office, Roshni was a graduate of one of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management. Before coming to Music Metropolis she had worked in an independent marketing agency. Roshni’s understanding of the business world was firmly shaped by India’s post-liberalization ideologies of value, and she was able to flawlessly and enthusiastically perform a discourse of brand identity without missing a beat. Her ability to internalize and perform these narratives was precisely why she had been hired to help usher Music Metropolis through the difficult moments of the industry recession. Roshni and other new marketing managers who had been hired by the struggling retail chain in the 2000s knew that they would have to make changes if Music Metropolis was to survive. They were in an unenviable but relatively common position for brand managers—they had to work with the existing brand image of a struggling franchise in order to retain continuity, but they also had to improvise new associations in order to attract new customers. Music Metropolis’s managers were aware of the danger that branding can alienate as many potential customers as it attracts. The chain’s appeal to a youthful, urban cosmopolitan, and its practices of sensory overstimulation excluded the vast majority of working-class Indians as well as any customers who were critical of spectacle or simply uninterested in an “international” shopping experience. Music Metropolis had essentially written off the mass of down-market customers who could not readily afford the cost of original recordings. However, there were a significant number of high-value customers who did not fit into the youthful, energetic demographic and had therefore been excluded from the Music Metropolis fold. Many music connoisseurs and cultural elites regarded the Music Metropolis image as derivative of foreign brands such as Virgin, while others saw it as merely cliché. During the course of my research, Roshni and other marketing managers were consistently embroiled in the question of how the chain’s image could be developed to reach out to these potential customers.

High Value Customers Like other organized retailers in urban India, Music Metropolis utilized three key metrics for each store to rationalize the store activities that were consonant with the brand personality of the chain yet did not obviously contribute to the bottom line.6 These metrics operated as a kind of local category that allowed employees to make value statements and quantify the relative success of individual stores within the chain. Indeed, the company circulated each of these aggregated statistics to investors, market research firms, and business consultants in order to provide some insight into the relative success of the chain and particular stores within the chain. Local store managers were able to recite these statistics about their own stores from memory and with little hesitation and consistently had a narrative or rationale to explain their store metrics.

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In many ways the most important metric for Music Metropolis managers was “footfalls,” or the number of customers entering the store. Although typically measured electronically in American or European stores, at Music Metropolis footfalls are measured by the security guards at store entrances and logged hourly for later compilation. From this data, the busy days and times for each store were easily tracked by the corporate office, which, among other things, enabled them to determine optimum staffing (see below). Footfalls were critical to brand managers because they indicated the value of the brand to potential customers, even if these customers did not purchase anything. The second metric, “customer conversion rates,” indicated the percentage of customers who generated a bill (receipt), that is, the percentage of customers who made a purchase. Finally, the “average bill value” tracked the average monetary value of a customer purchase, which indicated the kind or quality of customers that a particular store attracted. The last two metrics indexed the sales efficacy of customer service agents (CSAs) once customers entered the store. Like footfalls, local store managers were very cognizant of their conversion rates, average bill values, and total store revenue insofar as both their individual and store performances are measured with these metrics. Yet considerations of actual profit margins lie outside of this formula, insofar as profits were determined by the deals that the corporate merchandising team was able to negotiate with the music labels or other vendors. As many Music Metropolis executives noted to me, any activity for a store or the chain had to be justified in terms of increasing one of these three variables. Strictly speaking, attracting customers into the store (generating footfalls) is largely the responsibility of the marketing department, though individual store managers had a secondary marketing role, especially in stores that were distant from the metropolitan centers (e.g., Nagpur, Lucknow, Jaipur). The responsibility for generating conversions and higher average bill values rested primarily with the store managers and their CSAs. As Roshni noted, the performative efficacy at the moment of sale rested with CSAs: “once a person enters, to convert him into a buyer is in the store’s hands. They have to upsell, cross-sell, suggest, recommend, hang around at the correct distance, be available, whatever it takes to convert that person to buying something” (interview with author). Just as marketing and branding are team efforts, the other departments play a role in encouraging customer spending. For example, merchandising managers frequently noted in interviews that merchandising plays a role in conversion rates and average bill value, inasmuch as having a proper selection in the store (“store fill”) that reflects local customer desires was critical to inducing these customers to spend more and return to shop at some later time. If there was insufficient merchandise in the store, then customers simply left without purchasing anything. If there was a good range of material available, the customer might buy more than he or she anticipated. In this way, the average bill value was inflected by how well the merchandising team anticipated customer demand as much

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as it indicated the selling prowess of CSAs. A number of senior managers pointed out that Music Metropolis is a revenue-driven business rather than a value-driven business. That is, just like local stores in Bhopal, organized music retailers have to sell large volumes of merchandise to compensate for the low profit margins of individual units. While the end result of generating profit is the key to both models, as I have noted in the previous chapters, the profit margins of music are very slim relative to other products, such as food or apparel. And with the general availability of pirated (and downloaded) music, the margins have shrunk and will only continue to shrink. As a result, they noted, it is necessary for a music store to sell as much product as possible to as wide a range of people as possible. This approach differs from a high-end clothing store, like Louis Vuitton, which may only require a few buying customers on any given day. This fact provides an additional rationale for store events and spectacle more generally: the better the stores are known, the better the chance that they can bring in crowds. And the crowds themselves generate value for the chain in addition to revenue. Like other retail spaces, Music Metropolis desired to retain their customers, especially affluent customers who consistently could (or would) generate high average bill values. The Music Metropolis card available at any of the store outlets encouraged repeat buyers and the development of high-value customers. Referred to internally as the “loyalty program,” the Music Metropolis card was a membership cum points program that a customer joined by spending ₹600 ($13) in a single purchase in a store,7 or by direct purchase for ₹150 ($3). Customers earned one point for every ₹50 they spent, and these points could be redeemed for later purchases, discounts on monthly promotions, or entrance to member-only events. While the Music Metropolis card was designed to encourage repeat purchasing, it also provided a way to track the demographic profiles of their customers and their purchasing habits. Yet by their own admission, they did not mine this data to the fullest possible extent to provide a statistical outlook on their customers; they relied instead upon a third-party analysis of their data, which appeared to provide ambiguous results. Although the brand strategy was designed to increase total footfalls in order to increase gross revenue, some customers were more equal than others. One of the categories the chain used to describe customers was the “high-value customer,” that is, a category of shopper that had disposable income and a taste for music, especially the high-profit genres and formats.8 Essentially, the entire brand was designed to attract a high-value customer, or others who aspired to be this customer, the very ones that Rhythm House regularly attracted (see Chapter 2). This was their stated rationale for operating a loyalty program: despite being relatively expensive to maintain for the chain, it enabled managers to determine who exactly these high-value customers were and how they could keep them shopping at their stores, So you can end up selling much more to them because you get to know their tastes, their interests because they’re keeping track of everything

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Experiencing the Brand, Branding the Experience that they’re buying. So because you’re doing that, if you’re getting members to come back again, then you can conserve footfalls. If you more or less have got a lot of your high-value customers coming back, then the quality of the footfall walking into your store is a very good one, as compared to if you don’t have your really high-value people coming into the store. So when your quality of footfall is good, automatically your conversion rate is higher because it’s easier to sell to that. People are already interested. It’s easy to increase your average bill value because the people have money to spend, they have deep pockets. (Roshni, interview with author)

As Roshni suggested here, attracting high-value customers enhanced each of the metrics used by the store. Accordingly, “high value” had a several meanings for the store: not only did it refer to the affluent customers who could afford the relatively high prices of the international catalog (which itself had high value for the brand identity), high-value customers were precisely the sort of people that Music Metropolis wanted to have seen in their stores by other potential high-value customers. Additionally, the loyalty program provided demographic and purchase data on these customers, data that could be mined and managed. For many of the same reasons that store revenues, profit margins, and operating costs were kept confidential, I was not given access to the specific details of the customer loyalty program. However, in several public venues, the head of Music Metropolis reported having approximately 250,000 members in its loyalty program, from which they estimated 49 percent of the chain’s total revenue was being derived. Beyond this instrumental rationale, the Music Metropolis card itself had heterogeneous meanings among customers. While loyalty programs became relatively passé in most metropolitan cities, in some smaller cities the card had almost talismanic significance. For example, one store manager in Lucknow noted that a local customer exhibited a curious tenacity when his card did not arrive after several weeks and requested the card multiple times at the store. Similarly, in my first meeting with Kuldeep in Bhopal, he displayed his Music Metropolis card as a sign of his cosmopolitan sensibility. In each of these cases, the Metropolis card demonstrated the successes of the brand strategy, illustrating the loyal, high-value customers who augmented the reputation of the Music Metropolis chain.

Overwhelming Spaces: The Audio-Visual Design of Music Metropolis Music Metropolis executives anticipated, or at least hoped, that their high-value customers’ primary associations with the brand would be the massive flagship stores located in metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, or Chennai. The idea was that the smaller suburban stores and satellite outlets would conjure the larger-than-life experience of the

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flagship stores. Naresh, a regional manager for the chain in Delhi, put it this way: “when you talk about Music Metropolis in Delhi, you would know that there’s a Music Metropolis in [a mall], but you will always remember [the large south-Delhi] Music Metropolis, as the real Music Metropolis” (interview with the author). This retail strategy mirrors a model that was successfully pioneered by a number of retail chains in the United States (Klein 2002). Music Metropolis first opened giant flagship stores for the sake of generating awe, and then later expanded to smaller spaces once the significance of the brand had been established. The smaller spaces retain the signature styling and “energy” of the flagship stores, albeit in a compressed format.9 Due to this brand strategy, there were a number of design features that Music Metropolis took pains to keep consistent across all of its various locations and market contexts. First, the Music Metropolis logo was inescapable, appearing on all of the internal and external signage, as well as on the stages and wall murals. In the flagship stores, these logos were positioned so that they would be highly visible in media coverage of celebrity events that took place in the stores. Another invariable feature was the presence of quality audio-visual technology, sometimes to an excessive extent. Regardless of its size, every dedicated Music Metropolis store was outfitted with a high-power sound system, an 18-channel mixing board for stage performances, a public address system, listening posts, and numerous television displays. The flagship stores boasted as many as 64 television screens, arranged in banks and generally all tuned to the same music-video channel. These televisions represented one of the most prevalent means of consuming international music in India. Customer-service agents working the floor frequently used them as a sales tool: in my interviews, sales staff frequently mentioned that new music videos tended to catch the attention of customers, allowing sales agents to encourage an impulse purchase of the music being shown. In addition to their use as a selling tool, televisions helped to shape the ambiance of Music Metropolis outlets. The movement on the screens augmented the hustle-and-bustle in the stores and contributed to the sensory stimuli intended to overwhelm the customer. The shifting images on the television screens merged with the aural stimulation provided by listening posts and the powerful in-store sound systems. These sound-design aspects of the stores were no less impressive than the overwhelming video displays. Brightly painted, triangular stands holding three sets of expensive Nakamichi CD-player/headphone combinations were spaced throughout the stores, allowing customers to listen to pre-selected music at each station. When the chain opened, these listening posts had to be specially imported for Music Metropolis stores, and in interviews and press releases executives consistently promoted the ability to listen to music before purchasing it as one of the novel aspects of the Music Metropolis shopping experience. By 2004–2005 Indian vendors had begun

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to sell such listening stations, and their use was spreading to other music retailers. However, there was still a certain novelty in the ability to move through the massive Music Metropolis flagships and sample different kinds of music at different stations throughout the store. Listening posts were frequently located adjacent to the main windows in the store in order catch the attention of outside pedestrians and act as advertisements for the shopping experience. Michael, one of Music Metropolis’s store designers, explained to me that this function of the listening posts was similar to that of showwindow mannequins in clothing stores—except that customers were used as demonstration models (interview with the author). Local store managers reported that the listening posts tended to draw youth who did not have the means or the intention to make a purchase yet in some way embodied the desirable class habitus; the listening posts were just a way for them to pass the time in an air-conditioned space. However, in their role as mannequins inhabiting the shop windows, these non-buyers were embraced by Music Metropolis for the branding purposes of the chain. Their presence helped to contribute to the image of the store as “a happening place,” even if the crowds at the listening posts did not necessarily resemble the high-value customers that the chain desired to attract. The high-quality sound systems available in Music Metropolis stores were probably the most central marketing apparatus in the chain’s design schema. Each store broadcast music throughout the day, generally using a live radio-jockey, and local merchandising managers carefully coordinated this aural content with current advertising campaigns and perceived customer interests. Not unlike the timings dictated for Indian classical rāga performances, the timings accorded to Music Metropolis’s in-store broadcasts were designed to target the anticipated musical tastes and mindset of the customers in the store at that time. For example, in a Bengaluru flagship store, music genres were assigned to the following schedule: 11:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Spiritual 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Fusion/World Music 12:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. Hindi Chartbusters 2:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. International Chartbusters 4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. Regional Chartbusters 6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Hindi New Releases 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. International New Releases 8:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. all sections Because this Bengaluru store was busiest in the evenings, the faster-moving music (in terms of tempo, as well as sales) was slated for the coveted 6:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. slots. Throughout the day, however, the bright sounds emanating from Music Metropolis stores joined with promotional posters, television images, and celebrity appearances to help create the desired atmosphere to attract customers.10

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Promotional Efforts and Holiday Conundrums The Music Metropolis executives whom I interviewed divided their promotional campaigns into three categories: product promotions, concert tour promotions, and holiday promotions. Each of these was expected to play a role in reinforcing the chain’s brand identity. The first category, product promotions, was arranged in collaboration with record labels or media distributors. These promotions were usually tied to larger marketing campaigns associated with the release of a new album or film. The role of Music Metropolis executives was to determine which of these new-release campaigns was best positioned to boost sales and reinforce the image of the chain. Participating in the right product campaigns was seen as mutually beneficial to Music Metropolis and the production company; both could benefit from the brand synergy created in the advertising. In these kinds of promotions, the sponsoring companies would frequently offer incentives to feature their products, such as higher profit margins on the recordings and free marketing materials (e.g., signs, shelving, cardboard cutouts). Concert tour promotions entailed a similar set of considerations and benefits. Music Metropolis executives had to carefully consider the image of the band and its sponsor, to determine if any “undesirable” characteristics (i.e., those that did not overlap with the Music Metropolis brand image) could be minimalized or overlooked. In the Bombay Rockers tour promotion, for example, the band’s marketability as “international superstars” outweighed the fact that they were much more popular in India than in their native Denmark. Music Metropolis generally limited its concert promotions to international artists who were visiting the country, or Indian artists that had an international reputation. Because they could count on additional promotion from other media outlets, Music Metropolis executives believed such tours were a reliable and cost-effective means of promoting the chain’s cosmopolitan image. Holiday promotions presented Music Metropolis executives with a more complex set of decisions. Nearly all retailers make use of holiday-themed promotions to draw customers—especially during gift-giving holidays such as Diwali and Christmas. Promoting music as a component of particular holidays was not new; indeed, Vibodh Parthasarathi notes that music and musical hardware were given seasonal promotions from the very start of the Indian music industry (2005, 173). However, in order to participate in regional Indian holidays, Music Metropolis was in some ways forced to suppress its identity as an edgy, cosmopolitan brand. Furthermore, Music Metropolis stores tended to carry only a small selection of the Indian folk musics associated with particular holidays, and such music was normally tucked away in peripheral sections of the stores. The chain attempted to mitigate this problem by encouraging its branches in different regions of India to put on small celebrations for holidays that were locally popular. Regional managers would decorate their stores in ways appropriate for the local festival, while offering discounts on folk music and sometimes even

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promoting this music on the in-store sound systems. During the Rabindra Jayanti festival, for example, Music Metropolis stores in Kolkata offered substantial discounts on the music genre Rabindrasangeet (songs penned by the local Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore). In Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Baroda, music for the style of Gujarati dance known as rās was featured and discounted in the period surrounding the Navaratri festival. Such promotions helped Music Metropolis outlets remain viable in their local environments, although they remained relatively low-key compared to the chain’s national advertising. When it came to nationwide holiday promotions, Music Metropolis executives adopted four seasonal campaigns—Valentine’s Day, “Summer,” Diwali, and Christmas. These promotions were conducted in all Music Metropolis stores and were accompanied by large-scale advertising campaigns. The choice of promoting these four holidays was a bit of a delicate subject. “Summer” is self-evident—as is, to some extent, the Hindu festival of Diwali. Diwali is widely celebrated throughout India. It is associated with families coming together and extensive gift giving; it has also become a primary commercial holiday and a popular release date for new blockbuster films. Indians often delay purchasing high-status goods like refrigerators, televisions, or jewelry until Diwali—in part because Hindus consider it auspicious to buy during this period, and in part because such items tend to be heavily discounted for the holiday. Most retail spaces in India run at least some kind of Diwali promotion to capitalize on the atmosphere of the festival.11 Despite the popularity of Diwali, Music Metropolis’s marketing team decided in 2004 to drastically scale down their promotion of this holiday. As the executives explained to me, they reasoned that Diwali was not associated with music-buying in particular, and they expected that the chain would be able to register the usual increase in sales just from the atmosphere of the season. This calculated risk appeared to be successful, according to my interlocutors. However, the decision to forego the Hindu holiday of Diwali while focusing on the Christian holiday of Christmas seemed to be a source of some underlying tension within the company. Marketing executives at Music Metropolis viewed the Christmas season as critically important. Part of the significant sales increases during this period were due to gift-gifting among Christians—who were a small minority in India as a whole, but comprised a more respectable portion of Music Metropolis’s urban, cosmopolitan demographic. In addition, however, the “Christmas Season” overlapped with international New Year’s celebrations. This is a season when many non-resident Indians return to the country to vacation, taking advantage of holiday breaks and milder temperatures. The influx of cash from vacationing non-residents provides a significant boost to local economies. While the relatively secular nature of the “Christmas Season” helps to explain its importance, some Indians might find it distasteful that a holiday season of Christian origins is promoted above Hindu or Muslim holidays.

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I asked Roshni why Music Metropolis’s marketers had not applied the same logic to Christmas that they did to Diwali (the logic that increased sales would take place even without a major promotional campaign). The tone of her response was somewhat defensive: The reason for that is that Diwali is more for promotions, because every store will be running an offer, a lucky draw, whereas Christmas is also about cheer—people do up their windows or they have some lighting. So everywhere there is this festivity and this cheer, so if we don’t do anything, we would stick out like a sore thumb. Which is not the case—[catching herself] well, for Diwali also, which is why we were under the psychological pressure to do something. But Diwali is less so because we are music. If we were an apparel store, then we would have to do something with Diwali. (Interview with the author) Roshni’s response reveals something of the “peer-pressure” element in holiday promotions; it would be unconscionable for the chain to not do anything at all for a major commercial holiday. The absence of a promotional apparatus would cause the stores to “stick out like a sore thumb.” In response to the differentiation between Diwali and Christmas, however, what Roshni is suggesting is that musical “cheer” and gifts of music were not closely associated with Diwali in the same way that they were with Christmas. Thus, for a music retailer, Diwali is of lesser importance.12 Roshni might have been more precise by saying that Diwali is of lesser importance for a store with Music Metropolis’s particular international branding. As a retailer that minimizes its lines of Indian folk and classical musics, concentrating instead on cosmopolitan international sounds, Music Metropolis was much better positioned to take advantage of the relatively secular and international flavor of the Christmas season. The relationship between branding and holiday promotions was even clearer, and more controversial, in the context of the chain’s Valentine’s Day promotion. In some parts of India, conservative Hindu groups have mobilized opposition against retail outlets’ gradual adoption of this Western holiday. Hindu nationalists see the celebrations as a kind cultural imperialism, and they object to the public display of romantic love as a threat to the Indian “cultural institutions” of arranged marriage and filial piety. In 2004, for example, conservative organizations in Bhopal mobilized a Valentine’s Day bandh (work stoppage) to protest the promotion of the holiday. Crowds of young men threw rocks at businesses that displayed Valentine’s Day decorations and detained young couples on the street that had the appearance of being on a date.13 Music Metropolis executives believed that promoting Valentine’s Day was an important aspect of maintaining their youthful, cosmopolitan, and “edgy” flair. However, they did make a concession to the protestors (and an effort to protect their stores) by avoiding the use of the “Valentine’s Day” label. While executives and store

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managers continued to describe the promotion as Valentine’s Day in internal discussions, this name was no longer explicitly stated in the marketing for the chain’s events. Instead, the tradition of crowning a “Mr. and Miss Music Metropolis” was renamed as the Do Deewane, or “Two Lovers” contest. Despite this linguistic change, Music Metropolis’s newspaper advertising and posters continued to reflect the iconography of the Western holiday. There is a double meaning in the term “holiday promotion.” Retail outlets use existing seasonal events to encourage shopping—but at the same time, the decisions of marketers can emphasize particular holidays and shape the ways that they are celebrated (Schmidt 1995). In some sense, it is the holidays themselves that are promoted. Through their decisions to promote (and secularize) Western holidays, Music Metropolis executives positioned the company’s brand in a way that led to external criticism and at least some amount of internal tension. Perhaps, however, this is exactly what having an “edgy” brand is all about. It is worth asking why an Indian retail chain like Music Metropolis promoted an “imported” holiday like Valentine’s Day, while minimizing Diwali and altogether avoiding widely celebrated Islamic holidays such as Muharram and Ramadan. The most straightforward answer is that such holidays did not conform to the chain’s brand personality. Attempting to apply the brand in the context of those holidays might have provoked much greater religious controversies and would have been financially unrewarding due to the much-debated status of music in Islam. So, instead, Music Metropolis executives chose to ignore Islamic holidays altogether and to encourage customer participation in festivals that were more amiable to commercial marketing—or that at least had a longer history of being colonized by retailers.

Creating Spectacles Music Metropolis’s promotions of tours, product releases, and holiday seasons were interspersed with one-time-only events designed to establish the chain as a “destination” in the eyes of potential customers. The company’s executives believed that it was especially important for Music Metropolis to have a reputation as a “happening” place, where the stars came to earth, if only briefly. The chain therefore put a great deal of emphasis on celebrity meet-and-greets, musical performances, and music workshops. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of these events in the overall marketing strategy of the brand. Senior and regional managers constantly stressed in my interviews that every Music Metropolis store ought to have frequent celebrity appearances. Part of the importance of these events came from their national advertising potential. By encouraging reporters to attend and promoting the events in newspapers and other media outlets, executives were able to lend a celebrity aura to Music Metropolis that extended far beyond the customers who were able to come to any particular event. Film stars often appeared at Music Metropolis stores and signed autographs as part of

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soundtrack promotions, and these appearances were carefully photographed and advertised. Musicians likewise visited the stores as a part of album marketing campaigns, and in some cases they could be prevailed upon to give a live performance of one or two of their songs on the in-store stage. Music Metropolis was able to attract visits from major artists because it provided a cosmopolitan space and free advertising for the artist’s music label in the nationally circulated newspaper owned by the chain’s parent company. As the retailer’s reputation expanded, store events could also reliably draw secondary coverage in local newspapers and other media. Often the timing of these appearances was known well in advance. The Music Metropolis corporate officers were located in Mumbai, conveniently adjacent to a large cross-section of Indian music labels and film producers. The chain’s executives were thus well positioned physically as well as socially to orchestrate Music Metropolis appearances during the course of national celebrity tours. In some cases, though, individual events were arranged on a spur-of-the-moment basis. Roshni noted, “we get a call, say, Tuesday, saying that such-and-such ghazal artist will be here on Friday, can we do an event with them?” (interview with the author). In screening celebrity appearances, Music Metropolis executives took pains to ensure that the artists appearing at events invariably reflected the desired brand image (e.g., youthful, edgy, energetic). In addition, they tended to follow the risk-averse model that was prevalent among music labels (Negus 1999). The chain only provided space to “known” (or heavily sponsored) musicians. Artists were required to have the backing of a major music label and considerable promotional force to be considered for an event—for example, having music videos and/or album commercials appearing on major television channels was a prerequisite. Local bands that did not already have a recording contract with a major label were deemed unsuitable for the cosmopolitan Music Metropolis brand image. The retail chain’s executives coordinated directly with the marketing departments of “classy” domestic and international labels, while independent artists, smaller producers, and even substantial “down-market” labels that had a national presence (e.g., T-Series, Tips, Venus) were regarded as being unworthy of institutional contact. Celebrity events seldom had an obvious effect on store revenues. Some Music Metropolis outlets showed an increase in sales during casual meetand-greets, but for the most part, celebrity appearances tended to monopolize customers’ interest while packed stores reduced their ability to browse or purchase music. If a large-enough crowd gathered, it was not unusual for managers to shut down store operations during events, leaving only a single outlet open at which customers could purchase the album or soundtrack that was being promoted (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2). For this reason, Music Metropolis executives usually tried to schedule events for time slots that would normally be slow in sales. The goal of these events was not to turn an immediate profit, but rather to fulfill the chain’s long-term strategy of promoting the Music Metropolis brand.

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Figure 4.1 Customer Browsing a CD Kiosk at the Bombay Rockers Event (Pune) May 2005—Photograph taken by author.

The extensive effort that managers put into organizing artist events sometimes succeeded, and sometimes failed. All of the Music Metropolis executives and the staff whom I interviewed were able to describe particular landmark events. Very often these memorable moments had to do with managing overwhelmingly large crowds for well-known celebrities, but in other cases there were enjoyable surprises. For example, the visit of the renowned rock guitarist Joe Satriani to a Mumbai location in April 2005 was memorable because it prompted an unexpected number of young male guitar players to show up at the store carrying their instruments, much to the delight of the staff. Other store events that I attended were unqualified failures—such as the visit of an American folk-rock band to a store in

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Figure 4.2 The Bombay Rockers Event (Pune) May 2005—Note that the store was far too crowded for any sales to take place during the event, except for at the kiosk depicted in Figure 4.1. Many of the customers are holding up cell phones or digital cameras to capture the performance. Photograph taken by author.

Chennai that drew only about a dozen unenthusiastic customers. Or the CD release of the prominent vocalist Pandit Jasraj that drew fewer than 10 customers to one of the Mumbai flagship stores. The Bombay Rockers event that I attended in Pune in May 2005 was about midway between these two extremes. It revealed aspects of Music Metropolis’s branding success, as well as some of the difficulties that the chain’s marketing managers encountered.

“They’re Pretty Ok”: The Bombay Rockers Event in Pune The Bombay Rockers event in Pune was one of several Music Metropolis appearances that the group’s label had scheduled into their 2005 Indian concert tour. This tour had been heavily promoted in newspapers and on the radio, and it was carefully linked to a simultaneous album promotion that was blanketing the airwaves. As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, the Bombay Rockers were an easy match for the Music Metropolis brand. They were “youthful, edgy, and exciting”—and perhaps more importantly, their international status would reinforce Music Metropolis’s image as a central destination for cosmopolitan pop. In Pune, the Bombay Rockers’ retail appearance was scheduled to occur in the late afternoon, just a few hours before the start of the group’s concert in another venue. As most of the Rockers’ fans prepared for the concert, it is possible that this close timing was one reason the Music Metropolis event ended up drawing a somewhat lackluster crowd. The flagship store in Pune, complete with the usual stage and highpowered sound system, could comfortably hold several hundred customers. About an hour before the event, Music Metropolis staff began to reconfigure

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the space to make it more conducive for a celebrity appearance, rather than for music shopping. Shelving units were moved to the periphery to clear the area in front of the stage, and extra security guards began to take up positions around the store (both to keep the anticipated crowd away from the artists and to watch for shoplifters who might try to take advantage of the tumult). The music of the Bombay Rockers had been dominating the in-store sound system all day, and as the time of the appearance drew near, the radio-jockey stepped up her announcements of the upcoming arrival. Nonetheless, 30 minutes before the event, there were only a handful of customers in the store. It was apparent to the Music Metropolis and record label executives who had come to observe the event that the crowd would be significantly smaller than expected. It was not clear to these executives what had happened. The Bombay Rockers event that had taken place in Mumbai the previous evening, I was told, had nearly filled the store, with many fans arriving an hour or more early to stake out a place near the stage. Were the Bombay Rockers simply not as salient in Pune as they were in Mumbai? Or had something gone wrong with the timing? Twenty minutes before the event was to begin, there were still fewer than 40 people in the store. At this time, however, the head of security who had come along on the tour arrived to tell us that there were an indeterminate number of customers awaiting the arrival of the Bombay Rockers downstairs near the store entrance. This somewhat alleviated the executives’ anxiety. I observed that nearly all of the customers/audience who had arrived for the event were in their teens and twenties and appeared to come from new middle class backgrounds—precisely the sort of customer whom the executives wanted to attract. Still, as I observed the gathering crowd and their responses to the announcer, a jean-clad woman in her early 20s, there was simply not much excitement in the room. The upbeat soundtrack that seemed to be continually increasing in volume did little to focus the crowd’s attention, and as the announcer began her stage patter many in the audience simply talked over her proclamations. To prime the crowd for the artists’ arrival, the announcer began to solicit audience participation. She interviewed a young boy near the stage, who revealed that he had lived in North Carolina before coming to India, thus fortuitously reinforcing the international tenor of the event. She encouraged the boy to sing a portion of a Bombay Rockers song, a request that caused him to promptly flee the stage. Somewhat less than diplomatically, the announcer responded, “You decided to walk out on me, that’s just like a true-blue American! Just kidding.” The announcer then began to quiz the audience about the duo, starting first with their names. Most of the audience, it seemed, knew very little about the Bombay Rockers. I began to suspect that many of the people who came to this event were less interested in the group per se as they were in the overall spectacle of witnessing a celebrity appearance. When one audience member yelled out the name of one of the Rockers, “Thomas,” the announcer asked whether this was the firang

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(the  foreigner) or the desi (the local, in this case a non-resident Indian). Receiving a somewhat muted response, she asked the crowd where the group was from. Someone yelled out “Denmark,” and she responded, “Both of them?” A confused pause was followed by her asserting that both of the artists were, in fact, born and raised in Denmark. Following the brand image of the chain, the presentation of the Bombay Rockers at this Music Metropolis event should have emphasized their carefully constructed international standing. The announcer faltered somewhat in delivering this message, however, when she referred to one of the duo as a desi and raised the question of whether or not they were both from Denmark. To make matters worse, she frequently slipped out of the scripted English-language interactions with the audience, codeswitching into Hindi when responding to unanticipated developments. For several minutes, the announcer tried to get members of the crowd to volunteer to sing or dance to recorded Bombay Rockers songs, with very limited success. At one point, when she asked a young man if he liked the music of the Bombay Rockers, he noted halfheartedly into the microphone, “They’re pretty ok, yeah.” This enthusiasm deficit was further reflected in a lack of audience interest in Music Metropolis store promotions. When the announcer asked the crowd to comment on the big summer promotion that was going on at the retail chain, there was a moment of confused silence. She was forced to remind them that the brand was currently commemorating its expansion to more than 100 outlets. She then reminded the crowd that the Rockers would be signing albums during their appearance, but only albums purchased at Music Metropolis during that day’s event. When the Bombay Rockers finally arrived on the scene, the crowd swelled to around 100 and the atmosphere became markedly more energetic. The announcer briefly interviewed the duo, asking Thomas, “how do you like India,” and asking Naf how the two had met. In Naf’s response, it became clear that this partnership was the idea of a record company rather than a spontaneous collaboration. This did not seem to allay the suspicion that the Bombay Rockers were intentionally created as an “international sensation” for the purposes of Indian consumption. Throughout their career, the Rockers have remained much more popular in South Asia than in their native Europe. The duo then performed “Rock the Party” to a pre-recorded accompaniment, a common practice of pop artists worldwide. By the end of the song, the crowd had become enthusiastic, and the announcer pressed the duo to perform one more number. They choose “Ari Ari,” a song that could have passed as a straight-up bhangra performance rather than as international pop.

Creating New Audiences through Events and Workshops Developing the store brand as a valuable musical resource became more complicated as the Music Metropolis chain expanded through the 2000s and it became increasingly difficult to arrange celebrity visits for the newer,

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smaller stores. Executives at the corporate office began to encourage store managers in smaller cities to be proactive about organizing their own events. Managers whom I interviewed in these smaller cities said that they felt a great deal of pressure to come up with activities and promotional tie-ins that would resonate locally and increase their customer base. For a time, the expansion of the Indipop genre provided a glut of aspiring artists who needed the promotional support that store appearances could provide and who were a reasonable fit with the chain’s cosmopolitan image. By 2005, however, popular interest in Indipop had begun to decline in favor of international bands. Even with the benefits of free media publicity, it was often difficult for Music Metropolis to line up enough cosmopolitan celebrities to fill the needs of its expanding empire. This provoked no small amount of consternation on the part of the chain’s executives, as regular events remained central to their brand image and overall market strategy. The company addressed this celebrity shortage by introducing workshops, music seminars, and contests, especially in its smaller outlets. These small-scale events began in 2003 and seemed to provide an ideal solution for the problem: When we started expanding, we found that we were not able to do events in places like Nagpur, Nasik, and Lucknow, and we decided that we must do workshops in all of these cities. So this is why Lucknow has got a dance workshop. Workshops is one, the second is talent contests … We’ve got a contest called Breakthrough. Breakthrough is in the smaller cities, they’re whatever frequency, once a month. So you breakthrough with different kinds of talent—one month it is mimicry, one month it is dancing, one month its solo singing, one month its rock bands. That had its longest innings in Lucknow, and did very well also. We got good participation. Now Kochin is running it, Hyderabad is running it, [we added it to] a store in Bangalore which has a footfall problem … So these are all fabricated out of nowhere, so that we have activities, day-to-day activities running in the stores where we may not be able to get artists. (Roshni, interview with the author) Events and workshops were successful in attracting high-value customers to the stores, and they had the unintended consequence of keeping musician visits from becoming passé. Events like these gave the appearance that something was always happening at Music Metropolis, even for those who saw the ads but decided not to attend. These events also helped to build new markets for music—as upwardly-mobile customers learned more about the genres promoted by Music Metropolis and the kinds of experiences that were to be had at the stores, they became more likely to identify with the brand and to return as shoppers. One of the retailer’s media campaigns was called “Get Spotted at Music Metropolis.” This effort was coordinated with a diamond-jewelry distributor

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that operated manned vendor displays in the chain’s flagship stores. As was the case with celebrity events, the “Get Spotted” campaign was designed to increase footfalls in the stores and to promote the chain as a social destination. Each week for several weeks, three customers using listening posts at Music Metropolis were selected, ostensibly at random. These customers were photographed and their names and pictures appeared in advertisements in the local newspaper. Almost incidentally, the lucky customers were given a gift bag of branded diamond jewelry. In the newspaper advertisements, sunrays emanating from photographs of the lucky customers were equated with a celebrity “spotting” at the store, emphasizing the idea that you might run into a celebrity (or become one!) anytime you visited Music Metropolis. The “Get Spotted” campaign was a powerful representation of yearning for social prestige that Music Metropolis executives sought to harness in their branding efforts. The executives desired that their customers would desire to be seen in the stores. By blurring the distinction between celebrity appearances and everyday customers, the campaign’s creators encouraged customers to view themselves as participating in the prestigious status of the brand. This reinforced the idea that the individual shopper could absorb the valuable Music Metropolis image during the course of a financial transaction. Creating prestige through social events was also evident in the chain’s jazz workshops. Music Metropolis’s corporate head, himself a jazz lover, decided to partner with the Mumbai-based organization Jazz India to help promote appreciation for the genre. Jazz seminars in Mumbai were run by knowledgeable fans from Maharashtra and Gujarat who volunteered their time—and often their own resources—to present their musical passion to a monthly audience of around 30 to 50 customers. The seminar topics varied according to the interest of the presenter, ranging from a discussion of jazz documentaries to musical comparisons between jazz and blues to an analysis of different performances/interpretations of a jazz standard. Each workshop was self-contained in order to attract the largest possible audience. Music Metropolis offered the presenters free space, sound equipment, and promotional support, and all of the jazz music in the store was discounted by 10 percent for an hour after the seminars. Jazz events were part of Music Metropolis’s effort to reach out to potential customers who might not necessarily fit into the “youthful” or “edgy” aspects of the chain’s brand image. Executives hoped that the typically older (and wealthier) jazz fans would be a valuable bridge for showing high-end connoisseurs that Music Metropolis could cater to their needs. I observed at these workshops that the attendees did tend to be cosmopolitan, wealthy patrons-of-the-arts who could readily contribute to the chain’s bottom line. Unfortunately, Music Metropolis executives found that sales generated by such events proved to be essentially non-existent. The main problem was that most of the Mumbai seminar attendees were too high value: these individuals tended to shop for music in Europe and the United States, and they felt that the Music Metropolis jazz offerings were rather anemic compared

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to their own collections at home. In the three seminars that I attended, I did not see even one album purchased by the participants. Most attendees simply left after the event without even looking around the store. These difficulties are part of the ongoing headaches experienced by Music Metropolis brand managers as they struggled to develop the chain’s image amid the industry-wide climate of declining sales. Despite occasional setbacks, Music Metropolis executives continued to believe that workshops and events provided a vital service to the brand by bringing in the sorts of customers that they wanted to see (and be seen) in their stores. Jazz workshops were reportedly more successful in engendering business in other parts of the country (such as Kolkata), while other kinds of dance and music appreciation seminars proved to be valuable in smaller cities. The division head of Music Metropolis explained to me that events were quickly becoming a way of tailoring the chain’s brand to particular locales. While most of the stores’ features were designed to reference the national brand, events provided a greater opportunity for local and regional distinctions in taste to emerge. While Kolkata and Mumbai stores had jazz, for example, Delhi workshops were focused on the “world music” genre. In this way, Music Metropolis executives were learning to play variations on brand image that would allow the expanding chain to leverage both the power of national prestige and the intimacy of local taste.

The Value of the Brand In this chapter I have shown how executives use branding strategies in design aesthetics, promotions, and events as a way to add value to the music they sell. The idea behind branding is that customers will spend additional money on music recordings if these purchases allow them to identify with a prestigious image and to participate in a meaningful shopping performance, even as they add a new set of meanings to the recordings that they bring home with them, say, the story of having purchased this album when they saw the Bombay Rockers perform in Pune. Social status derived through economic display forms a significant part of what customers purchased in Music Metropolis stores. The chain’s marketing managers expended a great deal of resources to establish the prestige of their brand (such as installing expensive design features and hosting celebrity events) that seldom led to immediate returns, but which they believed would add to the overall value to their merchandise. The particular kinds of values that Music Metropolis executives produced to convince consumers to spend money in their stores included the status of international celebrity, the legitimacy of buying original music at a “classy” Western-style retailer, and the value of being on the cutting edge of social trends. Through careful brand management, Music Metropolis executives were ultimately able to convince a significant number of customers to purchase music at a much higher cost than they could have found on the street or in the “unorganized” sector.

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However, my research also revealed the fragility of these branded values. The worth of the Music Metropolis image was always at risk of being undermined by social dynamics (such as the controversy surrounding holiday promotions), by performance lapses on the part of store representatives and celebrities and by executive miscalculations in ascertaining the tastes of local markets. For example, one store manager in Hyderabad mentioned to me that he often overheard customers talking to their friends on mobile phones, saying that were in one of Music Metropolis’s competitor chains. This suggested that the Music Metropolis brand never fully achieved its desired status for customers, as the pre-existence of other chains overwhelmed any other store possibility in that genre of retail. Viewed in hindsight and from outside their internal branding discourses, one might reasonably suggest that Music Metropolis achieved a kind of generic status as an organized retailer, meaning both that the store design was part of a discursive genre (corporatized music stores) and yet undifferentiated as a branded space. The appeal of the chain’s branded image was successful enough to keep Music Metropolis’s doors open during a time when discourses of lost industry value predominated. By 2010, it was the brand itself—rather than any of the material goods available in the stores—that was sold to another company.

Notes 1. As I noted earlier in the book, “Music Metropolis” is a pseudonym. While I have taken efforts to maintain the anonymity of this company and employees, the context of its founding as related in this chapter is accurate. 2. V. Rajesh (2010) suggests that the grocery chain Foodworld was the first organized retailer to emerge in 1993, followed by the Music World chain in 1997. Both of these companies were owned by the RPG group, which also owns the Saregama music label. These initial efforts by RPG to transform India’s retail climate helped to create the foundation on which companies such as Music Metropolis could later build. 3. See Strasser 1989; Leach 1993; Coombe 1998; Klein 2002; Mazzarella 2003. 4. It is possible for this state of un-differentiation to return if there are too many similar products available in the market. In the business world, this return of a product to an unbranded state is referred to as “commoditization” (not to be confused with “commodification” in Marxist theory). Generally speaking, commoditization is perceived by marketers to be an extremely negative development because it erases the surcharge that businesses are able to obtain for branded products. 5. Furthermore, the meanings attributed to a successful brand have a way of moving out of the producer’s control in the marketplace and mediascape, especially when competitors or social advocates promote negative brand associations. One example of this in the Indian context is Coca Cola, which for some years has been accused of polluting local waters and having high levels of pesticides in its drinks. Public disputes over the value of a brand can lead to intense meaning conflicts and marketing wars. 6. Corporations try to rationalize the impact of any activities on the “bottom line,” although as William Mazzarella (2003) has noted, this is not always easy to do

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7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

Experiencing the Brand, Branding the Experience in the case of marketing a brand. Indeed, one of the conundrums that marketers face is the problem of “unaccountable success,” that is, successful branding that does not seem to originate from the activities of marketers (thus, making it difficult for marketers to justify their institutional relevance). At the time, this ₹600 purchase might consist ofapproximately 1 international DVD, 1–2 international CDs or Hindi Film DVDs, 4–6 Hindi film CDs or international cassettes, or 8–10 Hindi film cassettes. In one of our early meetings, one manager referred to these as “evolved” customers: those who knew their tastes, followed particular international acts, and were willing to keep up with the latest trends. My interlocutors at Music Metropolis in 2004–2005 suggested that this idea of starting out with flagship stores and then later opening smaller outlets was a long-standing company plan. While this explanation makes sense, I suspect that the company might have also been obliged to shift its strategy and start opening less expansive stores due to the decline in the music industry. Judging by the downsizing of nearly all of the chain’s flagship stores in 2003, it seems likely that Music Metropolis had the misfortune to start out too big at precisely the wrong historical moment. In the context of sanitized mall spaces, the noise levels emerging from Music Metropolis stores had to be carefully managed, and this music was in competition with the aural branding of surrounding retail outlets. Nonetheless, the distinctive sound profile of the chain was clearly recognized by mall customers. Jonathan Sterne (2003) described similar techniques of aural branding in his discussion of the Mall of America. See Mazzarella (2003) for a discussion of Diwali gifting and the advertising campaigns tied to the festival. Roshni also suggested in our interview that the promotion of certain Western holidays in India, and the forms of consumption currently tied to those holidays, was in part the result of extensive marketing campaigns carried out by the Archies and Hallmark greeting-card companies starting in the early 2000s. These campaigns, she suggested, had a significant effect on the way that middle class Indians viewed holiday celebrations. This opposition to Valentine’s Day is not limited to Hindu groups. Ritty Lukose (2009) describes similar protests that took place in the Indian state of Kerala, which has a significant Christian population. Conservative Christians joined with Hindus in objecting to many of the same aspects of the holiday (its commercialization and public display of romantic love)—though these groups tended to omit the anti-Western diatribes.

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Putting Music in Its Place Merchandising in Space and Time

As I waited on a railway platform in May 2005 with a merchandising manager from Music Metropolis, we struck up a conversation about genre and marketing categories. I was perplexed at the time as to why the Bombay Rockers’ debut album had been placed in the store’s “International” section rather than in “Indipop.” After listening to the album carefully, I could hear very little in the musical or vocal style of the Rockers that was different from Indipop recordings. Furthermore, the Indian elements in their music seemed to position the duo as part of a much more distinctive genre than would be suggested by the broad “International” categorization. I hazarded that placing the Bombay Rockers in International might thwart customers who looked for them in the Indipop shelving—which was located on the opposite side of the large Music Metropolis stores. My interlocutor was clear on the matter, however. He explained that despite any similarities in musical style and language, the Rockers are not Indipop artists because they did not grow up in India. He seemed to feel that most customers were aware, or should be aware, of this distinction. In my research I found that musical categories were quite fluid and that they often depended on aspects of social performance and positioning that had little to do with musical content. The Indipop classification is a prototypical example. Peter Kvetko (2005) has documented how Indipop came together as a genre when Indian artists who admired Western pop began to position themselves in opposition to filmī (i.e., Bollywood) modes of production. Indipop artists were structurally removed from the Bollywood film industry and were therefore said to have greater control over the content and style of their performances—in other words, they were more “independent.” When Indipop was still a nascent, “happening” genre in the mid-1990s, the genre had a tendency to include any pop artist who drew on Indian sounds and was not part of the film industry. At this time, the film vs. non-film dichotomy was more important than nationality. Thus, a group called the Bombay Vikings, formed in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1994 with one diasporic Indian member (Neeraj Shreedar) was—and still is—classified as Indipop. Similarly, the influential 1990s remix albums of Bally Sagoo, a DJ who grew up in Birmingham, England, were also classified as Indipop in Music Metropolis stores. What had changed, I wondered, by 2004 when the

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emerging Bombay Rockers were classified as “International” despite having a very similar musical profile and biography? One reason for the shift in genre labels was the declining popularity of Indipop. Since the turn of the millennium, big-name artists in this genre had seen declining sales; thus, reframing the Bombay Rockers in International was a way of garnering more interest for the group. If a new pop album mixing European and Hindi styles were liberated from the Indipop label, it might attract more attention. A deeper explanation for this change, however, can be found in the economic transformation of India and shifting views about Indians living abroad. In the mid-1990s India was still seen as something of an “underdeveloped” nation (it had yet to become a hub for technological outsourcing). In this context, the accomplishments of diasporic Indians were a central source of national pride (Rajagopal 2001). When a British artist of Indian descent such as Bally Sagoo garnered international acclaim while drawing on Indian traditions, his work was eagerly adopted as a native product—hence the “Indipop” classification. By the 2000s, however, such successes were becoming more commonplace, and economic changes in India had decreased the interest in this kind of national validation. A growing number of middle class Indians began to think of themselves as cosmopolitan, global citizens, prioritizing the aura of international sophistication over the imperatives of national pride. Or, to look at it another way, successful diasporic artists merged, in the view of middle class Indian audiences, with the other international luminaries who frequented the country’s music charts. Bally Sagoo became relatively less admired for his “Indianness” and more admired for his proximity to Bryan Adams, Sting, and the Rolling Stones. In this environment, there was a growing sense that the Indipop classification was provincial and derivative. What better way to assure customers that they are listening to authentically international music than by placing new diasporic acts into the International section of music stores? Because of this transformation in social values, the Indipop genre went into eclipse, while the International genre grew in prestige and sales. Drawing from scholarship on globalization, Keith Negus (1999) adopts the term “de-territorialization” to describe this process of blurring the geographic and political significance of music. Starting the 1980s, Negus argued, multinational conglomerates focused on promoting music that was stripped of any linguistic and cultural references that might interfere with diverse audiences’ enjoyment of the product. This allowed Western music to be more easily exported to “developing” markets, and to a limited extent, it allowed non-Western artists to break into the Western industry. “De-territorialization” was then followed by “re-territorialization,” which involved new categories of innocuous but “ethnically flavored” sounds (i.e., “world music” or “regional music”). Re-territorialization succeeded because it allowed cosmopolitan audiences to gain a sense of safe participation and mastery over ethnic/cultural differences, without experiencing any fundamental threat to their lifestyles.

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The main concern in both of these processes, I would argue, is precisely the cultural “threat level” that musical diversity presents to the homogenizing strategies of large music companies and expansive retail chains. By firmly clarifying genre arrangements and promoting music with culturally innocuous, yet superficially “edgy” connotations, Music Metropolis created a shopping experience in which the chains’ middle class customers could be assured that every recording had been put in its place. This issue of locating the Bombay Rockers in Music Metropolis stores reflects a much broader phenomenon of categorizing music recordings and distributing them in physical space. Similar geographic divisions are created when retail outlet managers determine which recordings will be for sale in particular stores in particular towns or how concert promoters and broadcasters make decisions about how to organize and market musical performances. The categorizations promoted by different industry players are sometimes inconsistent, and they are often predicated on the different ways in which these industry players conceptualize their audiences. A local radio broadcaster, for example, might use an anomalous genre schema that is based on the perceived tastes of a target demographic marked out by advertisers1—perhaps by combining jazz records from the 1950s and Hindi film classics in the same show. A music label might pressure retailers to move an artist’s work to a different section of the store in order to maintain the label’s brand image. For example, in 2004, my interlocutors at Music Metropolis mentioned that Sony Music was encouraging the retail chain to keep the label’s new artists out of the Indipop shelving. Sony’s managers presumed that these singers would sell better in the International category, and the label preferred to avoid having its prestigious name associated with the declining and ostensibly “local” Indipop genre. The way in which recordings are categorized and geographically distributed is thus shaped by specific value negotiations among interested parties, as well as by broader social trends. As the example of “Indipop” vs. “International” indicates, the decisions made during this process help to determine what kinds of social value will be laminated onto particular music commodities. In this chapter, I trace the logic of genre and spatial organization in different Indian retail outlets in order to point to the operation of another conception of “value”: a position within a field of relational meanings. Comparing the organizational strategies of local, “unorganized” retailers against those used in Music Metropolis stores allows us to see how the rise of organized retailers transformed the landscape of musical values.

Genre, Space, and Time In the broadest sense, genres can be viewed as sets of cultural associations (or “discourses”) that help to organize creative practice. Scholars have devoted a significant amount of effort to analyzing the nature of genres and their role in social experience.2 For the purposes of this book, I would like to

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emphasize three aspects of these categorizations. First, genre discourses help to frame the creation and consumption of music and are therefore a means of establishing music’s social value. When an artist, broadcaster, marketer, retailer, or consumer (or anyone else) describes a recording as “Indipop,” this characterization is a mechanism by which the speaker attempts to affix particular kinds of meaning and value to the recording (e.g., if it is Indipop then it is an Indian product, it is anti-Bollywood, it speaks to a youthful and rebellious audience).3 Second, genre categorizations and their meanings are always under negotiation and are seldom internally coherent. Genres are produced through the actions and interactions of a large array of stakeholders, and the values of these stakeholders often diverge. Thus, there is a fluidity that comes with genre, as meanings are constantly negotiated and reframed over time by agents who are struggling to establish (or negate) a shared definition. Genres are never stable or monolithic. Third, it is important to understand that genre categories frequently emerge in relationship to other, oppositional categories. One reason that an Indipop recording is Indipop is that it is not a film song. This kind of oppositional definition has been described by a number of structural linguists (e.g., Saussure 1916) as a fundamental feature of social meaning. Regardless of whether or not we agree that opposition is necessary for genre formation, it does seem to play a significant role in many such categorizations. Genres are most often staked out as relational value positions within an overarching model of musical meaning, and this entire construct of interrelated genres is constantly pushed and pulled in different directions by individuals who have different agendas and different degrees of social power. Some scholars have gone to great lengths to map out the aural signifiers of genre (e.g., the use of certain musical rhythms, instruments, and compositional patterns). This is a fascinating and valuable area of inquiry, but I am more focused here on the broader social associations that come into play in defining genre. There is always a back-and-forth flow between the musical aspects and the social aspects of genre, as socially positioned artists (and other industry players) work to share their experience, vision, and goals by elaborating on existing musical practices (Brackett 2002). However, musical genre conventions and innovations always extend far beyond what can be heard. They encompass modes of behavior, presentation, dress, social positioning, and physical design aesthetics, among other things. Sonic differences are used to convey diverging affective qualities (e.g., rebelliousness, cosmopolitanism, tastefulness, rudeness, nostalgia) and as an index to performed identities (e.g., the sounds preferred by certain ethnicities, classes, genders, religions, and age groups). Thus, genre construction is an active social endeavor strongly tied to identity and aspiration. The social dimensions of genre construction can be extremely complex, and they are constantly evolving over time. For example, a fan of Indian classical music may have a particular understanding of the social meaning of Hindi film songs that leads him to disdain not only the sound of those

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songs, but also the people who enjoy listening to them. This fan might be reproducing nationalist outlooks from the 1950s, when the post-colonial Indian government associated film songs with Western cultural imperialism. Such an outlook on the genre would be very hard to square with the perspective of a younger fan who has come to associate early film songs with the “golden age” of soulful Indian nationalism. These two fans might have very different perspectives on what kinds of musical and lyrical features are definitive of the genre, what songs epitomize its qualities, and how these songs are related to other Indian genres. In a similar fashion, the genre of “1960s folk rock” would have a very different meaning to a Mumbai music executive than it would have to someone in rural Texas. In addition to the issues involved in establishing the definitive characteristics and significance of this genre, various individuals and organizations might have different views about what recordings merit inclusion. This process of establishing genre becomes even more complex when we consider current music that is still in a state of creative development. In retail stores, issues of genre positioning play out clearly in physical space through the organization of the stores’ merchandise. Stores thus provide excellent microcosms for examining the genre labels and social interpretations that are given to different products in different shopping contexts. Furthermore, these stores are sites of public negotiation. Sellers must anticipate the genre models and desired meanings that their customers will bring into the store, as well as expectations that customers have developed during prior shopping experiences. If the retail space is not organized on the basis of a shared logic, then customers may become frustrated or intimidated while trying to navigate the store. At the same time, however, sellers have their own goals, which might include attracting new customers, encouraging certain purchasing decisions, or initiating new brand associations. Savvy merchandisers can use an astute awareness of customers’ mental models to design a “natural” and/or entertaining shopping experience—while also subtly directing the customers’ path and encouraging desired product associations. The floor arrangements in Music Metropolis were constructed in a much more purposeful fashion than were India’s family-run retail spaces, where the particulars of merchandise layout were relatively slipshod and varied greatly from store to store. The unorganized-retail arrangements were largely designed to create a space that would be familiar and comfortable for local shoppers and in which the merchandise would be readily at hand for the shopkeepers who mediated all customer browsing.

Space in Bhopali Counter Stores In Chapter 3, I provided ethnographic vignettes to describe family-run retail shops in Bhopal, and I explained how music transactions in these family-owned spaces were strongly grounded in the values and social networks of the local communities. These stores have long provided the

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standard music-shopping experience for most Indian consumers. They can therefore be used as a kind of reference point when discussing the newer arrangements promoted by organized retail chains (which I will address in the later sections of this chapter). My fieldwork in Bhopal and other Indian cities led me to identify several physical design features that seem to be nearly universal among family-owned retail outlets. One of the most prominent is the inevitable countertops where transactions take place and have given these spaces the commonly used appellation of “counter stores.” Nearly all of the local music shops that I visited during my research were distinguished by a central counter that kept customers separated from the shopkeeper and the merchandise (see Figures 3.1 and 5.1). Counter stores throughout Indian markets used similar layouts, including grocery, fabric, apparel, and jewelry shops. Putting a counter between the customer and the merchandise has a decisive benefit in reducing shoplifting opportunities, but it is at the expense of display value. In counter stores, browsing is limited to what customers can make out on the shelving behind the shopkeeper or (sometimes) underneath glass countertops. The majority of the merchandise is kept out of sight, in cabinets and in the back rooms of the shop, and is only brought forward for examination after the customer has engaged with the shopkeeper across the counter. The counter-store model can be scaled to fit just about any marketplace context. The family-run retail spaces that I visited ranged from 100 ft2 outdoor kiosks up to 1,000 ft2 stores with lengthy counters worked by multiple shopkeepers. All of these stores, however, emphasized customer–shopkeeper interactions during browsing. This led to a certain limitation in transaction speeds, as each shopkeeper could accommodate the interest of only a few customers at a time. The mediated browsing model also had implications for genre arrangements within the stores: these categorizations tended to be rather haphazard and idiosyncratic among different local retailers. It was uncommon in my research to find explicit genre labels affixed to any of the shelving, cabinets, or counter displays in family-owned music shops. Instead, shopkeepers loosely organized their merchandise in ways that they found reasonable and accessible. Some might lump all English-language music together, while others might prioritize chronological distinctions, differences in format (e.g., CDs, cassettes), or more conventional genre distinctions (e.g., classical, devotional, pop, film). The various combination of these elements in a particular store’s arrangement of merchandise was a product of the store’s specific customer demographics, the number of recordings in stock, and the shop owner’s personal musical taxonomy. The musical categorizations used by family-run retailers did bear some relationship to the schemas used by music distributors and broadcasters, but they exhibited a larger degree of flexibility and local color. I also observed that shopkeepers seldom insisted on any particular genre name for a recording—they were just as likely to produce the same Bombay Rockers album for customers who inquired about Indipop as for those who asked about International (or about “English” or “angrezi” songs).

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Figure 5.1 Diagram of the Sangeet Mahal Music Store in Bhopal—Customers are limited to the small open area near the entrance, while the shopkeepers are represented as black dots behind the glass-topped counter. The portion of the store represented in the upper left-hand section of this diagram can be seen in a photograph in Figure 3.1.

The diagram of the Sangeet Mahal music store in Figure 5.1 shows how genres were (loosely) arranged in one of the family-owned retail outlets that I visited in Bhopal. Amit, the owner of this store, gravitated toward obscure historical recordings favored by collectors and connoisseurs. This orientation is reflected in the relatively small spectrum of categorizations given to new releases and international music and the comparatively large array of prestige genres that are present in the store (e.g., ghazal, devotional, classical, classic film). Promotional displays in the store’s front windows and music from the stereo system advertised Amit’s space within this Bhopali market. Once customers were inside the store, however, they were confronted with only a small display of visible merchandise under the glass countertops. The recordings on the shelves along the store’s back wall were stacked two deep and generally too far away from the counter for customers to be able to read individual titles. Many more recordings were kept in closed drawers around the lower periphery of the store, completely invisible to customers. Amit also maintained a small warehouse offsite, and he would sometimes send an assistant to this warehouse to fetch a requested album that was not available in the store. The shelving immediately opposite Sangeet Mahal’s entrance was the first to greet the customer’s view and was thus the most important merchandising

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space within the store. Amit (the central dot in Figure 5.1) sat here at the nucleus of customers’ attention, offering media for customers to peruse, completing financial transactions, and giving instructions to his assistants. His regular customers often sat beside the counter across from him, sipping tea and chatting nostalgically about particular recordings. Amit kept his  most popular cassettes and CDs on the shelves immediately near him (e.g., new releases and other frequent sellers). The albums further to his left and right, along with those stored in the drawers beneath the shelving, might be described as his “back catalog.” These were recordings that Amit wanted to have on hand for his customers but that he expected to sell at a much slower pace. The stock that he kept at his warehouse might be described as his “deep catalog,” recordings that he could locate if they were needed. The areas at the front peripheries of the store, where Amit’s assistants operated a small video rental business and sold boxed men’s apparel, might be regarded as his “peripheral merchandise.”4 Amit did not use industry terms like “best sellers” or “catalog” to describe how he arranged his stock, but we can apply them here as a way of describing an overarching layout. In this organizational design, the knowledgeable shopkeeper and his most popular merchandise are foregrounded, while his broader catalog spreads out concentrically from this sociable nucleus. The owners of the counter stores where I conducted research did not generally keep track of their inventories, nor did they pay much attention to their overall sales figures or cash flow. (My store inventories and genre-schematics were a bit of a novelty in this context—I provided the store owners with copies of the documents that I created, much to their amusement.) Furthermore, these shop owners did not usually accept credit cards in the early 2000s, and they were not in the habit of writing out receipts. These casual accounting practices, prevalent throughout India’s “formal/informal” sector, helped independent shop owners to avoid the more stringent controls and taxes levied on larger, “organized” retailers—a strategy that was largely recognized and tolerated to a limited extent by government authorities. This lack of rigorous bookkeeping practices in family-run stores was one factor abetting genre categorization. Because they were socially distanced from the “organized” practices of formal business chains, counter store owners felt less of an imperative to impose definitive categories onto their merchandise and spent more time with their customers negotiating what these categories could be and what they might mean. Most of the counter store owners with whom I worked in my research did not feel that there was a need to brand or market their stores. Instead, they relied on word-of-mouth and their long-term presence in their markets. The value of these stores was strongly tied to the personal reputation and social network of the owners. Amit, for example, tended to attract an older, middle class crowd that had a taste for classics and respected Amit’s knowledge of these genres. Siddharth, another of the shop owners I discussed in

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Chapter 3, oriented his selection toward a more youthful audience and was widely recognized as an authoritative presence in this social scene. I frequently noted that these shopkeepers put great efforts into maintaining their customer networks. They often sat with customers for long periods of time to discuss shared musical tastes, and they would sometimes offer a particular music recording as a gift, believing that the customer would be obligated to make further album purchases if he or she appreciated the suggested music. The centrality of personal interactions and ongoing relationships in the counter store environment enabled a relatively relaxed attitude toward genre categories and branding—owners who knew their stock and their customers did not need to rely on targeted marketing efforts to connect the right album with the right audience. These owners had relatively little incentive (or ability) to promote authoritative genre distinctions. One exception to this pattern among local retailers was Kuldeep’s Intersection Music Store, which opened in Bhopal in 2003 and made use of media advertising, clear genre distinctions, and other strategies borrowed from organized retailers. As I noted in Chapter 1, however, Kuldeep never managed to attract customers from beyond his local neighborhood, and he was ultimately forced to close his shop after only a couple of years of unremarkable business. Kuldeep found it difficult to draw customers away from the established counter shops in Bhopal. He was never able to gain a reputation as a local paragon of musical knowledge—and, unlike Music Metropolis executives, he was never able to convince local customers that his shop offered a more sensational and prestigious purchasing environment.

Organized Retail Organized retailers such as Music Metropolis initiated a drastically new form of browsing in India starting in the late 1990s. In opposition to the still-prevailing counter store model, these retailers gravitated toward a spatial arrangement in which customers could wander amid the merchandise and interact with it directly. Placing music recordings on open shelving in greatly expanded floor spaces made it possible for larger numbers of customers to browse at the same time. This arrangement also reduced customers’ dependence on the personalized knowledge of a mediating shopkeeper and instead shifted the focus of the browsing experience to advertising messages conveyed through professionally designed product displays and packaging. In such an environment—and especially in the massive Music Metropolis flagship outlets—the organization and labeling of music genres became vital for helping customers navigate the stores. These physical changes in store layout were accompanied by new headaches for store owners, as well as new marketing opportunities and new ways of thinking about music. My confusion about the location of the Bombay Rockers album in Music Metropolis (as discussed at the start of this chapter) is representative of the category problems that can arise in open-shelf browsing. Customers can

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become disoriented and frustrated if they do not have a clear understanding of the store’s categorization system—or sometimes even when they do have such an understanding. When I failed to find the Bombay Rockers album in Indipop, I began to look around at nearby sections. However, because the Indipop section in Music Metropolis stores is a subset of the broad “Indian Music” category, it was surrounded by genres such as regional folk musics and Hindi film soundtracks. I was not completely surprised to find that the Rockers were located in International, as they assuredly have more in common with Britney Spears than with Indian classical recordings. However, in the organizational logic of Music Metropolis stores, Indipop as a subset of “Indian” music is located on the opposite side of the store from International. Without a clear understanding of how these genres are differentiated, I would have to traverse back and forth across the store to try to locate particular artists. Had I not been motivated to ask for assistance, I may well have given up on the recording after looking in exactly the wrong place. This example illustrates why organized retailers who gravitate toward open shelving have a much greater incentive than counter store owners to clarify their genre schemas, distinctly mark their shelving arrangements with signs, and try to standardize genre perceptions so that customers will arrive with a reasonable knowledge of where to look for specific albums. The pervasive presence of genre signs throughout Music Metropolis stores was one of the most striking differences between these outlets and the much differently organized family-run shops. After becoming accustomed to local shops, the profusion of signage in Music Metropolis was almost intimidating. The many signs designating various kinds of genre divisions were interspersed with those indicating temporal classifications (“Chartbusters” and “New Releases”), as well as those indicating store features (“Help Desk” “Cash Counter”) and different kinds of peripheral merchandise (“DVDs,” “Clothing,” “Accessories”). Furthermore, these signs competed for the customers’ attention with a shifting array of advertising displays. Following Mikhael Bakhtin’s (1986) notion of “speech genres” as an underlying principal structuring utterances in dialog, one might call this organizational and dialogical placement of commodities in retail spaces “commodity genres.” In the context of music stores, music genre (i.e., music commodities) operates as one kind of commodity genre. At particular times, large advertising displays concealed the genre category labels, so that the particular item being promoted stood in as a stereotype or exemplar of the entire genre. For example, at one point in early 2005 in certain Music Metropolis stores, an immense display promotion for The Incredibles film was placed directly in front of the sign for the English-language DVD section. Anyone who was trying to find the section to purchase a different English-language film would be forced into the awareness that The Incredibles was representative of this genre. The purpose of all of this signage was, I would suggest, not exactly to clear things up for the customer, but rather to reassure the customer that everything was “in its place” and that the store was navigable. Genre signs

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and advertising displays called out to customers with tags that offered possibilities for identification amid the profusion of music. They provided opportunities for markers to direct the attention of customers. And perhaps most importantly, in the absence of a familiar, trusted shopkeeper, they offered the comforting appearance that everything in the store had been carefully organized to suit customer needs.

Musical Taxonomies in Music Metropolis Music Metropolis outlets had different floor plans and varied greatly in size, each of which pointed to a musical taxonomy embodied in space. The chain’s marketing managers, however, took great care to ensure that their genre signage was clear and consistently styled across all of the various stores in order to keep this taxonomy consistent. They used a standardized schema of colors, fonts, and positioning for various kinds of signs: Level I (orange) signs hanging on chains from the ceiling indicated the location of important store fixtures such as the cash counter, help desk, bag check, and so forth. In a few cases these signs were also used to indicate meta-categories of products, such as “Hindi,” “International,” or “Apparel,” but this use was relatively rare. Smaller Music Metropolis outlets often omitted these conspicuous orange signs, because their customers could readily see where central store features were located. Level II (yellow) signs were also hung from the ceiling and were used to indicate product groupings or meta-categories within the stores. These categories were fixed across different Music Metropolis outlets and relatively limited; they included labels such as Indian, Hindi, Regional, International, Chartbusters, New Releases, Home Entertainment, Books, and Apparel. Level III (black) signs were attached directly to shelving units (either affixed to the top of free-standing “gondola” shelves or positioned above individual wall racks). These signs incorporated the Music Metropolis logo and were the most frequently used signs in the stores. They denoted specific music genres (e.g., Remix, Pop/Rock, Ghazal) or specific types of peripheral merchandise. Like the higher-level categories, Level III signs were professionally produced and therefore limited to a fixed variety of labels. Level IV (yellow) signs were scattered amid the display areas of the shelving and were known by Music Metropolis employees as “shelf-talkers.” Unlike the higher-level signs, shelf talkers were usually hand-written, and they varied immensely in design and content. These paper labels had a variety of uses within the store. Some of them highlighted the merits of important albums or artists, while others indicated sub-categories within a particular Level III genre.

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Putting Music in Its Place Senior Music Metropolis managers explained to me that shelf-talkers played an important role in engaging customers’ interest, acting as “an additional customer service agent.” In other words, the hand-written discussion on these signs stood in for the colloquial engagement of a knowledgeable shopkeeper in a context where the retail staff was frequently too busy to greet every customer. These shelf talkers were also the only labels in Music Metropolis that might be written in the script of a local language (e.g., Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Kannada), rather than in English/Roman script. Level V signs were the various colors and designs of the individual media packing themselves. These labels were quite diverse and served varying purposes: simultaneously identifying the media, the contents of shrink-wrapped packaging, and operating as a kind of advertising. As a type of label, these are the most heterogeneous in form.5

When taken all together, these various levels of signs created an explicit, hierarchical map of Music Metropolis stores—the kind of map that was unnecessary in India’s “unorganized,” shopkeeper-oriented retail spaces. If one were to diagram the arrangement of Music Metropolis category labels (see Figures 5.2 and 5.3), what would emerge is a classical taxonomy in which each individual recording is “put in its place” within a deterministic, top-down schematic. While it might not seem to be an entirely profound observation that organized retail chains need to have an underlying organizational logic, comparing these chains to family-run stores reveals the extent

Figure 5.2 Signs in a Music Metropolis store in Chennai—This photograph shows the pervasive use of signs in a Music Metropolis store in Chennai (May 2005). Photograph taken by the author.

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Figure 5.3 Diagram of music categories—The various levels of signage that are visible in the picture mark a hierarchy of categorizations, as indicated in this diagram.

to which organized retailers are invested in developing unambiguous genre taxonomies and universalizing the use of those taxonomies across geographic and social space. As Music Metropolis executives would be quick to point out, these retail arrangements are “customer-oriented” in the sense that they liberate browsers from complex, locally grounded engagements with a mediating shopkeeper. However, they accomplish this via homogenization, at the expense of interpersonal texture.

Music Genres or Marketing Categories? While I use the term “genres” throughout this chapter to describe the categorizations in Music Metropolis stores, it is worth bearing in mind that these are idealized and “aspirational” genre distinctions as developed by the chain’s executives, rather than an entirely accurate reflection of larger social practice. Fabian Holt (2007) has argued that the taxonomies used by organized music stores are not music genres at all, but should rather be thought of as marketing categories. Holt rightly explains that genres emerge from complex interactions among diverse stakeholders (music labels, retailers, trade publications, broadcast media, music critics, musicians, and audiences). Music store categories do not simply reflect these existing social realities; they instead present an authoritative organizational schema that explains how the chain’s executives would like genres to be defined. Music store categories, in this outlook, are just one position within the overall social push-and-pull through which genre understandings are constituted. I would suggest, however, that it would be inaccurate to say that music store taxonomies are merely marketing categories, with no relation to the larger construction of genre. The categorizations developed by retailers need to have strong points of contact with broader genre discourses. In order to be useful, they have to mesh with audience expectations and with the genre schemas used by other industry stakeholders. What we see in Music Metropolis genre labels is not a neutral, descriptive reflection of existing social categories— but neither is it an autonomous, top-down creation by marketers. That being said, I would agree with Holt that organized retailers tend to actively revise certain existing genre divisions. In my interviews, Music

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Metropolis executives noted that it was especially important to keep their music taxonomy aligned with that of other branches of their parent company and with large international labels. A genre such as angrezi (“English music”), which has a well-defined and stable meaning among certain Indian populations, is very unlikely to be adopted by cosmopolitan retailers such as Music Metropolis, because it does not readily align with the terminology of international conglomerates. In short, the Music Metropolis taxonomy is an idealized portrayal of genre that acts as a powerful social force in attempting to shape existing genre distinctions. Especially when we consider the ever-growing vertical and horizontal consolidation throughout the music industry and the desire of executives to develop universalized categorizations for the sake of inter-industry efficiency, we can say that the trend toward developing rigorous genre schemas has a decisive social force.

Privileged Positioning The layout of Music Metropolis stores reveals how the chain’s executives instituted and promoted a consistent pattern of genre relationships. By flattening out Music Metropolis floor plans, we can see how certain ideas about music were geographically enforced in the stores through the logic of proximity. Figures 5.4 and 5.5, for example, show the “Indian” section of a Music Metropolis flagship store in Mumbai. In these diagrams, we

Figure 5.4 The “Indian” section of a flagship Music Metropolis store (Mumbai) March 2005—Photograph taken by the author.

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Figure 5.5 Top-down schematic view of the store section photographed in Figure 5.4—The yellow highlight indicates areas set aside for “Chartbusters” (at the top left) and “New Releases” (at the center left).

can see that the temporal classifications, New Releases and Chartbusters, were located in Aisle A, closest to the entrance. Aisle B grouped together Indipop, Remix, and Dance. Aisle C was devoted to Spiritual and Instrumental. Aisle D included specific devotional and poetic genres, as well as music in the Gujarati language, which is commonly spoken in Mumbai. Aisle E was dedicated to music in other regional languages besides Gujarati. The wall space furthest away from the entrance was devoted to Hindi film soundtracks. The arrangement of these different genres within the “Indian” section reveals some of the specific ways in which music can be categorized—Aisle A was defined by chronology (“newness”), Aisle B was classified by musical style, Aisle C was organized around religious content, Aisles D and E were organized according to locality (linguistic and regional), and the back wall space was organized by production context (film soundtracks). The entire collection, of course, was grouped together on the basis of its perceived “Indian-ness.” The spatial arrangement of different genres within this Music Metropolis “Indian” section reflects how the chain’s executives interpreted the value and social role of particular genres. In this retailing logic, categories of music that were most likely to attract attention and provoke an “impulse purchase” were located nearest the entrance, so that all customers entering

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the section would have to pass by them (these categories also happened to be the highest-priced music in the store).6 If a customer dropped by the store with a vague intention to look around the Indian section and maybe pick up something new, she would first notice the Chartbusters and New Releases, and after that she would enter the Indipop/Dance/Remix section. She would barely have to skim the surface of the store, so to speak, in order to find something to buy. On the other hand, a customer who came to the store to search for a specific album or for a less “edgy” genre would need to pass through these initial trendy sections in order to locate the object of his or her interest deeper in the store. As several Music Metropolis executives explained during my interviews, branding the store as a cosmopolitan outlet meant that regional, religious, and classical genres were not as likely to attract the attention of the customers they targeted. These music categories were therefore de-prioritized in the stores’ geography and placed in relatively inconspicuous locations. Of course, these valuations created a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy—the chain’s branding tended to act as a filter for what kinds of customers would enter the store, and the classification and positioning of recordings tended to reinforce certain views of musical priority. These genre arrangements indicate an assessment of music as “high-value” or “low-value” based primarily on how executives evaluated the potential profit from each genre. One of my interlocutors—a warehouse manager who had misgivings about the current store layouts—explained to me that in Music Metropolis’s early years the “Chartbusters” had been located on the back wall of the “Indian Music” area. Music Metropolis executives at that time thought encouraging high-value customers to walk past the low-priority merchandise would give these relatively marginal genres a chance to attract more attention. Later on, however, executives decided to reverse this arrangement: the high-priority merchandise was moved toward the front of the store, where it remained throughout the duration of my research. Placing low-priority merchandise in low-traffic areas further marginalizes these genres within the Music Metropolis taxonomy. The logic by which music recordings were divided into relatively privileged or relatively marginal genres was consistently implemented across all of the various Music Metropolis outlets that I visited. Figure 5.6 shows the layout of one of the chain’s smaller stores, located in the city of Hyderabad. This store consisted of only a single room in which the music was divided into five meta-categories: Chartbusters, New Releases, International, Hindi, and Regional. Compared to the Mumbai flagship outlet’s Indian section, described above, this store shares an identical pattern, albeit on a smaller scale. Again, the New Releases and Chartbusters are foregrounded so that they are the first categories to greet the customer upon entering the store. The trendy International section is given a central position in the main aisle leading from the entrance to the stage. The Hindi and Regional sections are again located peripherally, along the edges of the store, and are somewhat obscured by other shelving and displays.

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Figure 5.6 Top-down schematic view of a store in Hyderabad—This diagram shows the entire music-display area of the store. Not shown is a small section to the left of the main entrance that contains peripheral merchandise.

There are, to be sure, differences between the two stores. In Hyderabad, the Hindi and Regional sections were separated from each other and given their own Level-II signs, whereas in Mumbai these categories were organized together under the single Level-II heading “Indian.” In the Regional Hyderabadi shelving, the only recordings to be found were film soundtracks in the Telugu language, whereas the Mumbai flagship store boasted a much greater variety of regional languages and styles. In addition, many of the genres that were given their own Level-III signs in the larger Mumbai store had been combined in the downsized Hyderabad space (e.g., Indipop/Dance/ Remix and Ghazal/Classical). Despite these differences, however, the same basic patterns of genre grouping and prioritization can be seen at work in each store. Music Metropolis’s overarching pattern is to foreground trendy pop songs and international sounds, while pushing regional and classical genres toward the outskirts.

Genre Clusters in Music Metropolis During the spring of 2005, I organized a grand tour in which I visited 26 Music Metropolis stores in 12 cities throughout India.7 With the permission of the chain’s senior executives, I carefully videotaped the layout

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and signs in each store. This allowed me to create a database in which I recorded how each store was physically organized and how genres were linked together under particular meta-categories.8 When I reviewed this data, certain category patterns began to stand out. The groupings became particularly obvious when I observed how smaller stores combined two or more genres onto single Level-III signs. For example, “Indipop/Remix” was very frequently used as a genre combination. Alternative juxtapositions that might seem just as logical—for example, the combination of “International/Indipop” or the combination of “Hindi Film/Remix”—did not appear at all in Music Metropolis stores. The decisions that Music Metropolis executives made about how to organize genre clusters reveals a specific interpretation of the musical and sociological relationships among different genres. The consistent separation of Indipop and International into different clusters, for example, reinforced the assumption that Indipop’s “Indian-ness” takes precedence over its musical-stylistic similarities with Western musics. This structural organization revealed how merchandising executives believed that customers drawn to the Indipop label would be more interested in looking at the nearby remixes than in browsing through the broader categories under “International.” Due to the way in which Indipop was clustered with other “indigenous” genres at this time—and the manner in which the International section was privileged within the layout of Music Metropolis stores—it is unsurprising that artists such as the Bombay Rockers (and their record labels) would want to be “liberated” from the Indipop classification. Based on my 2005 survey of Music Metropolis stores, I identified 14 primary genre clusters used by this organized retailer. These groupings remained more or less consistent across all of the stores that I visited, with the exception that some of the clusters were not present in smaller stores (see Table 5.1). A quick examination of these primary genre clusters reveals the ways in which local Music Metropolis executives interpreted the interests of their customer base and the way in which their genre taxonomies were tied to the chain’s cosmopolitan brand image. In addition to the Indipop/International division discussed above, there are a number of significant observations to be made about how music was clustered in this taxonomy. The prominence of Hindi film soundtracks as a primary grouping, for example, reflects the long-standing hegemony of the Hindi language and of the soundtrack production format within the Indian mediascape. However, in accordance with its “international” aesthetic, Music Metropolis did not place any particular emphasis on prestigious “evergreen” songs from the classic era of Hindi film. These recordings were simply mixed in with the other early film soundtracks and compilations. The chain thus largely chose to ignore the prestige value and independent billing that other industry players would have liked to grant to that particular subset of classics soundtracks.9 At the same time, the separation of film song remixes from the film song category (i.e., the

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Table 5.1 Genre clusters in Music Metropolis stores—The highlighted items are “temporary” categories and thus function somewhat differently from the other catalog groupings Store Size

Meta-Category

All stores

Chartbusters

Genre Labels (Level III Signs)

Hindi, Spiritual, Indipop, International, “Hot Picks,” Regional New Releases Indian, International, Regional International Pop Pop/Rock, International, Compilations, “Best of,” Classics, Instrumental, Country, Movie Soundtracks, Heavy Metal Hindi Film Hindi Films, Compilations, Classics, Instrumental, Karaoke Spiritual Spiritual, Devotional Indipop/Remix Indipop, Dance, Remix, Cover Versions Large and Promotional Best Buys, Collector’s Item, Exclusive, medium-sized Hot ’N Happening, Imports, Just stores Arrived, Promotion, Special Offer Regional Regional, Bengali (Adhunik, Compilations, Devotional, Pop/Band, Rabindrasangeet, Nazrul Geeti, Folk Song), Kannada, Tamil, Telugu (Film, Spiritual, Others), Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Malayalam, Gurbani Classical/Ghazal Hindustani Classical, Carnatic Classical, Ghazal, Qawwali, Instrumental Fusion Fusion, New Age, World Music Large stores (Western) Classical Western Classical, Jazz, Blues only (Western) Dance Techno, Trance, Dance, Remix, Underground African-Diaspora Hip-Hop, Rap, Reggae, Gospel, Soul, Dance Children Children, Kids

clustering of remixes with Indipop) can be interpreted as reflecting the somewhat ambiguous status of remixes as a “non-film” popular music. That is, despite their origins from film soundtracks, remix songs are not attached to a new film narrative. This aspect of Music Metropolis’s organization conveyed the assumption that individuals who go into the store to look for film soundtracks would be less likely to browse the remix section. This separation was becoming increasingly tenuous by 2005, as contemporary producers had begun to include “authorized” remix versions as part of original soundtrack releases. Music Metropolis genre groupings reinforced the hegemony of the English, Hindi, and Urdu languages by lumping all other Indian languages into the relatively marginalized category, “Regional.” This organizational principle was maintained regardless of the music style being sung in the regional languages—and regardless of what the dominant local language was in any given store location. Perhaps, ironically, the “cosmopolitan”

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image of the Music Metropolis chain was conveyed in part by the stores’ aloofness from the local vernacular. This lack of regional diversity was particularly striking in South India, where Hindi film songs were still given their own “Chartbuster” category in every store, yet local language chartbusters were conspicuously placed into the “Regional” genre rather than labeled under the local language (i.e., “Tamil,” “Telugu,” “Malayalam,” etc.). The chain’s (Mumbai-based) executives considered this consistency in merchandise offerings, the layout of genre groupings, and the language of  categories to be an important part of the Music Metropolis brand. Along with consistencies in store design principles and color schemes, these genre and language groupings helped to reinforce a consistent Music Metropolis brand experience across the vastly different regions of India. Three of the groupings in Table 5.1 are somewhat anomalous in that they are “temporal” categories. Individual recordings were not expected to stay in the “New Releases,” “Chartbusters,” and “Promotional” shelving for any significant length of time; they instead made a brief appearance there before settling into another section (or leaving the store altogether). “New Releases” and “Chartbusters” were particularly critical for Music Metropolis sales, because the store’s internal promotion of these items coincided with external marketing that added value to the music. In the case of “New Releases,” Music Metropolis was able to leverage value from promotional campaigns conducted by music labels and other distributors. The external media hype surrounding a new release was often supplemented by advertising assistance in the form of promotional posters, shelf-talkers, and cardboard cutouts that were given to Music Metropolis (and other retailers) by the production companies. These promotional displays had a tendency to spread out across the floor space of Music Metropolis outlets, in effect turning the entire store into a market for new releases. The “Chartbusters” section, meanwhile, was always conspicuously marked by bright yellow shelving. It advertised the top hits of the day as measured by the albums’ overall national sales in Music Metropolis outlets. In most cases these albums were also new releases, but they enjoyed the additional synergistic effects of being designated as the top exemplars of their respective genres. Customers were willing to pay premium prices for new releases and chartbusters; according to the Music Metropolis executives, these two temporary categories accounted for more than half of the chain’s total music sales.10 The centrality of temporal categorizations in Music Metropolis outlets reveals another aspect of musical value that Rajeev, a senior merchandising manager at the chain, described as the “product life cycle.” Music recordings were generally the most valuable to organized retailers in the weeks immediately after their release, when the aura of “newness” and the producers’ promotional campaigns were at their peak. Rajeev indicated that there were several different destinies that might await music commodities after this initial debut:

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For the purpose of ordering, for the purpose of deciding the mix, for the purpose of stocking, filling the store to suit the profile of the customer, you classify your entire mix into three basic categories. One, new products. Second is your best sellers or your chartbusters. And your third is what is called catalog, all the regular sellers. … Suppose a new product is released. Two or three things [could] happen to the product. The first one is, it bombs. If it bombs, it’s out. The second thing that can happen, is that the product becomes moderately successful, does a certain volume, goes up and down for some time, and then settles down into small but very steady volume and moves towards what is called deep catalog. Another thing that happens to new product is that it hits the chartbusters, like Veer-Zaara for example. (Interview with author) The fate that awaits any particular product in Music Metropolis thus largely depends on how well the recording sells during its initial release. If it rises to the top of the Chartbusters, then it will almost certainly maintain a place in the store for years to come. If it is moderately successful, then it goes to “deep catalog”—it will be kept in supply by the retail chain but given low priority in stocking. If a recording does not register any immediate success, then, in Rajeev’s words, it is “out.” The growing influence of organized retail on the music industry (broadly construed, see Chapter 1) has tended to consolidate these short-term value judgments, to the extent that it can be virtually impossible today to find a recent recording that did not sell well during its initial release. The “Chartbuster” shelving, like other aspects of Music Metropolis genre groupings, tended to be a homogenizing force on musical values. In addition to its role in reinforcing short-term market evaluations, the “Chartbuster” categorization promoted universalized ideas of contemporary taste throughout the many diverse regions in which Music Metropolis operated.11 The national “Chartbuster” rankings were delivered uniformly across all Music Metropolis outlets—if a Bryan Adams album was listed as the number-one international chartbuster in Delhi, then it was also listed as number one in Bhubaneswar, Nagpur, Lucknow, Bangalore, and everywhere else. The same was true for the chain’s Hindi, Spiritual, or Indipop chartbusters. The category of “Regional Chartbusters” was an interesting exception. These listings were compiled on an area-wide basis following the chain’s four primary divisions (West India, North India, East India, and South India). However, the local-area chartbusters were not specifically labeled as such—they were never called “North Indian Chartbusters” or “Tamil Chartbusters.” Instead, they always maintained the generic label of “Regional.” Music Metropolis executives sought to establish their sales rankings as an authoritative barometer of Indian national tastes—and indeed, the retailer’s chart rankings were often used by broadcasters and other industry stakeholders:

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My chartbusters are a property or a brand called “Music Metropolis National Charts.” I have a single chart all over the country. … Universal music uses this as their representative charts in the country to circulate it worldwide. MTV uses our charts. … At the end of the day, we want it to look like, say, a Billboard [magazine] in India which actually represents the state of the product in the country.” (Rajeev, interview with the author) Music Metropolis executives argued that the chain’s “Chartbuster” rankings were more accurate than other Indian hit parades, because they were derived from nationally compiled sales reports rather than from more subjective measures of consumer interest such as radio call-in requests. These rankings, as the quotation above indicates, were considered a kind of intellectual property derived from Music Metropolis’s position as a central national retailer. The universal nature of these rankings remains questionable, however, for three reasons: Music Metropolis stores were oriented toward a particular kind of middle class consumer; they were concentrated in the largest Indian cities; and purchases in Mumbai, Delhi, and their suburbs comprised the most substantial portion of the chain’s sales. As I visited Music Metropolis outlets across India, I asked local managers if the “Chartbusters” display accurately represented sales numbers within their particular stores. For the most part, these store managers simply replied in the affirmative—although if pressed they might acknowledge that there was some variation at the lower end of the charts. Some of the managers explained to me that while local tastes did not entirely match what was reflected in the “Chartbuster” shelving, the store staff felt compelled to “push” national top-sellers due to the marketing emphasis that was placed on these recordings. Managers who fell behind in “Chartbuster” sales could often make up the difference by coaching their staff and using extra-aggressive sales tactics, thereby meeting national revenue expectations for these more valuable recordings. This in-store dynamic again reveals the aspirational nature of Music Metropolis’s organizational schema, as the heavy promotion of chartbusters throughout India created a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy by inciting customer interest. It also shows how the chain was focused on leveraging values that were created by large-scale marketing and geared toward economic status display. The chartbusters shelving created a mythic status and prestige value for particular recordings, while other items that might actually be of greater interest to existing local tastes were physically and economically sidelined in the stores.

The Logic of Stocking and the Tastes of the “Evolved” Customer Thousands of professionally produced albums are released every year in India. Spatial constraints in the stores coupled with brand ideologies mean that very few of these albums will be picked up by Music Metropolis, and

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fewer still will make it into the chain’s regular catalog. Deciding which albums to carry was the task of the chain’s merchandising managers, who had to evaluate the short- and long-term revenue potential of every recording. While there were many concrete factors that Music Metropolis executives relied upon to predict the trajectory of individual albums, this evaluation was not a precise science. Music Metropolis executives sometimes cited their own personal “feel” for a recording as a motivation for pushing it in the stores. This seemed to be a widespread phenomenon—all of the successful retail managers whom I interviewed agreed that it was necessary to balance knowledge of established customer desires and the manager’s own sensitivity to potential musical trends. My primary interlocutor in discussions of Music Metropolis’s acquisition strategies was Rajeev, a senior merchandising manager at the chain’s corporate headquarters. Armed with an MBA from the prestigious Indian Institute of Management in Bhubaneswar, Rajeev had spent three and a half years working for the Saregama music label before moving to Music Metropolis. He was an unabashed fan of 1960s and ’70s international rock and had an encyclopedic recollection of the minutia of Western rock bands, musicians, and momentous concerts. Although he noted that his job required him to stay abreast of developments in all music genres, Rajeev’s deep interest in international music made him an ideal executive for the Music Metropolis brand. As part of his job Rajeev frequently traveled abroad to visit retail chains in the United States, United Kingdom, and United Arab Emirates, and he seemed to be on personal terms with most of the major players in the Indian music industry. Rajeev and his staff maintained a spreadsheet that listed all of Music Metropolis’s outlets and the allocation of stock for each store. An outlet in a particular district of Chennai, for example, might be given a higher percentage of international music and a greater representation of Tamil-language soundtracks within the “Regional” section. A different store in the same city might stock a greater number of Hindi soundtracks and a lower number of international recordings. These stocking proportions were constantly adjusted and re-adjusted to account for changing sales data from various areas of the country. Unfortunately, the exact contents of this spreadsheet and the formulas by which stocking percentages were determined remain proprietary information and cannot be reproduced in this book. When it came to introducing a new album into Music Metropolis stores, Rajeev explained that his team balanced their carefully assembled knowledge about existing customer demand (i.e., sales) with a consideration of the incentives that music labels were willing to offer, the extent to which the album reinforced the chain’s brand image, and their own personal sense of the music’s value. As always, these judgments tended to only briefly touch on evaluations of musical quality before shifting over to broader social considerations:

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Putting Music in Its Place You can’t have a formula for ordering a new release … you listen to the content, how you are convinced about the content. How is this particular band, film, or artist, or whatever—what is the track record? Or if it’s the film banner, if it’s a film, what is the track record in the past? How well has it done? What are the kinds of promotions? What’s the kind of inquiry that’s coming to the stores before the product is placed? What’s the media plan [of the music label]? What’s the promotion? Are [music labels] giving me any special schemes to do that well? Let’s say they tell me, “ok, I’m launching it, I‘m giving you on CD 10+1,” that enhances my margin; we negotiate that way. … So all of these are laid down to decide what am I going to do. If I’m convinced that this is going to be big, I want to hit numbers that I will break out at my store, exposing it to the maximum extent. … See the other problem is, Jayson, the proliferation of new releases that’s happening today. It’s completely crazy. Everybody is thumping products, there are films, there are remixes, there are Indipop, there are versions, cover versions. There are a number of genres that are large—there’s devotional, there’s literally a proliferation of titles. Now, a large store like mine, at least on a certain category, we cannot say, “I won’t keep this product” [in the store]. So it’s a question of how I grade it. A VeerZaara gets larger volumes, but some B-grade film may not get that same kind of exposure. (interview with the author)

Beyond exemplifying the “crisis of proliferation” (Attali 1985) in this era of the music industry that only became worse in the first decade of the 2000s, this statement illustrates how Rajeev paid careful attention to the advertising plans of music labels, using them to gauge the relative confidence that a label had in a particular recording. What remains unsaid here is that Rajeev limited space in his stores: not everything fits, nor does he want it to. When the synergistic industry hype around a new release appeared to be heading toward a tipping point, Rajeev would make a decision to give that product greater “exposure” in Music Metropolis stores (thereby adding to the broader hit-production synergy), and he would hope that the album would “break out.” Products that were determined to be good candidates for exposure were granted premium display space in the stores’ high-traffic areas and were heavily promoted in Music Metropolis’s own advertising. The decision to get on-board with a release promotion was always a risky endeavor—devoting resources and store space to a product that “bombs” (i.e., fails) could have significant repercussions for the profitability of the retailer. To make successful stocking decisions, the merchandisers had to constantly hone their market-evaluation skills, and Rajeev was prepared to offer any number of lessons about albums that he had wrongly expected to thrive. Before meeting with record label executives, Rajeev and his team would draw up a list of upcoming albums scored on the basis of sales expectations.

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If this metric was above a certain level, they knew that Music Metropolis would automatically stock that recording: this is what Rajeev means when he says that a “certain category” of albums did not allow for the possibility of rejection—it would be unseemly for the retailer to not have a big international hit in stock. For most upcoming albums, however, the Music Metropolis team negotiated fiercely in closed-door sessions with record labels to determine whether or not the store would even carry the recording, much less what kind of profits the chain might receive from the recording’s sale. Beyond the issue of external promotional efforts by the label, Rajeev weighed the brand support that the product would lend to Music Metropolis, as well as the various incentives that music labels were willing to offer in return for stocking particular albums. Further details of these negotiations were again considered to be proprietary information, but Rajeev readily agreed that the buying power of Music Metropolis put him in a significantly advantageous bargaining position relative to local music stores. The size and power of the Music Metropolis chain allowed him to negotiate as an equal player with large record labels, and to obtain much better distribution deals than would be available to smaller outlets.12 It is notable in the above quotation that Rajeev began his explanation of stocking decisions with a reference to personal evaluations of the music (“you listen to the content, how you are convinced about the content”). Rajeev was a rabid music fan, as were all of the merchandising managers whom I interviewed. This wholehearted immersion in music might even be considered a requirement for successfully performing the merchandising job, if not for the customer service agent (CSA) role that I describe in the next chapter, as stocking decisions required a predictive ability grounded in an acute understanding of music cultures. At the same time, Rajeev pointed out that he sometimes had to curb his enthusiasm about particular recordings out of respect for his understanding of customer tastes. Part of his view of the Music Metropolis brand and mission was that these popular Indian tastes could be gradually, in his words, “developed” through the merchandising decisions of the retailer. Rajeev’s views of musical quality and his aspirations for the musical future largely coincided with the cosmopolitan and edgy brand image of Music Metropolis, and this was one reason he greatly enjoyed working for the retailer. The merchandising team often drew on brand discourses as a way of justifying their decisions to stock certain genres and albums whose profitability might not be immediately apparent in the sales numbers. By way of this logic, for example, most T-Series products were shunned by Music Metropolis. Even though T-Series was the best-selling music label in India, the company’s rural, “down-market” reputation was deemed to be incongruent with Music Metropolis’s image. Rajeev and the chain’s other merchandisers instead gravitated toward multinational labels with a reputation for quality, such as Sony, Warner, and Universal, along with certain Indian prestige labels, such as Saregama, Yash Raj Music, and Times Music (see Chapter 2).

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The stories of three contemporary film soundtracks can help to further clarify Music Metropolis’s stocking logic. Veer-Zaara (Yash Raj Music, 2004) was a relative shoo-in for the chain’s merchandisers. As I have described elsewhere (2009), this soundtrack was pervasively marketed as an enjoyable prestige item for new middle class consumers. It was presented in expensive packaging, buttressed by superstar actors and composers, backed up by an extensive media campaign, and stamped with the well-known Yash Raj label. Veer-Zaara was the kind of soundtrack that Rajeev had to promote in order to maintain the Music Metropolis image. In contrast, the case of Morning Raga (Times Music, 2004) required a more complicated calculus. This film was more innovative, artistic, and understated. Much of the dialogue was in English. It featured Shabana Azmi, one of India’s most prominent art-film actors, and the soundtrack was a complex, semi-classical endeavor composed by an unknown music director. Rajeev elected to adopt and promote this soundtrack at Music Metropolis because he felt that the artistic quality and social context of the music enhanced the chain’s image and because he valued the prospect of corporate synergy with Times Music (which was likely providing distribution incentives). Morning Raga was the kind of product that Rajeev felt he could promote in order to help “develop” his chain’s audience: “I must be visible in Veer-Zaara because that’s what my customer is coming for. I can also be visible in a Morning Raga because that’s the kind of product that I should sell” (interview with the author). The film Tere Naam (T-Series, 2003) received a very different evaluation. Rajeev correctly anticipated that this soundtrack would be a significant hit among a certain section of the Indian population (in fact, it became India’s top-selling soundtrack of 2003). However, Rajeev and his team did not feel that the style and audience of this soundtrack were consistent with their aspirations for the Music Metropolis brand. The merchandising team ultimately decided that they should stock the soundtrack at its release but that it would receive no particular promotion in the stores: Will I take a decision to back up Tere Naam? No. The movie will be big, the music will be big, but it will be a rural, upcountry sort of feel. It’s not urban. I never backed that product. JBJ: But you must have had some pretty decent sales regardless? RAJEEV: Nothing much. It was never big on the charts. JBJ: So we’ve got urban-rural tastes in play here, but even more than that. … RAJEEV: At the end of the day, your sales reflect the profile of your customers. Even if it’s a mass product—how do I put it—let’s say there’s some vague film called Shikari that may do well in a rural area. But in my store it won’t sell. After the first week it will be out, it won’t even be on the charts. So it’s possible. Tere Naam is a classic example. There was one more product, I forgot the name, it just bombed in our stores. It never hit the charts. It bombed in all of the urban markets. Whatever sale came from U.P. [the state of Uttar Pradesh] and Bihar, and other places. RAJEEV:

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Like other senior managers at Music Metropolis, Rajeev had sharp disdain for “rural” Indian music. The brand ideology that led the store’s executives to limit their stock of folk genres and to lump together most Indian languages as “Regional” also came into play during the evaluation of new releases. The lack of promotion of Tere Naam in Music Metropolis outlets may have led some customers to look elsewhere for their music (thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in low sales), but Rajeev was not particularly concerned about those parts of the population who were not likely to get on-board with his chain’s vision. His sarcastic choice of the hypothetical film title Shikari (hunter) and his reference to sales in “backward” North Indian states were fairly typical class-based slights offered from the perspective of a wealthy Indian living in a metropolitan city. Through their product stocking and promotion decisions, Rajeev and the rest of the merchandising team tried to use the power of Music Metropolis’s market position to influence the direction of the music industry and to develop customer expectations. As the chain continued to expand across India, its executives profited by encouraging customers to make an economic display and declare their affiliation with cosmopolitan styles. Even in relatively marginal areas, such as the aforementioned Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, local aspirants had the opportunity to perform social distinction (Bourdieu 1984) by shopping at Music Metropolis. Rajeev’s goal, then, was to continually develop the sensibilities of what he and other Music Metropolis executives referred to as the “evolved” Music Metropolis customer (a moniker that I described in more detail in the previous chapter). Maintaining the edginess and social prestige value of the brand required that merchandisers move beyond the established tastes of consumers by developing the merchandiser’s vision of the musical future.

Would Bryan Adams by Any Other (Genre) Name Sound as Sweet? Genre classifications and prioritizations are cultural processes through which individual actors negotiate and perpetuate meaning. By embedding a particular organizational schema in Music Metropolis store layouts, the retail chain’s executives promoted a specific construct of musical meanings. I discussed three aspects of Music Metropolis’s idealized genres in this chapter: (1) the genres used by this organized retailer were more rigorously defined and grouped than genres used in more local contexts; (2) these genre arrangements were applied homogenously across all of the various regions in which Music Metropolis operated; and (3) the retail chain’s executives actively pushed certain musical priorities through their branding strategies, physical genre arrangements, and stocking decisions. These music industry transformations, in which commodity distribution was becoming more streamlined, homogenous, and unsociable, were only a small part of the changes

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taking place throughout India during the 2000s as economic liberalization strategies opened the country to Western merchandising techniques. Similar processes were taking place in bookstores, clothing stores, stores selling household goods, and nearly every other retail context that had previously been dominated by local marketplaces. Bearing in mind this growing influence of large corporate chains on the construction of shopping experiences, it is worth asking, “what is in a name?” Is there any significant difference in the experience of listening to a Bryan Adams album if you bought it in Music Metropolis under the sign for “International,” versus asking for it in a local store under the tag of “English Music,” “Rock,” or “aṅgrezī?” What is the difference among devotional, spiritual, and baktī gīt? Between old Hindi film songs and evergreens? Between regional music and Tamil film songs? Does the genre title really matter, and do the firmer, more consistent categorization schemas used in Music Metropolis really affect consumer outlooks? I would suggest that these genre names really do matter, because while they might refer to the same products, they each carry different connotations, cultural associations, and values that come into play when the recording is purchased and played. In the case of Bryan Adams, for example, the specific label of “English Music” carries with it the history of British colonization, with its conflicted legacy of oppression and resistance. By changing this label to “International Music,” however, listening to Bryan Adams becomes a somewhat less disturbing, more innocuous form of transgression. The singer gains a cosmopolitan accessibility, allowing for less sharply political modes of identification. The same could be said for the Bombay Rockers—by evading the “Indipop” genre, this group was able to appeal to the new Indian middle classes, who would likely have not been as interested if the Rockers had been labeled on the basis their “Indian-ness.” Chains like Music Metropolis certainly attempted to appeal to these values and meaning through signage and spatial layout. As I will show in the next chapter, the chain also attempted to reinforce this perspective in its hiring practices and sales training strategies.

Notes 1. See Ang 1991, 1996. 2. For some of the central works in the area of musical genre, see Fabbri 1982; Toynbee 2000; Brackett 2002; Holt 2007; and Mahon 2011. Musical genre labels have been variously interpreted as social performances (Turino 2000; Frith 1996), as expected attitudes or behaviors (Hebdige 1979; Walser 1993), as modes of communication (Feld & Fox 1994; Feld 1984), and as signifiers of identity (Stokes 1994; Taylor 1997; Turino 2008). 3. Genre discourses are one of the “structures of anticipations,” that is, a way of framing experience that Stephen Feld (1994) argues is an important site of musical meaning. 4. Nearly all of the music stores that I examined during my research (both family-run stores and organized chains) kept a stock of peripheral merchandise such as t-shirts, videos, and books. The presence of these items indicates the

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expansive nature of genre and marketing categories, as shopkeepers were aware that customer interest in their primary merchandise (music recordings) would likely spill over into an interest in associated commodities. When I returned to the same music stores in 2010–13, I noticed that the retail spaces devoted to these peripheral goods had uniformly expanded, as shopkeepers attempted to compensate for declining music sales. 5. Very little scholarly analysis has been conducted on the packaging of music commodities and how this packaging is designed to add value to the product. The only two studies that I am aware of in this area are Ian Inglis’s (2001) analysis of the Beatles’ album art and Deborah Wong’s (1989) discussion of Thai cassette jackets. A detailed investigation of packaging is beyond the scope of this book, but I would suggest that it remains an open and potentially significant area of inquiry. 6. For an applied anthropologist’s perspectives on this kind of retail-store spatial logic, see Paco Underhill (1999). 7. Music Metropolis executives divided India into four geographic regions, each of which was given its own middle-management structure for operations, marketing, and merchandising. (Regional managers reported to the chain’s national executives at the corporate headquarters in Mumbai.) Using the chain’s regional divisions, the cities in which I conducted research can be organized as follows: West India: Mumbai, Pune North India: Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon, Jaipur, Lucknow East India: Kolkata, Bhubaneswar South India: Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore. 8. My goal in this tour was to obtain a snapshot of Music Metropolis genre categories throughout India at roughly the same synchronic moment. Twenty-five of the stores were videotaped between April 23, 2005, and May 30, 2005. The primary Mumbai flagship outlet was videotaped a bit earlier, on March 10, 2005, but the timing was close enough to the other stores that the differences in layout were minor. In each store, I carefully filmed multiple panoramic shots, followed by a top-to-bottom shot of each individual shelving unit and then specific shots of any signs, store fixtures, advertisements, and decorations that might not have been fully captured in the other video footage. The result was approximately 3,500 separate video clips that I then used to reconstruct the stores’ layout and create my genre-groupings database. I also noted the type of media that was present in each of the genre-identified shelving units (e.g., cassettes, CDs, DVDs). I had hoped to repeat this spatial exercise when I revisited Music Metropolis stores in 2010; unfortunately, by that time the chain had been sold to a new owner, and I was unable to obtain permission to conduct such detailed examinations. My informal observations in 2010 revealed that there had been a continuing reduction in spatial allotments for “low-value” recordings and that there was a notable presence of films, video games, and new mobile-phone displays in the high-traffic areas of the stores. 9. In addition to branding concerns, music clusters were also shaped by particular industry relationships. The “evergreen” category of film songs was all but ignored by Music Metropolis—but it was strongly foregrounded by their competitor, Music World. Not coincidentally, Music World was owned by the same

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conglomerate that owned the Saregama music label, which held the distribution rights for nearly all of these “evergreen” albums. 10. Some of the newer Music Metropolis “satellite” outlets consisted of nothing but chartbuster displays. These small “shops-within-shops” were generally located in gas stations and bookstores; they were comprised of two or three shelving units that displayed the chain’s current best sellers. 11. Jacques Attali (1985) traced similar concerns in his historical study of the “hit parade” format. 12. Before the arrival of organized retail in India in the late 1990s, music labels typically sold their products to independent distribution companies, which then negotiated deals with local stores. Large chains such as Music Metropolis were able to eliminate the intermediary distributors and come to direct agreements with labels, as is indicated in this 2005 Saregama investment prospectus: Conventionally, wholesalers and distributors are the major customers of the products of Saregama. These wholesalers and distributors thereafter distribute them to the sub-wholesalers, sub-distributors, and retailers. In recent past, specialized mega music retail stores … have emerged due to availability of wide repertoire and enjoyable personal shopping experience. As these large retailers buy music directly from the Company, Saregama can bypass the intermediaries, thereby saving on the operation & distribution costs and enabling retail stores to procure music products at attractive rates. (http://www.sebi.gov.in/dp/saregama.pdf, accessed 10/31/15) By 2005 this distribution approach had placed family-run music stores at a distinct disadvantage. In addition to missing out on the promotional incentives that record labels offered to organized chain stores, smaller retailers were also still obliged to use the services of independent distributors. This meant that their per-unit stocking costs were much higher than what the larger stores paid. Fortunately for smaller retailers, this imbalance seemed to have been reduced by 2010. In interviews conducted at this later date, some of my interlocutors in family-run stores said that they too had been able to bypass the middle distributor layer and order some of their stock directly from music companies.

6

Music, Passion, Knowledge Music Retail and Affective Labor

One afternoon in 2005, I arrived at one of Mumbai’s flagship Music Metropolis locations to continue acquainting myself with the store and maybe pick up a couple of CDs for my growing collection. The experience began as I escaped the cacophony of horns and metallic taste of car exhaust, the air-conditioning buffering the heat and smells outside. I was surrounded by the store’s spectacular interior aesthetics: vaulted ceilings held up by colonial-era pillars, gigantic colorful murals replete with fanciful images of music and musicians, an enormous video wall composed of imported plasma-screen televisions, large sculptures hanging from the ceilings—skeletons, divers in dry suits, biplanes—and listening posts that allowed customers to evaluate the music for sale. Along with the banks of televisions that broadcast the latest music videos, a jukebox accepted ₹5 coins. The walls of the mezzanine-level coffee shop displayed molded handprints, signatures, and celebrity photographs: the one place you might see the Hindi film star Rekha and international pop star Britney Spears on the same stage. In addition to the visual experience, the radio-jockey (RJ) booth spun the newest of the new albums in high fidelity sound; it was better quality, in fact, than most anyone had at home. The upbeat music played constantly throughout the store, an aural blanket enveloping the space with motion and excitement, the bass literally moving objects in space. As I browsed the electronic music section, Abhishek, one of the store’s customer service agents (CSAs), noticed that I was already holding a couple of albums and approached to offer a cloth basket to help me keep one hand free. A slim man in his early 20s who wore a soul patch and longish hair and spoke in a slangy drawl, Abhishek fit the description of a hipster. Indeed, he quickly pointed out that he had worked as a DJ in one of Mumbai’s smaller clubs, a statement that helped to lend him authority as an expert in this genre. After he asked if I had any questions, I mused out loud to him that as a jazz musician, I was a bit perplexed by all of the different categories in this section: didn’t they all sound pretty much the same? Without seeming to take offense at my question, he initiated a conversation about what he perceived to be the differences between genres of electronic music that I had been hearing in Mumbai’s bars and the appropriate spaces and context for each genre. Abhishek punctuated his explanation by taking recordings from

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the shelves that exemplified the differences between the genres and handing them to me to examine. Most of these albums went directly into my basket, a few I handed back to him to reshelve after a brief look. The covers of the albums and the song titles, coupled with his descriptions of several songs, provided some insights into the potential musical experiences. But it must have been clear to him that I was still a little confused about the musical differences he was describing. Abhishek beckoned for me to follow him to the nearby RJ booth to listen to some of the tracks in the headphones. A couple of the CDs he had suggested were already on the booth’s shelves, and the RJ popped each of these into the CD player for me to listen to for a few minutes to elicit my opinion. After I noted that I did not find the music on these CDs particularly compelling, Abhishek pulled several CDs from my basket, opened the packaging, and had the RJ pop these CDs into the player. After listening for a few minutes, I noted to him that one of these sounded a little closer to my taste, and I placed it and a couple of others back in my basket to purchase; the others remained at the RJ booth. Following my positive evaluation of one of the albums, Abhishek brought me to the help desk in the International section. He mentioned an album title to the woman at the counter, who searched the Music Metropolis database to see whether this album was in stock here or in one of the other stores in the city. He was certain that I would love this album, and he had the CSA at the help desk order a copy of the CD for this store. He noted that it would arrive later in the week if I wanted to check it out. By this point, I had about seven CDs in my basket, but I had resolved before coming to the store to buy only one or two albums on this visit. Carefully weighing the merits of each of the CDs, I handed two recordings back to Abhishek who returned them to the shelves, but not before playfully noting that I would be missing out on some great music. I carried my new collection of electronic dance music CDs to the cash counter at the front, where the CSA noted that I was likely to be spending more than ₹600 (approximately $13). He asked whether I would like to join the Music Metropolis Club: I would get a Music Metropolis card, have access to discounted music that changes monthly, earn points toward future purchases, and receive email reminders of the store events and new music. I noted to the clerk that I already had a card and removed it from my wallet to be swiped and returned to me. In the quick checkout ritual on the main floor, security covers were removed from the CDs, the purchased music scanned by a laser gun, a receipt printed out, special offers tossed into the bag, and the bag was handed to me. I thanked Abhishek once again for his recommendations and returned to the baggage check, removed a token from my pocket, and claimed my backpack. A security guard opened a door, and I stepped back into the organized chaos of the Mumbai afternoon. From the perspective of the Music Metropolis company, this was a textbook sale: the CSA and I had made a brief, intimate encounter in which he had an opportunity to educate me on a music genre with which I was

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unfamiliar. He had correctly assessed that I was not under any particular constraints on the price of the albums, and he overcame any objections by spending time with me to assess my tastes and providing some audio examples. Yet he knew how to close the sale: do not to press too hard on this individual moment, because if I came to trust his taste, I would be open to his future suggestions when I returned to the store. In essence, Abhishek was filling the role of knowledge producer for me as a customer: by providing some of the background context of the recordings, he affixed a set of narratives, which are associated with particular aesthetic and musical values, to particular recordings based upon what he ascertained my tastes to be. Thus, the physical recordings that I purchased that day carry along with them the particular memories of the purchasing moment and the intimate social interaction that facilitated these CDs landing in my collection. Similarly, the transaction process was smooth that day: there was no line at the cash counter, I was prompted to use my loyalty card, and I was able to quickly leave the store without incident. As I was recounting this interaction to Geeta, the corporate Human Resources (HR) manager some weeks later, she knew exactly which CSA I was describing. Abhishek was among a few CSAs particularly well known by the Music Metropolis management for their knowledge and sales savvy in certain musical categories in the store—a CSA in Calcutta was known for knowledge of rock music, a CSA in another store for a deep knowledge of local folk musics, and another as an adept salesman of Western classical music. Yet these CSAs were not the norm: most CSAs required significant sales and music training in order to be effective at their jobs, particularly in the genres belonging to the international catalog around which the chain had fashioned its brand identity. This conundrum of finding knowledgeable labor was not limited to the Music Metropolis chain: it plagued all of the organized retailers who sold music. For example, as Atul Charamani, former chair of the Saregama music label noted in an article for the trade magazine Soundbox in 2013, sales clerks working for organized retailers could not effectively compete with clerks and owners of counter stores. Like the Bhopali shop owners that I discussed in Chapter 3, Charamani describes the intimate knowledge that counter store owners had about their own inventories as well as the range of available recordings—and their customers—in their local markets. The younger, less experienced store clerks employed by organized retailers did not have the same level of engagement with the products that they sold. Describing the generic context of organized music retail, he noted, Initially it was an amazing experience to walk into shops with thousands of square feet devoted to selling CDs. India had never seen anything like it. Most music stores had a counter behind which titles were displayed, and a salesman who stood behind it interrogated consumers about their music taste. These salesmen hardly spoke English, but

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Charamani was not alone in complaining about how store clerks in organized retail contexts lacked musical knowledge and passion: store customers, music store owners, and executives of the Music Metropolis chain frequently sang this refrain. In this chapter, I focus on one of the inherent contradictions in so-called “organized retail” in India—the play between differential domains of value as a music store chain selling recorded music and other media oriented its brand to attract a particular kind of high-class clientele. As I elaborated in previous chapters, Music Metropolis aimed to create a music destination in each of the cities into which it expanded by way of cultivating its brand and carefully choreographing celebrity events. To this extent, the neoliberalizing economic moment in India created certain kinds of opportunities for the success of a retail chain, not the least of which were the promotional capabilities/considerations that being a division of a media conglomerate provided. The performative dimension of selling that I described in the vignette above enabled the lamination of new sets of values onto the music commodities clerks were selling. It is worth reiterating here that values are, first and foremost, socially and historically constituted human phenomena that circulate along with objects. That is, rather than asserting that social, cultural, or normative values are merely epiphenomena of economic exchange, we must acknowledge that economic value is concatenated with manifold kinds of value, many of which only become apparent in transactional social moments. It is not just that store employees sold music (in addition to their other duties), but to a very great extent they had to sell themselves as competent knowledge producers of the commodities for sale in order to gain customer trust. Moreover, as I point out in this chapter, people involved in the music industry constantly invoked the ideal employee as one who had a “passion for music”; very often senior managers had the requisite passion that their clerks seemed to lack. This suggests a mode of exceptionalism for music as a material commodity that simply could not be overlooked in the context of music sales. Accordingly, I argue that the sale of music

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implicated not only the performance of class habitus, language politics, the values embedded in the neoliberal category “retailing” as opposed to traditional “shopkeeping,” but also the tensions between the social and economic values of music and the “ideology of musical exceptionalism” as it pertains to music in its commodity status (Beaster-Jones 2014b). However, one of the key constraints the Music Metropolis company encountered was hiring a knowledgeable, enthusiastic workforce to sell both media commodities and the shopping experience itself to high-value customers. In this chapter, I focus upon the narratives that accompanied the new middle classes and the performative dimensions of selling music as an exceptional commodity demanding passion for efficacious selling practices. As I will argue, individual music store employees had to mitigate their own class standing and the relatively low status of retail sales in order to perform the habitus of the new middle classes that the chain tried to attract. In addition, through a discussion of hiring practices, gender norms, and the mobilization of “customer service” discourses, this chapter illustrates how selling music is the performance of affective labor that crosscuts different modes of value production in neoliberalizing India.

New Middle Classes and Labor in Music Metropolis In the social and economic discussions of India’s post-1991 neoliberal trajectory, the practices, ideologies, and relative size of the ‘new’ urban middle class became a fashionable subject of debate.1 A category of people believed to be the main beneficiary of liberalizing economic policy, the new Indian middle class has largely been characterized by scholars as a group that gradually lost its faith in the Nehruvian planned economy and focused its aspirations instead on the fruits that emerged from the efflorescence of global capitalism and the opportunities afforded by state divestment in the financial and industrial sectors. As it became less reliant upon state institutions for employment, this new middle class turned its attention to the opportunities presented by the private sector. Government service is now a far less desirable career path than the potential wealth attainable by working for a large national or multinational corporation. If the ideal type of the old middle class is the austere civil servant, the ideal type of the new middle class is the cosmopolitan marketing executive. In the public imagination, liberalization has been the enabling condition for an economy in growth—with its attendant wealth and prosperity—as well as the availability of new consumption possibilities. As Leela Fernandes (2000) has noted, the focus of much of the discourse regarding the Indian middle class has represented the nouveau riche as the post-liberalization norm, rather than acknowledging the intense heterogeneity of those who label themselves as middle class. Because of the disparity in wealth and access to resources between the floor and the ceiling of the Indian middle class, Rupal Oza (2006, 12) has rightly argued that we speak of middle

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classes (in the plural) rather than a homogenous middle class (in the singular). Others have attempted to create operational categories defined by income, education, and occupation, which is the basis of the Social Economic Classification (SEC) developed by the Market Research Society of India (MSRI) in the 1980s and revised in the 2010s.2 However, rather than attempt to reify class by defining these categories (which can have more or less utility), I will operate from the perspective that there are manifold meanings of the term “middle class” and that executives mobilize these categories in everyday discourse. The new availability of international brands in neoliberalizing India has been widely celebrated, even as the old guard has frequently vilified the consumerist practices of the new middle classes (e.g., Varma 2007, 2014). Yet, with the exception of media imagery and advertising, the changes made over the last decade to spatial designs for this public consumption and the spectacularization of retail spaces more generally have been largely overlooked. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the eruption of shopping malls and department stores all over India in the mid-2000s that has transformed the urban and suburban geography, as well as how middle and upper class Indians have come to shop for clothing, furniture, media, and food. Similarly, even as the white-collar labor of call center workers, computer programmers, and marketing executives has been the focus of scholarly interest, less attention has been paid to the emergence of retail labor over the last decade. As department store chains continue to emerge, there is a growing need for a particular group of educated middle classes to work in a sales role in these retail spaces—an emergent labor pool that looks significantly different from the ideal type of middle classes of the popular imagination. Moreover, taking this expansive definition of middle class into account, one might argue that, regardless of their roles, almost all workers present in Music Metropolis stores belong to the new middle classes because they participate in this neoliberal sales model. Most of this chapter 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. Maintaining the sales floor and creating a productive shopping space required the labor of a number of people within each store who are employed directly by Music Metropolis and indirectly by other companies. In any given store, one might see anywhere from three to fifteen Music Metropolis employees and five to ten employees whose labor was outsourced from other companies, depending upon the size of the store. Smaller stores in a metro area, for example, would have a store manager and two or three CSAs. Larger stores in a city might also serve as a local headquarters, which might then include a small back office staff, namely people involved with merchandising and warehousing for every store in that locale. Larger stores in metro cities might also serve as the regional headquarters (Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai), which meant that this back office staff included regional managers as well (marketing, merchandising, operations).

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In addition to CSAs, managers, and back office staff, each store included a number of support staff employed by other companies but intimately involved in the store’s day-to-day operations. Among these employees, housekeeping and security staff were the most visible on the shop floor. Larger stores might also include vendors from other companies that were selling their wares in the Music Metropolis space or representatives of music labels delivering products for the sales floor. In large flagship stores in Mumbai, several vendors representing jewelry and electronics companies worked on the sales floor along with CSAs, their different role indexed by the uniform that differed from the CSA’s. Similarly, security and housekeeping staff wore uniforms that indexed their role within the store, that is, as outsiders of the Music Metropolis company. While I did not have official permission to interview people from housekeeping and security because they were employed by outside companies, I did discuss their roles within the store with managers and CSAs. A few notable points stood out, not the least of which was that their roles within store operations seemed to conform to social and occupational norms of class and caste. For example, unlike CSAs, members of the security staff tended to come from larger villages outside of the metropolitan area, were from middle castes, had studied in government schools in Hindi or whatever the local language might be, and tended to interact with customers in regional languages rather than in English. Security staff manned the areas on the outside portion of the store, namely the bag check and security gates. Their role was to surveil not only customers coming in and out of the store, but also the CSAs, who might be tempted to take store property home with them, a practice euphemistically known as “shrinkage.” Store security operated in a hierarchically ambivalent space with CSAs, such that CSAs tended to have more authority within the confines of the store, yet were subject to being searched by security as they moved in and out of the store. Store managers carefully fostered the security staff’s outsider status as a way of controlling the shop floor. One manager noted to me in an interview that she made a point of discouraging fraternizing between security and CSAs as a way of fighting shrinkage. That is to say, CSAs who colluded with security were provided more opportunities for moving products out of the store. This manager therefore consistently shuffled her security and housekeeping staffs in order to deter this kind of collusion. Like security staff, housekeeping employees supported store operations within a spatial and social hierarchy. Housekeeping staff ensured that the floors and shelves remained free of the dust, mud, etc. that might be tracked in from outside, thus removing this obligation from CSAs who focused more on customer interactions and staging the store for sales. Housekeeping employees seemed almost invariably to come from lower caste households; this was indexed by not only their uniforms but also their linguistic and bodily praxis within the store. Nevertheless, some store managers deployed housekeeping staff to shore up some of the duties of CSAs and security, such as stocking and observing suspicious customer behavior in less visible

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corners of the store. That said, housekeeping staff rarely interacted with customers and certainly did not sell music within the store directly.3 The point that I want to emphasize here is that most of the people employed directly and indirectly by the chain might be described as middle class due to their involvement in the neoliberal retail sales model, particularly considering how hierarchies and roles could be blurred in the pursuit of the stores’ daily operations. In the context of discussions of CSAs and their middle class habitus below, the CSAs were participating in the new middle class project even if their lived experience was significantly different from the new middle class habitus that they were expected to perform.

Hiring Class As I noted in Chapter 4, as a component of its brand management strategy 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.” However, creating this cosmopolitan space in the social-economic milieu of early-2000s India had particular challenges. Foremost among these challenges was finding well-educated, music-knowledgeable youth to sell music for wages that were approximately half what they might earn at a call center, albeit with better hours.4 As the most visible employee of any retail space, Customer Service Agents (CSAs) were the local guides to the geography of the store and were charged with the task of selling music and multimedia. In addition to managing the layout of the physical space, CSAs were expected to initiate interactions with customers, establish the customer tastes (of that particular moment), suggest additional possibilities that the customer may like based upon what they know is available in the store, and otherwise ensure that the customer has a positive shopping experience. CSAs were the face of the brand, the focal point of interaction for most customers, that is, at least until some aspect of the transaction went awry (e.g., when a manager might be called in to mediate a dispute). Music Metropolis executives frequently noted in interviews that CSAs were one of the most important elements of the success of the chain, and they were very careful in their hiring practices. In terms of hiring into their positions, CSA candidates responding to local newspaper advertisements were subjected to three interviews: a walk-in screening with a store and regional manager that might last 10 to 15 minutes, followed by interviews with Geeta and her assistants, and finally by an interview with the division head. The fact that the division head typically interviewed candidates even at entry-levels positions signals both that the position was considered important and that the company was small enough to allocate time for the head to do so. While CSAs came from a wide variety of social backgrounds, there were nevertheless some patterns for this entry-level retail position that, like other retail work, had relatively high turnover (i.e., the percentage of employees

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who leave the company within a year of being hired). Most CSAs at Music Metropolis were working their very first jobs outside of the home. Their age ranged from 19 to 28, although the median age was about 22. Most of the CSAs had at least a twelfth standard (grade), English-medium education, that is, schools that use English as their language of instruction. Some of them had a few years of college education and had dropped out or were pursuing a degree by correspondence. Most worked full nine-hour shifts in the stores, and part-time CSAs were infrequent. Most store managers labeled their CSAs as middle class. Or, as Geeta clarified, keeping the heterogeneity of the term middle classes in mind, they were generally “middle-middle” or “lower middle” class. Most CSAs came from single income families, and for about 90% of them, their salary contributed to the household resources; the rest were working for pocket money. Roughly 40% of the CSAs were married, although this average tended to be a little higher in the older, more established stores in metropolitan cities. Nationwide, Music Metropolis’s CSAs were paid about ₹4–5000 (approximately $95 to $105) monthly, which managers pointed out was a middle of the road salary in the retail sector. While this is less than half the salary of a call center worker, it was significantly higher than the salary of store assistants working in local music shops, who might be earning ₹1500–3000 (approximately $33 to $67) monthly. It is worth pointing out that even in the mid-2000s, music recordings and DVDs were still considered luxury items by many Indian consumers. Thus, CSA monthly salaries did not provide scope for building their own music collections, especially as their backgrounds largely limited their discretionary income. Nevertheless, many CSAs that I interviewed were well aware of working for a large media conglomerate, and they felt this created fair scope for internal promotion within the company. Indeed, most knew of store and regional managers who had begun their careers as CSAs in one of the big flagship stores, which provided ample inspiration for the possibility of promotion to middle management, even if promotion to upper management was relatively rare. The basic information that Music Metropolis interviewers collected from its CSA candidates was very similar to other retail contexts and not always verbally communicated. Were the candidates well groomed? How was their hygiene? How did they smell? Would these people be comfortable speaking to an upper middle class clientele with the proper musical knowledge in the English language? Would they be comfortable wearing the requisite uniform of jeans and polo shirt? Did they have the proper knowledge and bearing to convincingly sell music? While it rarely came up in my interviews, the key unspoken component to recruiting CSAs for Music Metropolis was their ability to perform the new middle class habitus even if they themselves did not come from the new middle classes.5 In addition to performing this class habitus, the social values derived from the language politics of the new middle classes created additional centripetal force. Because Music Metropolis branded itself as a cosmopolitan

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space that valorized international (English language) music in particular, CSAs were expected to have a high degree of English proficiency regardless of what local language was spoken at their store’s location. Insofar as CSAs were expected to interact with customers in English, the job posting and all of the interviews took place in English and were a key dimension of their hiring. One of the issues that managers had to determine about candidates in their interviews was not simply their level of conversational English, but their comfort in initiating a conversation in English and their ability to sell music in English. Managers argued that selling music in English is a significantly different activity than discussing music with friends. Most store managers that I interviewed felt that their CSAs were generally comfortable selling in English and ostensibly the majority of CSA interactions with customers took place in English, particularly in the metropolitan cities. However, I sometimes encountered CSAs in different parts of north India whose English language skills were not especially strong and clearly felt more comfortable when I codeshifted to Hindi, possibly because they found my American accent too difficult to parse. In a nation in which there are 22 scheduled languages and hundreds of dialects, why is the English language so important to executives at Music Metropolis? And why would English be so important if song lyrics were frequently in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, or other important regional languages? There are several possible answers to this question, but most important among them is that English, the language of India’s erstwhile colonizers, was a lingua franca that was still deeply connected to social class. Many parents pay a premium for their children to attend private English-medium schools, and in many parts of India there is a clear hierarchy between schools based upon their language of instruction. Moreover, English was the language of much of India’s international business class and diasporic Indians, as well as Music Metropolis executives themselves, most of whom had been educated in India’s elite business schools. Middle class English speakers are precisely the sort of high-value customers that the Music Metropolis executives desired to have in their stores. Accordingly, it was important for CSAs to “speak their language,” that is, to be able to communicate effectively with this most desirable customer, even if it was not the CSAs’ most comfortable language. Along with proving their language skills, potential CSAs were tested on their general knowledge of music; HR managers (who themselves largely belonged to the new middle classes) quizzed the candidates on, among other things, the music hits on the week of their interview. The quizzing practice they used in the initial screening tests not only determined whether they had the basic musical competence needed to work at Music Metropolis, but also helped managers decide in which section or genre a potential CSA might be employed (e.g., international music, Hindi/regional music, home entertainment, or clothing/accessories). Interviewers also queried applicants about who their favorite artist was and why. As such, in addition to determining their relative music proficiency, CSAs were vetted on the basis of their ability

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to talk about music more generally. This enabled the HR staff to evaluate their relative “passion” for music—which might be communicated as much by a candidate’s affective stance as by their knowledge of musical genres. Taken from a different perspective, one might argue that candidates were being vetted on the ability to perform the “affective labor” of retail sale (Hochschild 1983; Wharton 2009). That is, CSAs needed to demonstrate that they could enthusiastically support the customers’ desires while otherwise suppressing their own. CSAs must be able to assess customers’ musical likes and dislikes and make appropriate suggestions of additional music that a customer might like, even as they might have to avoid alienating customers by imposing their own tastes. The value of this affective labor was a significant point of emphasis for Music Metropolis’ approach to hiring: so when you’re hiring CSAs, because you say that they are face of the company, what sorts of qualities do you look for? GEETA: I look for somebody as cheerful, friendly, enthusiastic, loves music. … JBJ: I noticed that love of music is number four in your list. GEETA: no, we assume that people who don’t love music would walk in the door. An integral part of our interviewing process is what kind of music you listen to. We go in detail. So if this guy walks in, and says, “I love Kishore Kumar,” I’ll say, okay tell me five favorite songs … and then I want to talk to about that song to know how much he knows. I want to know exactly where he’s coming from. (Geeta, interview with the author) JBJ:

This notion of employees with a passion for music was invoked over and over again in my interviews. Aspiring employees were expected to perform this love in interviews so that they could also perform it for customers. But the follow-up questions probed the depth of this love: it is one thing to suggest that someone loves music, but the passion has to be demonstrated through the performance of knowledge. This performance continued to be evaluated by Geeta and her staff in the interview contexts and presumably in the training sessions that followed. This requisite love of music, combined with specialized knowledge of music, points to a kind of musical exceptionalism when music circulates as a commodity: as if music has transcendent possibilities, unlike mundane goods such as soap, grains, electronics, clothing, or other commodities. Not surprisingly, this assumption that their employees love music suggested an element of self-selection, and a conspicuous absence in musical knowledge was widely acknowledged by both executives and customers to be a problem for Music Metropolis.

Intersectional Class, Caste, and Gender Norms in Music Retail The exceptional quality of music commodities played out in other ways, namely in obvious gender imbalances within music stores as compared to other genres of retail sales. These imbalances became strikingly apparent at

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the intersection of class, caste, and gender. In other words, as my discussions with my interlocutors illustrate, women working in music retail created problems for the normative performance of urban middle class womanhood in India. Music Metropolis had very few female CSAs: as few as 10% of all the salespeople working on the shop floor were women. This low percentage of women working in music retail was more or less the same gender ratio present at other music stores. Rhythm House, for example, does not have women selling music on the shop floor, nor were any women selling music in the shops in Bhopal and the vast majority of other stores I visited in India. What is striking is that women participate to a much greater extent in other retail spaces such as apparel, book/stationery, and department stores, as well as behind the counters in fast food establishments. While women are largely outnumbered by men in these sorts of entry-level customer service jobs, there seemed to be far fewer female CSAs in music retail contexts. The gender-based constraints cited by my interlocutors below (i.e., late nights, odd hours, public interaction, low status) might have applied to retail work in any context, and thus did not explain why there were so few women in music stores versus other retail venues—but they did highlight the intersectional constraints of women working in music retail. In my experience, women often have just as much or more knowledge of music as men, yet rarely are they labeled as music connoisseurs or music specialists, the quality Music Metropolis sought to find or cultivate in their CSAs. One of my frequent questions at all levels of the organization was, “why aren’t there many woman CSAs?” For example, when I posed this question to Geeta, JBJ: The GEETA:

male to female ratio is about 10 to … [interrupts] There’s no male to female ratio! [laughs] There is no male to female ratio.

If we were to assume that like other possible CSAs, women were also music and film lovers, why were they not present on the sales floor? Geeta and other managers had consistently argued to me that within the world of retail employment, CSAs were the people who carry the brand. Thus, not only was the lack of women noticed by employees, it was not a desired state: they calculated that 30–40% of their customers were female and that it made little sense to have so few women on the shop floor. What makes music retail sales different from other kinds of sales positions? Executives, store managers, and CSAs gave me a number of explanations that paralleled each other, regardless of their role within the organization or their gender. Ultimately, most of their rationalizations addressed the range of social constraints for women working outside of the home, without necessarily addressing the specific context of music retailing. Their responses fell within several kinds of categories, including a dearth of women applying for work at Music Metropolis, the working hours, the physical labor of retail, social stigmas

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about women interacting with customers, and the specialized knowledge required to sell music. The focal explanations for the lack of women in this chain were shared by new and old middle class normative standards, and underlying this was the lingering social danger of being associated with popular music. Anne began her career at the Mumbai flagship store as a CSA and was promoted to store manager within a few years. When I noted to her in an interview one day in 2005 that there are rarely more than two female CSAs working even in the biggest stores, she noted that “it’s always been that way.” JBJ: Why is that? ANNE: I really don’t

know. When we have interviews over here, there are very few women who come to the interview to begin with, so probably they’re just not coming out for a job like this. JBJ: Do you have any gut ideas of what it might be? ANNE: There is a lot of family pressure against a job like this for a woman, because you work shifts, you work late hours. It’s hard work. You’re on your feet, speaking to a lot of people every day. So probably there is some kind of a mental block, especially for parents, maybe not the women themselves. But, [voicing a concerned parent] ‘how can my daughter come home late and work odd hours.’ (Interview with the author) Even in this brief statement, Anne summarized the range of justifications for the need to protect middle class women that I had been hearing from people throughout the chain. She noted that fewer women come to interviews because being on one’s feet and arriving at home late were of concern to women and their families. Because employees in most metropolitan stores tended to live in districts far from the wealthier neighborhoods where the stores were located, CSAs frequently had to commute 60 to 90 minutes to and from work. Thus, a shift ending at 9:30 p.m. meant that a woman would not arrive home until 10:30 p.m. or later. As with call center workers, a woman’s safety at night is of deep concern, especially in northern Indian cities like Delhi where the incidence of sexual assault is high.6 Unfortunately, most music stores were relatively empty during the day: like other retailers, most of their labor needs were in the late afternoon and evening, as this was the time that many customers shop for music, especially in flagship stores. Thus, heavier staffing was needed at night to cater to the greater customer presence. Several female store managers cited their need for evening shift employees as one reason that women were less likely to come to interviews.7 As I mentioned above, these arguments would apply to all women in similar retail positions. But Anne’s voicing of the concerned parent did not just refer to the safety of the women, but in her words, the “mental blocks” that parents had about what their neighbors would think if they allowed their daughters to work

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late hours. Geeta noted that most CSAs come from chāwls, a kind of inexpensive housing that “have common passages, doors. So if my daughter comes home after 10:30 in the night, the whole mohallā [neighborhood] knows. And then she comes home wearing … a t-shirt and jeans. Then she works in a store, which plays music, which is—I don’t know what kind of music they play in that store” (interview with the author). In other words, it was not just that the women were coming home late, it was that they were observed to be coming home late by the neighborhood panopticon. The very fact of working in a music store where “you don’t know what kind of music is being played,” was a source of suspicion; to anticipate a point I will make later, the fact that the store plays popular music carries an implication of social danger. The uniform that they are expected to wear was also suspicious. Indeed, in most parts of North India, the fact that a woman might wear jeans rather than the more modest salwar-kameez in public can be the source of moral discomfort.8 Anne’s earlier explanation about why women did not come to interviews also pointed to retail sales as kind of heavy labor, because staff were on their feet all day and must be lifting things. This “heavy labor” theory, as I came to call it, was repeated by nearly everyone I interviewed on this topic. But I rarely let this rationalization go unchallenged, frequently noting to my interlocutors that not only did women perform heavy domestic labor, they also carried heavy loads of sand and gravel in construction. My interlocutors agreed, then refined their explanation: the issue was not so much the ability of women to perform the heavy labor as it was the class (and caste) stigma of being seen performing heavy labor in public and the negative stereotypes it evoked. But as most of them also pointed out, heavy labor in the home was different from heavy labor in public, which only the lowest classes (and castes) of women performed.9 These class stereotypes about heavy labor intersected with the pejorative class and caste associations held by many old middle class families about shop keeping, as I discussed above in reference to hiring CSAs in general. Anjali, a store manager who had worked in stores in the north Indian city of Delhi, as well as the west Indian cities of Bombay and Pune, pointed out the difficulty of getting women to apply for CSA jobs in north India precisely on the basis of the low status of retail sales jobs: In the North while I was there, the kind of feel I used to get was that they looked down upon a retailing job. The women themselves and their parent. It might be okay for the women themselves, because they are moving in that kind of a crowd and they know that Music Metropolis is a happening place. Their friends hang around in a place like this, so they would love to be a part of it. But parents, they would probably still be okay with them working in an office environment as compared to a retail environment, but the way that they put it across. … I know because I’m a woman and I come from a place like Lucknow, I explain

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my job profile to my family friends in Lucknow, the family would say, ‘acchā, [really!?!] you’re working in a shop?’ You know, that kind of a thing is still there. (Interview with the author) Like Anjali, other female employees often voiced an incredulous family member or new acquaintance who had said, “dukān mein kām kartī ho!?!” (“You work in a shop!?!”). Working in the back office at one of the larger stores was much preferable to forced interactions with customers coming in from the street. Not surprisingly, back offices at Music Metropolis had a much more even gender balance, particularly in the marketing and human resource divisions of the company. Yet, what remained unstated here was these women’s relatively high level of education and language training that might enable them to find “better” jobs outside of the retail sphere. In essence, when considering music retail sales as a first job, women were being asked, “this is the best job you could get with all that education?” Indeed, this was precisely the answer of another senior manager when I asked him my regular set of questions about gender in the store: women might simply have better job opportunities in office and call center environments. But Anjali’s statement also pointed to an ideological generation gap. From her perspective, the woman’s parents did not realize that working for a retail chain attached to a media conglomerate was not the same as working in a neighborhood shop, because there was ample space to advance within the corporation that a local shopkeeper could not provide. Many Music Metropolis executives were openly disdainful of “mom-and-pop” shops vis à vis the post-liberalization concept of “organized retail” (i.e., corporate retail chains). By managerial reckoning, the main issue here was not so much the low status of shop keeping—they believed that themselves—as much as social undervaluation of the status of working for a major corporation, albeit in a retail context. Anjali was pointing to one ideological difference in India’s new and old middle classes. That is, the old middle classes view civil service jobs as superior to business and retail jobs; the new middle classes tend to disdain civil service jobs in favor of the private sector. This was the double bind that Music Metropolis found itself in: on the one hand, they needed well educated, cosmopolitan CSAs to interact with their high value customers; on the other hand, families of potential CSAs did not want them to take low-status retail jobs. Young middle class women were expected to abide by the norms of female respectability (izzat), which means that they ought to avoid working in public contexts in which they could not control who they interact with (e.g., lower-class/caste and/or male shoppers). Consequently, women and their families preferred working desk jobs in access-controlled environments over retail stores. As Anne noted earlier, retail jobs require “speaking to lot of people every day,” an activity that respectable young women simply ought not to practice, especially when they were expected to initiate communication with men. Ostensibly, in the capacity of selling in a clothing or food

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store, female employees are assumed to be primarily approaching female customers. Thus, the gender dynamics of selling in a music store, assumed to have primarily male customers despite statistical representations, might be seen by some as provocative behavior that transgresses the bounds of middle class morality. In some northern cities, male employees expressed an anxiety about protecting their female co-workers even within the environs of the stores. One store manager in Jaipur worried that some men might take advantage of the fact that the woman could not simply ignore insistent customers as she would on the street. While none of the employees acknowledged that this had ever happened, it was a component of the discursive context of the Music Metropolis stores in that region. Moreover, my interlocutors were quick to point out regional differences about gender attitudes, especially commonly held perceptions that people in North India had more conservative social attitudes than people in other regions of the country. While this may certainly have been a reasonable rationalization, the ratio of women to men was no greater in other parts of India than it was in the North. Beyond the intersecting social constraints of class, caste, and gender that might explain why women are less likely to apply for CSA jobs in music retail, some of my interlocutors tried to argue that those women who interviewed for CSA postings often lacked the specialized knowledge they would need to sell music. Anjali noted this in the context of interviews: Music retailing we definitely look at music knowledge. But even then, when we are recruiting, the number of women coming in for interviews is much much lower. And even the number of women walking in for an interview, there are very few who would have a sound music knowledge. Even the basic knowledge, it would not be there. JBJ: Strange to me, since knowledge of regional music or Hindi film music is comparable to—or higher than—men. In [the game] antaksharī10—men vs. women—women tend to win more. ANJALI: Maybe because the women are at home and listen more, compared to the men. But selling it is a different ballgame altogether. You have to have the knowledge, you have to have the communication skills, the selling skills, the ability to work in a nine-hour shift. Everything together we find less women, definitely. (interview with the author) ANJALI:

Anjali’s initial explanation was that despite their love of music, women do not have knowledge of it, a point that ran counter to my observations. I consistently met women who had a deep knowledge of musical conventions and history, and middle class girls from the old middle classes were far more often trained in classical music and dance than boys were. Thus her argument about a lack of basic knowledge about music was problematic. When I challenged all of my interlocutors on this point, they suggested that having a love of music is different from being able to sell music. Once again, they

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argued that it was not an issue of knowledge as much as the performative aspect of selling. Like other people that I interviewed, Anjali differentiated knowledge of clothing and beauty supplies from music: the former was “natural” for women to sell. That is, it was a body of knowledge that is not specialized, insofar as it is available to all women. Music, they argued, was a different domain of knowledge, one in which men were widely perceived to specialize. This issue of knowledge and specialization might explain why I observed women most frequently at the help desk when they were present at a store at all. At the help desk, they would assist customers enroll in the store’s loyalty program or navigate a computer database to determine whether a particular recording was available in this or a nearby store in the chain. This help desk work—and the physical separation of the customer and employee by the desk itself—mitigated the issue of initiating contact with customers: only customers who needed assistance would communicate with them. Working at the help desk nominally required less specialized knowledge due to the assistance of technology to respond to customer enquiries. The rationalization regarding the lack of specialized knowledge was a partial but still insufficient explanation. While my interlocutors could provide no direct answer to this question, I would speculate that the association of popular music (both Indian and international) with youthful sexuality, coupled with gender and class identities noted above, was at the root of the issue.11 Like the additional meanings layered on music while it is in its commodity status, many of these meanings accreted to the people who sold it. This association with music was dangerous for middle class women, insofar as it could potentially compromise social norms of modesty and have negative social, financial, and physical consequences (e.g., women who compromise their modesty do not “deserve” to be protected). Tejaswini Ganti (2004) and Neepa Majumdar (2009) have noted that women’s public performance has long been the site of anxiety in film and the arts. There are few “moral” female musicians who perform in public: female musical performances have long been associated with the courtesan classical traditions (Qureshi 2006), while the folk songs that are sung at weddings or other social contexts are usually private performances.12 The connection between music and sexuality also corresponds to the visual representations of item number songs and remix videos, both of which have mobilized middle class activists against the perceived vulgarity of contemporary popular culture (Beaster-Jones 2009). Retail chains like Music Metropolis branded themselves as destinations for popular music and, inside and outside of India, popular musics have long been associated with youthful sexuality—thus working in a music store was simply dangerous for a woman’s reputation. This social fact is one of the important challenges that Music Metropolis had to mitigate in its hiring practices even as it tried to create a cosmopolitan shopping experience through promotions and events (see Chapter 4).

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“The Store Is Your Stage and You Are the Actors”: Sales Training at Music Metropolis Most music stores in India did not have or need a formal training program for music and/or sales: they rarely hired new employees, and when they did, they usually hired only one new employee at a time. Few of the small, family-operated music stores that I visited over the course of a decade involved more than the owner and one or two assistants. In most cases, these assistants remained the same each time I visited. Other family-run music stores like Rhythm House, which typically had six or seven clerks working on the shop floor (in addition to security, cashiers, and back office staff), hired staff a bit more frequently than smaller music stores. Like most non-chain stores, Rhythm House did not need a formal employee training program: new employees developed their musical knowledge on the job through apprenticing with fellow sales clerks, interacting with customers, fielding customer questions, and stocking and listening to the recordings sold in the store. At Rhythm House, new employees were given a small section to stock in one of the less important areas in order to learn how to properly merchandise. As Rhythm House targeted the same kinds of customers as Music Metropolis, the owner felt that sections that tended to draw more connoisseurs, like Western Classical or Fusion, needed better-trained sales assistants than Hindi film song, where many customers simply came in and found what they needed without interacting with a clerk. 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. For example, Mehmood noted that a family of diasporic Indians had recently come to his store and, like other international shoppers, took advantage of the favorable exchange rates and relatively inexpensive recordings (compared to the U.S. or U.K.) as a way to acquire a newer collection of Hindi and international musics. On one particular trip, they spent approximately ₹47,000 (roughly $1050 at the time) at the store. He noted that each member of the family had an assistant working with him or her, likely in ways that were similar to my interaction with Abhishek. Had there been no assistants, the family would have spent half the amount. Mehmood noted that a perceptive assistant can recommend several other CDs that a customer might purchase if he or she knows of a recording that the customer likes. Hence, through interaction with a sales clerk, a customer who enters a store intending to buy three recordings might walk out with ten. Moreover, the relationships between customers and clerks were sometimes quite strong: if a customer develops a connection with a particular clerk, and trusts his or her evaluation of a recording, the customer will return to the store knowing which assistant to look for. If that assistant is not working that day, the customer might come back on a later day to seek his or her advice. Indeed, I noticed that some clerks knew some of their repeat customers by name, what they had already purchased in the store, and had suggestions for what other recordings might interest

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them. This relationship seemed to largely develop with customers who were collectors and had fewer budget constraints. At Rhythm House, the employee turnover rate was generally quite low. Most of the clerks that I interacted with over my long period of research had been employed at Rhythm House for 15 years or more. Several employees had been working at the store for 30 or more years. This was one of the advantages of being an established presence in South Mumbai. Not surprisingly, on average the clerks at Rhythm House were much older than CSAs at Music Metropolis. This stability undoubtedly contributed to the intimacies between clerks and repeat customers. I personally derived comfort from the fact that every time I came to the store, I would see familiar faces, whose recommendations I trusted, and who would encourage me not to purchase albums that they knew I would not like. Thus, there was a reciprocal relationship: working at a reputed institution, being treated with respect by customers, and developing relationships with particular ones as clients (rather than “merely” as store employees), which in turn encouraged Rhythm House clerks to remain in their positions. While apprenticeships and on-the-job learning through interacting with customers and recordings (Rhythm House’s methods) were certainly a dimension of acquiring musical knowledge at Music Metropolis, the chain’s size and the kinds of employees it attracted required formal sales and music training by the company’s Human Resources staff. In essence, one might view requiring formal sales training as a characteristic of organized retail and brand ideologies that emerged within a neoliberal context. Geeta, a passionate music lover with a thorough knowledge of the “Indian” catalog, developed and implemented most of the formal sales training. She came to this position by way of the retail apparel industry, which, she noted, required many of the same kinds of sales skills as music retail. Becoming a CSA at Music Metropolis required, at minimum, four days of training, broken up between sales and music training. Some of the training was formal, in classroom-like contexts, but more of the training occurred as CSAs learned their assigned sections and had informal conversations with other CSAs and managers. CSAs in some sections received more detailed training in difficult to manage subjects like the high-value international music section. Geeta noted that Music Metropolis’s training modules were delivered in select stores, typically the flagship stores in any given city, which had the largest range of products. The training staff re-created a store in a classroom inside of the store to run role-playing simulations of assistant and customer interactions. Sales training in the neoliberalizing moment relied on globalized models of “customer service” (read: affective labor) that were largely drawn from American models on customer behaviors and desires and superficially adapted to fit an Indian context. The sales training program broke the transactional ritual of selling music (and any other commodity) into 12 steps, beginning from the moment that the customer walks in the store until

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the moment the customer leaves or offers a complaint. Each step of this “cycle of service” was labeled, discussed, analyzed, and role-played by store employees in their training program. Briefly summarizing from the sales instruction manual, these steps included (in bold), Greet the customer, which included asking open-ended questions, being confident, recognizing regular customers, not shaking hands with customers, etc. Introduce customers to the store layout and the products available, new arrivals, and chartbusters. In interacting with customers, CSAs should ask, listen, and repeat in order to ascertain customer music tastes, interests, and/or needs, and show and tell customers the features and benefits of a recording and/or its format. Handle Customer Objections. The manual notes that attitude is an important part of selling, so encourages the CSAs to be cheerful, be optimistic, and “never show your opinion about the customer during the interaction,” unintentionally reinforcing customer service as affective labor.13 In order to handle objections, the manual suggests that CSAs Empathize with the customer by saying “I understand that…” rather than simply saying “no.” CSAs should also Ask why, isolate, and then explain as another way of handling objections. CSAs should always be closing and remain alert to “closing signals” on the part of customers (e.g., customers ask to see a CD again, ask for other singers in a genre, or notes that they like a particular cassette). The trainer notes that the CSA must be careful here lest the customer perceives her as being “pushy.” CSAs should extend value by drawing customer attention to other products in the store and strive to “add-on,” “up sell,” and “cross-sell.” One effective way to do this is by drawing customer attention to music that is already playing in the stores at the RJ booth. At the end of the transactional process, CSAs should thank and invite the customer back, ask if someone is a member of the loyalty program, process the transaction quickly, point out other promotions in the store, hand the merchandise back to the customer, obtain payment, and initiate additional conversations (primarily about other products). Finally, the CSA should reflect on each sales transaction and record and analyze it. He or she should take notes about the customer interactions and evaluate which strategies were more or less successful, and get feedback from colleagues when possible. Breaking apart the transaction gave aspiring CSAs a chance to practice the elements of what operations managers believed to be good customer service and created a space for enculturating CSAs into the organized retailers’ expectations of sales. In slightly different terms, the sales training program

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introduced new CSAs to the idea that selling music is enacting an improvised performance. Indeed, as one slide in the presentation noted, “The store is your stage and you are the actors: the store ambience and product appeal should be so compelling that the customer cannot resist buying.” Thus, working in tandem with the established brand aesthetic described in Chapter 4 and the proper merchandising described in Chapter 5, the CSA could mobilize the power of his or her own sociability to sell music more effectively. The “discipline” (i.e., performative habitus) of retail service workers needed to be taught to CSAs as well. This discipline incorporated a matrix of bodily practices that enabled successful performance: greet every customer, say hello, smile, but do not otherwise touch customers; be ready to assist customers, but do not hover around them (especially female customers); be ready to provide advice, but do not impose your preferences, express your passion for music.14 Yet insofar as selling in a retail context is a kind of ritual engagement, there is always the potential for the sale to fail in some way (e.g., by inattention of the CSA, improperly stocking the shelves, long checkout lines, not having the proper blend of product). A successful performance required knowledge of the product on hand and the ability to assess the customer’s perceived needs and desires through careful questioning. These kinds of carefully structured human interactions created the possibility of generating “stranger sociability” and/or intimacy with certain kinds of customers (Warner 2002). Readers familiar with American sales and marketing practices will undoubtedly find some of the descriptions from this training manual very familiar. Indeed, Music Metropolis sent its executives abroad to visit stores in the U.S. and U.K., and many of the strategies and designs are, on some level, based upon what they encountered in international stores. Moreover, many of the ideas about customer service at Music Metropolis are components of global marketing discourses found in books that are widely available in Indian bookstores, taught in Indian MBA programs, and replicated in practice on the shop floor and to new employees in their training programs. Some of these ideas originate from books that explain the psychology of American consumers (as “marketing science”) and are applied to the Indian context more or less in toto. That is, because approaching retail sales using international models is still a relatively recent practice in India, marketers and executives make assumptions about Indian consumers without critically engaging with differences in history and practice. At times, I was shocked to encounter the marketing ideas my interlocutors shared with me when I later delved into the literature. For example, when I first interviewed Geeta about training customer service assistants (CSAs), she noted a story she had read about the “butt brush” effect on sales in American department stores. That is, a necktie display was not selling as well as it should have in a particular chain store. Retail researchers with a background in anthropology came in and determined that the location of the tie rack was near a throughway; customers walking by would brush the

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Figure 6.1 Classification of customers from sales training slide—An adapted slide from the sales training seminar (c. 2006) indexed the classification of customers that CSAs used while in the stores to establish which customers were worth the investment of sales time. Based upon the philosophy of increasing the footfall metric above all else, the slide stresses approaching all customers, even if the CSA (correctly) perceives that the customer’s arrival in the store did not signal the intent to purchase music. That is, it implies that a good salesperson might still be able to generate a sale through careful interaction with a customer, even if the customer is in the store to meet friends or is only planning to buy one recording.

customers browsing at the display. The discomfort that this caused for the browsing customers motivated them to move to a different display. Upon being alerted to this by the retail specialists, store managers moved the display, and the neckties started to sell as they had expected. As a method of training her CSAs to respond to customers, Geeta used this anecdote to point to the unconscious (ostensibly universal) workings of consumer psychology in retail spaces. In addition to creating space for displays, CSAs were also trained to approach customers in a particular way that would disenable easy brushoff (e.g., How can I help you? vs. Can I help you?) and to bring baskets to customers with more than three objects in their hands. Later, I was not surprised to find not only this anecdote, but also these sales techniques described in Paco Underhill’s (1999) Why We Buy. Insofar as Geeta was adopting American marketing literature to create cosmopolitan

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experiences for her customers, the question of whether or not these universalizing discourses were appropriate for Indian consumers was immaterial: this was the international shopping experience brought to India in very new contexts. As these and other conversations with people in Music Metropolis silhouetted, executives in organized retail more generally perceived this model of customer service as a newly available experience in India. Thus, sales training in retail was portable (i.e., could be used in any sales context including and beyond music sales), and, indeed, this approach to sales was virtually identical to the training I received in the United States during sales seminars from a major electronics retailer in the late 1990s. In other words, a category of “customer service” emerged from this literature, which managers generally felt was lacking in an Indian context as compared to an American one. Music Metropolis managers were not convinced that their employees were always equipped to perform this ideal of customer service and spent a great amount of effort on inculcating it in their sales staff. The newness of the customer service model in India, and with it the kinds of sales habitus that retail contexts require, are interconnected with the other senses of “value” that I have been working through in this book. In this customer service context, value means the desirable traits, behaviors, and features of something or someone that enabled selling music via emphasizing value regimes, rendering music an exceptional commodity. Taken from a different perspective, value is created through the expectations that CSAs affectively engage with selling music as a cultural commodity. Beyond this, Music Metropolis executives attempted to inculcate this affective labor in the CSA population as a technique for selling music.15 The end goal, as I mentioned in earlier chapters, was to generate customer relationships with the institution of Music Metropolis, if not with particular CSAs—which is one of the reasons that CSAs were referred to (if only in the training literature) as sales consultants. As such, one way to think about their role within the company is as knowledge producers: both knowledge about the music and interpretation of its value based on assessing the customer, as Abhishek was able to do. But successful CSAs had to carefully navigate the line between performing one’s own taste and not alienating the customers. Thus, discussing music in the hiring interviews was meant to indicate whether potential CSAs have any taste at all, plus a group of friends and a taste culture around music—can they initiate sociability on the basis of music preferences? As such, the question was a way of probing for musical passion, but as Geeta noted, selling music is different from merely discussing music, requiring a different set of skills, which they strive to teach CSAs. Managers at Music Metropolis and other organized retailers in India were well aware that human interaction and the creation of relationships generates the potential to sell recordings much more effectively than music “selling itself.” One way of doing this was through the CSA performance of shared tastes with music connoisseurs, even as the tastes of customers were validated by CSAs.

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Passion and the Exceptional Character of Music Beyond its focus on sales training and the discourse of customer service, Music Metropolis encountered another conundrum: simply training employees to sell music under the marketing rubric of a product’s “features and benefits” was insufficient to generate the necessary intimacy with customers. In other words, the knowledge to sell music required more than rote memorization of facts and relationships between musical styles and/or artists, but also seemed to require a certain amount of desire. Consequently, this exceptional character of music was encoded as a language of “passion for music,” that is, that selling music required an affective investment on the part of CSAs beyond the affective labor needed to provide good customer service. That is to say, the “exceptional” character of music as I have argued elsewhere (2014b) created a particular problem for selling music, as the conventional approach of selling other categories of commodities proved to be insufficient for selling music recordings. Ideally, the retail chain hired the people who had already developed this affective investment, but in practice store managers found it difficult to attract the knowledgeable and passionate labor force necessary to convince customers to buy music, in part due to the class disparities between customers and staff and prevailing gender norms discussed earlier in this chapter. Recognizing that the dearth of musical knowledge among its floor staff was a limiting factor for music sales, the senior management initiated its first two-day music-training seminar in May 2005 in order to provide employees with additional information on the product they sold, and to perhaps ignite the spark of passion that would increase sales. Held in a back conference room at the company headquarters, the audience for this seminar was comprised of the store managers of the local Music Metropolis Mumbai and Pune locations, several managers of other flagship stores in other metropolitan Indian cities, and the back office staff of the corporate office. Not surprisingly, there was a clear contrast between the bodily praxis of corporate office staff, who were comfortable in the space, and the praxis of store managers (especially those brought in from outside of Mumbai) who seemed uncomfortable being in the corporate headquarters with their senior managers. The gender imbalance of the participants in the room was also apparent, as all but two store managers were men, while the bulk of the back office staff, most of whom were middle managers running marketing and operations in the corporate office, were women. The first day of the seminar focused on international music genres; the second day on “Indian” musics such as film song. As I have noted, the Music Metropolis brand identity centered on high-value international music genres, rather than the field of “Indian” music genres that were the focus of other local and chain music stores. Yet the company found it difficult to hire staff on the sales floor that had the requisite knowledge to sell to their desired customer base. The tastes and deep knowledge of the history of rock and

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popular musics (in particular) had, before liberalization, largely been limited to upper class metropolitan residents, not the middle classes from which Music Metropolis drew its sales force on the shop floor. Music Metropolis took a top down approach in addressing this problem: managers attending this workshop were expected to pass on to their CSAs the requisite knowledge (and passion) to navigate the shop floor along with their customers. Of course, insofar as these workshop attendees were primarily operationally oriented managers who were increasingly being hired from other service industries, an individual store manager might have more or less knowledge of music genres. This fact, in turn, spurred the creation of this music seminar series: a way to instruct the managers about music, who would in turn impart this knowledge to their sales staff. This approach had been used in various other contexts in the chain (as it is within many other retail venues), primarily for training in sales methods. Geeta and Rajeev provided the opening invocation of the first day of the seminar, pointing out these ambiguities of musical passion even as they implicitly acknowledged the dearth of musical knowledge among their CSAs. Good morning everybody. It’s great to have a product training session because I think that is one thing that all of us are in touch with all the time. It’s something that all of us enjoy, it’s a passion for us, and it’s also what we do for a living. So when you combine passion with what you do for a living, magic happens. So this session is going to help us improve, polish, renew the magic that we keep doing on our stores every day. Let me tell you a little bit about how this session happened. We had been talking about product training for quite some time now, about how we need to brush up our skills. We thought we could try to do a “train the trainer” module like we did with customer service. But there is something that Rajeev said, and I’m going to quote him completely on it because I absolutely agree with what he said. He said, ‘music is about passion, and in passion, you can’t have a train the trainer.’ So what we’ll do instead is, we’ll have a session, an all-day session, which will help us get in touch with that passion we already have within ourselves. And when you have passion, you’ll go back to your floors and invite that passion into your teams. And train the trainer will be a natural, logical, obvious conclusion to that. And that’s what this session is all about. So, please enjoy yourselves completely and absolutely, don’t think about what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do … They have a vast, vast, vast sea of knowledge here which is just going to be flowing all over you. RAJEEV: I’ll add something here. How many of you have seen Woodstock? What is Woodstock all about? Three days of music, three days of peace. So I want to repeat this, two days of music, two days of peace. [crowd laughs] So let’s create that! GEETA: I think I won’t say any more than that! GEETA:

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Music, Passion, Knowledge So please, be very informal. Interpersonal. So that when you go back, what we expect is your passion is rekindled in love for the kind of music. Too, nothing like exposing you … you may have heard a lot of stuff, but this will help you recode a lot of music that you may have listened to. And the best thing that can happen is when you go back, you go back better equipped, hopefully, to talk music to your customers, to pass on this knowledge to your customers, and above all, making it convenient to your customers by identifying the music and keeping it in the right place.

RAJEEV:

The larger subtext here is that music cannot properly be sold without recourse to a certain kind of viral passion on the part of the sales force that would in turn be spread to the customers. The managers were thus charged with providing inspiration for that labor on the sales floor. But embedded in this invocation was the implicit understanding of the workshop model’s failure to inspire the necessary affective space (i.e., “music is about passion, and in passion, you can’t have a train the trainer”). Indeed, former Music Metropolis employees that I talked to several years after this and later music seminars openly acknowledged the failure of this seminar model to inculcate this passionate ideal, particularly once they took the social backgrounds of their CSAs into account. As such, the exceptional character of music in its commodity status rises to the surface yet again in the context of organized retail in neoliberalizing India. The passion for music, particularly the chain’s conception of high value music, had to already be latent; it could not be trained into employees.

Music, Labor, Value As I have been arguing throughout this book, multiple domains of social value (e.g., class habitus, language politics, specialized knowledge, passion for music, gender norms) were circulating in music stores at the very height of the recordings’ commodity status, albeit in the background. Inasmuch as the economic values of music can never be fully separated from the contexts of their circulation, these differential conceptions of the value of things, the sociability that is indexed in and through their modes of exchange, and the classificatory and evaluative elements that accompany them, are values that are laminated onto music in capitalist contexts. To that extent, the labor needs and hiring practices of the Music Metropolis chain indexed the in-built contradictions of value, as the social value of the human labor of selling music collided—and colluded—with the rapidly declining profits in recorded music in India in the 2000s. The values of the musical commodities reflected the values of the classed and gendered labor used to sell them. For instance, merchandising and sales managers felt that just about anyone within most pools of potential CSAs could sell the contemporary “Indian” (i.e., film song) catalog fairly well with

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minimal training; CSAs that could sell the “international” catalog to customers were relatively difficult to find. This posed a hiring problem because the kind of CSA that was needed could/would be better employed in other industries that required a high level of education (i.e., call centers). However, the lack of musical knowledge about international genres on the part of CSAs could be problematic for grooming high-value customers, as there is a certain degree of trust and intimacy involved in the interaction. While few customers would expect connoisseur-level knowledge from CSAs (indeed, customers would rather go to smaller stores for this), at minimum they expected CSAs to know what was in their store and to make informed recommendations from what was in their stock. As the Atul Charamani quote at the beginning of this chapter indicates, even this skill was sometimes difficult to find in many large organized retail stores, which undoubtedly contributed to their decline. As I discussed in regard to the jazz workshop in Chapter 4, many of the customers who attended these events were simply not convinced that Music Metropolis CSAs had deep knowledge of jazz, and these customers were much more likely to travel abroad to buy albums. In my own interactions with CSAs in the jazz and Western classical sections, I was never entirely certain how much knowledge my interlocutors had when it came to providing me with guidance on what to buy; whereas I was much more confident with my interlocutors in the sections that were less familiar to me and, presumably, more familiar to them. To this extent, for the CSAs in this context, there is the looming specter of performative failure; that is, betraying one’s ignorance in such a way that the customer does not take one’s recommendations seriously. Selling efficacy existed somewhere in the intersection of knowledge and performative affect (passion), and newly hired CSAs received training in both music and sales as a condition of their employment.

Notes 1. For a discussion of the “liberation” of the middle classes by economic liberalization see Tharoor 1997; Das 2000. For a discussion of conspicuous consumption and the new middle classes, see Liechty 2003; Fernandes 2006; Oza 2006; Varma 2007; and Chowdhury 2011. 2. That is, considering the head of household’s education level and ownership of particular durable goods to create socio-economic categories; households are classified as SEC A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, C1, C2, etc. For more information on these categories, see http://imrbint.com/research/The-New-SEC-system3rdMay2011.pdf. 3. The outsider status of housekeeping was sometimes reinforced in unexpected ways. For example, one of my interviews in Lucknow was interrupted by a representative of the state labor-relations board inquiring about the housekeeping staff. The operations and merchandising managers I was interviewing at the time were visibly nervous, asking me to turn off the recorder as they discussed

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4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

Music, Passion, Knowledge the employment status of two of their housekeeping staff, taking frequent opportunities to note that the staff were not employed by Music Metropolis and deferring most of the questions asked by this representative to the corporate office. What appeared to be the issue at the time was the possibility that some housekeeping staff members were underage and underpaid labor within the chain. But since they were technically not employees of Music Metropolis, they could deflect these labor issues to another institution. For a discussion of call center labor, gender, and bodily praxis, see Poster 2007; Patel 2010; and McGuire 2011. See Meredith McGuire (2011) for a discussion of the bodily praxis of call center workers who were trained to embody their international clients by sitting, standing, and eating “properly.” The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) provides statistics on reported crime in India that seem to support the perception of danger for women living in North India, as compared to women living in other regions of India. However, many cases of sexual assault are unreported, which suggests that the figures are likely much higher than this bureau represents. See http://ncrb.gov.in/ CD-CII2013/home.aspd for more details. Moreover, in some cities, the actual hours of female employees are more or less limited to particular periods for a variety of political purposes, one mode of reinforcing the social discourse of “morality.” Not surprisingly, moral standards are applied differently to women than to men. As the sociologist Reena Patel (2006) has rightly pointed out, for women, “working the night shift” has unsavory connotations, alluding to widely held assumptions about the women who work odd hours, as well as the families that would allow them to do so. Emma Tarlo (1996) has pointed out that wearing even the modest salwar-kameez by young village women going to university can be a source of tension because it suggests that these women might be trying to jump class or caste lines. Unlike men, most women working outside the home are expected to perform most of their domestic duties as well. Thus, Geeta noted that women preparing vegetables for the evening meal on Mumbai’s commuter trains was a common sight. Antākshari is a very popular game at a party (or while traveling) for two or more groups of singers. The first group chooses and sings a film song, stopping at an arbitrary point. The second group of singers then has to find a song with lyrics that begin with the final sound or syllable on which the first group ended. See Stokes (1994) for a discussion of the culturally ambivalent status of musicians as mediators of youthful sexuality. Even within the realm of female performers, certain instruments and performance practices are strongly gendered. Within classical traditions, for example, the dominant female performers are singers, not instrumentalists or drummers. Women are largely excluded from performing devotional songs like the Sufi qawwali (Qureshi 1996), with a few very important exceptions. In a variety of folk traditions, such as the Gujarati folk tradition of garbā rās, women do have important specialized knowledge of song forms and play a variety of instruments. And women have come to challenge prevailing norms on certain epic storytelling traditions (Marcus 1992). Here the sales training manual particularly emphasizes that objections are just signals that the customer wants to buy something. Some of the general objections

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that they list include “the price is too high,” “the CD collection doesn’t haven’t have the songs I’m looking for,” “what’s the discount?” The manual suggests that CSAs not judge a customer by external appearances and be sensitive to the use of English with “conventional looking customers” (a condescending way to refer to rural or working-class customers). Also in the section on answering objections, the slideshow encourages CSAs to be aware of the competitors’ pricing and of the market more generally. The presentation goes on to note other kinds of general objections that CSAs have to encounter. One of these acknowledges that local retailers will discount, which Music Metropolis does not do; they recommend that the CSAs point to the advantages of buying from Music Metropolis, which include the range of the catalog, the loyalty program, etc. In other words, CSAs should encourage customers to buy into the brand. 14. Other dimensions of discipline include not chatting amongst themselves, speaking loudly on the phone, eating or drinking when customers are present, making sales reports in front of the customers, using mobile phones, etc. 15. See Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011) for more discussion of affective labor in culture industries.

7

Conclusion Music Stores in the Age of Mobile Phones

One morning in the summer of 2010, I was discussing my research with Lalit, a domestic worker in the Mumbai household where I was staying as a paying guest. After a brief pause in the conversation, he noted that he needed help transferring VCDs of local songs to his mobile phone, particularly songs that would remind him of his home in the North Indian state of Uttarakhand. His phone was an inexpensive, locally manufactured “dumb phone” (i.e., it did not have a touchscreen or apps), yet it had the capability of playing audio and video files in several different formats that could be transferred over to the internal memory of the phone. He did not have a computer that could help him convert video files or serve as an external storage space, and thus his phone had storage limitations that forced him to choose which music and videos to discard when he wanted to add new music. Nevertheless, he pointed out that his phone could make wireless Bluetooth connections with other mobiles, which enabled him to share music with his local network of Uttarakhandi migrants, many of whom had similar problems with data storage. Managing available space on a phone was less of an issue than it might seem, as many markets in Mumbai had vendors who specialized in “mobile downloading”: computer kiosks, often maintained by mobile repair shops, that specialized in transferring music from an archive on a hard drive to mobile phones and other removable media (e.g., Secure Digital cards). He recommended one of the larger markets near a train station that had several vendors and was reputed among his social network as having some of the best collections. Later that day, I followed Lalit’s directions along the length of a train station, passing beneath a flyover to find a very brightly lit market to my right. In order to get into this indoor market, one climbs up four steps to a floor with glass walls on all sides, each side containing a row of smallish shops. There was some variety in store shape: some containing an outer storefront with an interior glass-enclosed (and air conditioned) interior store, as well as long glass display spaces containing mobile phone after mobile phone. Even at first glance, hundreds of phones and accessories were in view, but I presumed that many of these shops had additional warehouse spaces stocked with even more phones out of sight. Like the Itwara market that I had regularly visited in Bhopal, I suspected that these shops filled with boxes and

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bundles of phones and accessories were likely distributing these products to smaller stores and kiosks all around the city. As I wandered through the horseshoe-shaped market, I encountered numerous shopkeepers hailing me, “Yes! What do you want?” as I passed. Here and there I saw computers with USB cables attached to them, but there were no obvious signs that these men were involved in the music-to-mobile transfer business. As I could not seem to find what I was looking for on the ground floor, I eventually stopped at a shop to ask where I could get some music for my phone and was directed to the first floor. I had passed the stairs a couple of times but was not sure whether the upper level was a continuation of the market or a private space. After climbing the narrow marble stairs, I found myself in a very different kind of space: rather than selling phones, the shops here specialized in mobile repair. Most contained a young man hunched over a disemboweled phone with a soldering iron and loose parts close at hand. The layout on this floor seemed similar to that of the lower level, yet many of the shops were closed (with the metal curtain fastened to the ground), and several of them advertised spaces for lease. Next to the stairs, I came across signs printed in a large font on laminated white paper with the words “Memory card downloading done here.” Several of these locations had a young man with a desktop computer, keyboard, monitor, and card adapter attached to the computer. I picked one of these stations at random and asked the young man at the desk how much he charged. Introducing himself as Irfan, he asked me what kind of music I wanted, and I mentioned that I liked A.R. Rahman songs and a couple of recent Hindi film soundtracks. Irfan explained that adding data to my phone’s Secure Digital (SD) card would cost ₹100 (approximately $1.67 in 2010) per gigabyte of data. Somewhat surprised at this low price, I did not haggle and agreed to his first offer, which was likely two to four times what I might have been able to negotiate. I removed the SD card from my phone and he plugged it into the card reader attached to his computer then ran an antivirus scan on the card. As we waited for the virus scan, Irfan switched back and forth to a Facebook page where he was conducting three simultaneous chats. Once the virus check was complete, he navigated through one of the hard drives on his computer to a music directory. I noted that he had separate directories for movies and music files, and that he had organized the music directory into at least 20 smaller directories that probably contained any number of media files that I could not see, but that he would have revealed had I asked. In short, there were hundreds, if not thousands of albums on the part of the hard drive that was visible on the monitor. He navigated through his directories so that I could see the sorts of songs I might want. On my request, he dropped several hundred MBs of qawwali and Hindi film songs onto my external card. Irfan also was keen to introduce me to the music of Atif Aslam, his favorite Pakistani artist, and as I had plenty of space remaining on the SD card of my phone, I did not hesitate to have him add several albums. Transferring one gigabyte

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of songs to my SD card required about 10 minutes to complete, and Irfan continued to impatiently flip back and forth from the progress bar to Facebook, to the progress bar to Facebook. Once the music was transferred to the card and returned to my phone, I handed him a 100 rupee note, which he stuffed into an interior drawer of his desk, and chatted with him for a few minutes as he “friended” me on Facebook. Once the transaction was complete, I left the shopping center and returned to my accommodation in the city. Now that I knew what to look for, I started to observe signs for mobile downloading services in marketplaces all over Mumbai and markets that I visited in other Indian cities (e.g., Figure 7.1). In many ways, this mobile downloading market parallels the cottage industry around media piracy and reproduction in marketplaces and music stores that has been in existence for the last 40 years, albeit using new

Figure 7.1 A sign advertising mobile downloading services (Bhopal) 2010—Photograph taken by the author.

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technologies. Indian music store owners who had previously distributed music on cassette and CD in different periods of music format fashion began to incorporate computers and mobile phones as a mode of distribution. Like other disruptive technologies, mobile phones changed the rules of the game, not only increasing the rate at which certain kinds of music circulated, but also decreasing the prices of those recordings, which in turn created a space for the continued devaluation of music in economic, and perhaps, social terms. Very much like Ganesh, the hawker selling CDs that I described in Chapter 3, the model for mobile downloading relied on a logic of how music circulates in the marketplace that existed somewhat independently of the music industry’s logic. That is, rather than paying a fixed price for each individual song or album, customers now pay for the amount of data that is transferred. Thus, even if particular sound recordings have a set of social or aesthetic values attached to them (as Irfan’s desire to introduce me to the music of Atif Aslam indicates), recordings are essentially being sold in bulk when distributed via mobile downloading. The prices of recordings have, to a much greater degree, become commoditized (as opposed to commodified): that is, the logic of their sale follows the rules of other goods and services that do not have brand values attached to them and thus are generic and fungible. As such, the downward spiral of media prices that I had been observing in the early 2000s had continued unabated, even as access to global networks of music distribution increased. In this chapter, I return to the broader discussion of the cooperation of musical values and the implications for music stores in an age of mobile ubiquity. In the next section, I retrace the threads of musical values through the previous chapters in the book, then briefly discuss the disruption of the music market wrought by the mobile phone and the emergence of digital recordings as a “value-added service.” Not surprisingly, the introduction of mobile phones as a distribution mechanism altered the market environment for physical sales of music in India and facilitated the collapse of music retailing as an institution. The chapter concludes by revisiting the larger theoretical context of musical value in contemporary India.

Music Commodities, Neoliberal Markets, and Value The chapters of this book have reinforced the idea that a complicated cooperation of diverse value systems occurs when music is merchandise in neoliberalizing India. These values emerge from different sets of social and institutional interests as music circulates—and is distributed—in India. Values are viscous, sticking to recordings in ways that may or may not have anything at all to do with musical content. Some of these meanings are generated by institutional stakeholders and continue to linger even after the recording is sold, while others are not. Nevertheless, as the chapters have shown, these values are contingent, fluid, and based upon local conceptions of customer needs and desires.

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In Chapter 2 I highlighted some of the strategies that music companies employed to make value claims about the recordings they sold. From a long historical perspective, appeals to status and innovation as a way of selling music commodities have been a tool for the music industry (broadly construed) to make social-value claims in/of music in each era of the industry. To this extent, musical formats, content, packaging, and modes of distribution have been (and continue to be) indexes of social class and other modes of human sociability, even if these appeals also sometimes fell on deaf ears (especially when it came to purchasing recordings that had not been pirated). Moreover, as I argued in Chapter 3, by looking closely at local marketplaces as a confluence of music production, distribution, and consumption, the complexities of musical use and value come into sharp relief, particularly as value is constituted in part by the mobility of music recordings. As a form of material culture, the circulation of music recordings implicates different modes of sociability that move fluidly between commodity and gift, legitimate and pirated, as the ethnographic examples in that chapter indicated. Yet the overriding problem for the Indian music industry—which, Jacques Attali (1985) notes, is a problem for the entirety of the music industrial context—is that a copy is a copy. Whether the contents of a CD are imported from Britain, packaged on a factory line in Kolkata, or transferred through a mobile downloading kiosk in a Bhopali market, one result is the same: the music will play on some media player with more or less the same production values (sound quality). The one advantage that the “legitimate” product has over the pirated is the carefully produced social value attached to original media: the manufactured CDs, and their packaging, have a display (status) value that pirated media do not. In part these values are tied to industry narratives about artists and producers being indirectly compensated for their work through royalty systems and thus rewarded for their success, among other things. In many ways, the practices described in Chapter 3 illustrate the ways in which value might be structured in an absolutely “free” market: where intellectual property is not protected in some way through intervention by the state (or more directly by copyright holders themselves), as it ought to be protected according to neoliberal ideologies of intellectual property. In other words, as the products of the music industry eventually arrived at a value that is negotiated in local markets and not wholly determined by those involved in its industrial production, music labels were forced to confront piracy not only by organizing police raids, but by becoming more competitive with pirate markets by lowering their prices and looking for other modes of monetization. As my critical examination of the Indian Music Industry’s (IMI) official discourses on piracy indicated, the concept of music as intellectual property has come to be foregrounded by the music industry, even if it has not been emphasized within the market, or within the contexts of human sociability.

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Branding layers another set of values and meanings onto music commodities. These brand meanings can be affixed to music at any stage of its commodity production, from the stylistic traits of a particular musician or composer that makes them identifiable, to the packaging strategies used by recording companies, to the layout of music stores being designed to encourage certain kinds of shopping practices. Of course, I have suggested here that these branding practices themselves are not entirely new, but subjugating them to the rubric of an all-inclusive brand narrative was still a relative novelty in India of the early 2000s (it is a bit less new in the contemporary moment). Through decisions made before the recording in studios, much less the marketing and promotional campaigns after the recording is produced, many of the meanings of music commodities are established long before the products enter the store. But for an organized retailer, these meanings were domesticated for a new purpose: serving the interests of the brand’s master narrative. In the case of Music Metropolis, these brand narratives were supplemented by other activities (events, workshops) that are not explicitly selling music, but do create a feedback loop of values for consumers. These auxiliary activities served the interests of artists (most of whom need a venue for self-promotion), recording companies that attempted to augment unit sales by providing the masses access to artists, and retail chains that are able to simultaneously intensify the customer experience even as they are enhancing their own status as a “national” (pan-Indian) retailer. Insofar as all of these meanings are interconnected, this is just one way that music became meaningful beyond its sound. The brand became a new value of music that emerged in neoliberalizing India. The relative success or failure of Music Metropolis to evoke this desired brand image is less significant, perhaps, than the adoption and internalization of branding discourses in an age of globalization. As much as—or perhaps even more than—any of the amalgamated store features, this wholesale adoption of brand ideology and its application to musical value distinguished the Music Metropolis chain from neighborhood stores in urban India. The brand mediated musical meanings for customers, but insofar as each individual product arrived in stores already branded, the retail space operated as a kind of metabrand to orient the entirety of customer interactions with the products they handled. Insofar as recordings are produced, distributed, and purchased within overlapping frameworks of value, Chapter 4 noted how these values sometimes have little, if anything, to do with the content of the music. Many of these meanings emerge from the viscous residue of different stakeholders adhering meanings and values to music recordings. Yet despite Music Metropolis employees’ role in attempting to create and sustain successful transactions of music while maintaining a commodity status, there were times that, for one reason or another, other modes of sociability overwhelmed the values of commodity circulation. From the perspective of executives, for example, the concept of organized retail

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is based on a model in which social status accrues from shopping in a cosmopolitan space, where the ethical imperative of buying non-pirated media is achieved. Yet there were times in which store employees themselves circumvented this imperative. For instance, I vividly recall a helpful Music Metropolis CSA directing me to look for a 10-year-old Hindi film in the pirate kiosks near the store because the national distributor had not re-released the film and he knew that it could not be ordered by the store. In another case, I observed employees sharing media on CDs that they had burned at home, joking with one another that “piracy starts at home.” Indeed, as I was completing my research, I, too, exchanged music with executives, music that could not be found in their stores. I wanted my friends/interlocutors to experience some of the music that had defined me as a person. Thus, even people who were stakeholders in the commodity status of music within the music industry participate in the social networks that emerge in the circulation of music. The point of mentioning this is not to implicate my interlocutors and myself in the illicit distribution of music, but to demonstrate once again the ways in which music resists its commodity status. In essence, because it represents some part of me (and you), music calls out to be circulated as a mode of self-expression—this song performs some dimension of my subjective interiority in ways that perhaps other commodities do not, which indicates music’s uneasy status as a commodity. In music stores, genre has been another operational category that establishes and performs discourses of musical values. One means for generating value discourses is the placement of musics in relation to each other within the social space of the music store. Staff in the store further augment the valence of these meanings by arranging the music and guiding customers to these designations (or customers guide themselves) as though they are navigating an urban terrain. Additionally, these values embodied in space are reinforced for the kinds of people—and the kinds of music—in the performance of social class and taste. It is on the basis of this latter set of values that music store owners and merchandising managers decide what music will fill any given store within any given market writ large (i.e., state, city, neighborhood). As much as (or more than) any human interaction a customer might have in the store, the physicality of the space and the markets in which they were located indexed the cosmopolitan brand image that Music Metropolis attempted to evoke. As such, the experience of the retail store was nothing less than a complete, three-dimensional immersion in an advertisement, not only for the music and other products but for the brand itself. Taken from a different perspective, the temporal-spatial-genre organization of music stores play into the logic of merchandising decisions and the ways in which commodity meanings produced by the music industry merge into the meanings produced in stores. Sometimes these meanings

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are suggested by the industry through shelving advertisements and other promotional materials, such as posters and cutouts, for organized retailers like Music Metropolis. Other meanings are produced by the physical location of recordings within the store, as well as the category labels that retailers choose for different genres. Even the negotiation of genre names with prevailing local music labels was explicitly a component of the Music Metropolis brand strategy and contributed to the semiotic values that they bore in service to the stores and the brand. Often these genre categories aligned with the categories and values of the sister music label. Of course, industry categories were not the only sets of meanings that merchandisers managed: evaluations of the musical content were deeply implicated in the decisions that music retailers made in stocking their stores, which was an important suture point between economic and aesthetic values. These merchandising decisions were, in turn, tied to the ways in which stores imagined who their “highvalue” customers were and the category labels they used to attract them. Finally, in my discussion of the “Get Spotted” campaign at the end of Chapter 4, I noted how the viewer of the newspaper photographs is intended to see something of him- or herself in one of the three faces in the advertisement: you, or people like you, are the very sort of person or people who shop at Music Metropolis. On the other hand, these photographs strengthened the idea that the “happening” people already shopped at Music Metropolis. Music Metropolis attempted to create a space where cosmopolitan shoppers and cosmopolitan stores reinforced each other. This is a reflexive feature of the brand: executives saw some part of themselves mirrored in the brand (or in what they desired the brand to be), and ultimately were trying to attract people just like themselves (i.e., affluent, new middle classes) to their stores. In the same way that the brand as fetish disguises the alienation inherent in commodity consumption, the brand itself also points to values of consumption as India steers a neoliberal course. Yet, as I suggested in Chapter 6, this youthful, happening brand personality could not mitigate the low status associated with working in retail sales, particularly for young women who belong to India’s middle classes. The explanations provided for the low percentage of female CSAs, namely the late hours, visible labor, and interaction with the public at large, also pointed to the social danger attached to music that might transfer to its employees. Moreover, the dearth of well-educated, English-speaking workers who could enthusiastically perform a passion for music pointed to the exceptional status of music as a commodity, as the knowledge and ability necessary to sell music could not be effectively developed through rote memorization and sales training alone. In many ways, one might argue that the inability—or perhaps even the very need—to cultivate the affective labor required to sell music within organized retail contexts necessarily doomed the retail model to failure, particularly once the digital distribution of music recordings had become ubiquitous.

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Mobile Phone Culture: Music as “Value-Added Service” When I returned to India in 2010, I could not help but notice the pervasive presence of mobile phones on trains and in hawker, chai, and paan stalls. Mobile phones had been available in earlier stages of this research but were used almost exclusively for communicating by text messages and voice. Uses for the mobile phone had been transformed in five short years: not only were earbuds and mobile handsets omnipresent on streets and local commuter trains, but phones also replaced transistor radios on Indian streets, broadcasting radio, music, and other streaming media from their tinny speakers.1 In essence, the mobile phone afforded individuals the ability to manipulate their local soundscapes in new ways, through the use of wireless networking protocols that were in their infancy when I was conducting fieldwork in 2005 but had become pervasive by the 2010s. As I will suggest later in this chapter, it might be tempting to argue that the rise of mobile phones as a mode of experiencing music was the direct cause of music stores’ diminishing importance, but the mobile phone was one of several contributing factors in the collapse of music retail. In the context of selling physical music recordings, there are a number of important implications of mobile phones as a disruptive technology. The most obvious of these is that mobile phone owners can bypass the physical distribution of musical media by way of legal downloads from company sites and the use of streaming apps, as well as through sharing with friends and mobile downloading. Thus, it was no longer necessary for music distributors to create physical media to distribute recordings, especially once ecommerce portals existed for them to monetize the distribution of music. By 2010, music companies were reporting that their sales from digital distribution surpassed their sales from physical distribution (i.e., through music stores).2 One of the major consequences of this revolution was not only the decline of retail stores selling physical copies of music recordings (and the seeming superfluity of the institution of the music store) but transformations in the ways that music companies themselves valued recordings.3 In short, music recordings became (in corporate language) a “value-added service” for other companies like mobile providers that were selling hardware. That is, even though music sales were not central to the business of selling mobile phones and subscriptions, mobile phone companies used music downloads as an incentive to purchase a particular mobile handset or mobile plan. These nominally free downloads of particular songs belonged to the catalogs of music companies with whom the mobile companies had negotiated contracts, which in turn became an important source of revenue for music companies as the physical distribution of recordings waned. For example, the Saregama music label contracted with mobile phone companies like Nokia to provide incentives for customers to purchase a Nokia mobile handset. In so doing, Nokia customers would get subscription access to stream music by way of 3G networks or for a predetermined number

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of song downloads over a certain period of time. More recently, musics that were once “owned” by consumers as a part of their music collection had been shifted toward subscription services in which one purchases access rights or the rights to access are subsidized by advertisers. That is to say, rather than possessing the physical recording, one now purchased access to that recording by way of a streaming license, in much the same way that Muzak™ envisioned music being a subscription service for American office buildings in the 1920s (Lanza 1994). This approach in turn spurred customers to use mobile data, the profitable commodity that mobile phone companies desired to sell. Table 7.1 Estimates of the size of the Indian music industry—“Physical” (i.e., cassette and CD distribution) and “digital” (i.e., online, mobile, ringtone) sales were first differentiated for 2006 in the 2008 report; TV & Radio Rights and Public Performance were first differentiated for 2007 in the 2009 report 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 Physical Sales Digital Sales TV & Radio Rights Public Performance Total Industry

N/A 6.50 6.60 5.50 4.86 4.47 3.20 2.60 2.30 2.00 1.96 N/A 0.50 0.60 1.44 1.88 2.64 4.15 5.20 6.00 5.10 5.39 N/A N/A N/A 0.32 0.39 0.46 0.68 0.60 1.40 1.40 1.47 N/A N/A N/A 0.17 0.17 0.21 0.50 0.60 0.90 1.10 0.98 6.70 7.00 7.20 7.30 7.30 7.80 8.53 9.00 10.60 9.60 9.80

As Table 7.1 shows, physical sales of music declined to such an extent that music as a subcategory of the entertainment industry was ultimately removed in the 2015 FICCI-KPMG annual report. In drawing attention to this shift from physical to digital, I want to emphasize that these are the categories used by my interlocutors. Indeed, physicality is still present in the circulation of music recordings by way of hard drives, USB drives, mobile phones, computer servers, cell phone towers, Ethernet cables, and so forth. Thus, it might be better to say that the distribution of music shifted to new formats, platforms, companies, and networks. Moreover, this process was accelerated by the emergence of India’s 3G networks in 2010 and the data subscription models described by Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey (2013) that enabled most Indian consumers access to the Internet in ways that they had never had before, in spite of the Internet cafés that dominated the early 2000s. In this broader context, rather than suggesting that the entire music industry is in decline, it would be better to suggest that revenues shifted to other dimensions of the industry, particularly to intellectual property regimes.4

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Music Stores in the 2010s In the 2010s, Indian music stores, and stores that sold music as a part of their stock, rapidly disappeared. Indeed, almost all of the stores that I had regularly visited between 2003 and 2005 were closed in the early 2010s. Music Metropolis shuttered most of the stores they had been operating, the Music World chain closed its last store in 2013, and bookstores that had a significant music selection (e.g., Landmark, Crossword) removed most of their music collections by early 2015. Local, family-operated music stores have not fared much better. In Bhopal, most of the store owners that I worked with have started other, non-music businesses. Amit’s store, which was already the longest running store and had been surviving on the basis of Amit’s connoisseurship, is one of only two music stores remaining. He noted to me in 2013 that he sells very little music and is looking for another line of business to move into. The music that he does sell is to an aging clientele who are less likely to listen to music on a mobile phone or a computer. In Mumbai, Rhythm House survived longer through a mix of store and online sales, but the holiday crowds of NRIs and foreign tourists who once filled the store during the festival season in the mid-2000s were largely absent when I visited the store in the mid-2010s. In addition, music had become a smaller portion of the overall sales space in Rhythm House, having been displaced by home video (i.e., DVD and Blu-ray) and audio accessories (i.e., headphones and speakers). Even though online sales have picked up, they did not compensate for declining in-store sales. Like Amit’s store, the Rhythm House clientele has continued to age, and indeed, the store was permanently closed with a farewell party in February 2016. Like Lalit managing the amount of media file memory on his mobile phone, space had long been a difficult issue for music stores to navigate. Attali (1985) has argued that a music recording is essentially the reification of time, but in the context of music stores, selling reified time requires expensive retail space. Because music recordings need a lot of display space to sell in the neoliberal, organized retail model, the very physicality of the medium creates problems. In short, too much music was vying for limited shelf space. Declining sales and profitability for music stores generated new issues, particularly as storefronts in malls and on high streets became too expensive to maintain. Rents for shop spaces continually increased, even as revenues fell once new modes of music distribution became foregrounded by music companies. Thus, one longstanding retailer in Mumbai explained that he was able to generate significantly more revenue by leasing the space of his stores than he could generate through music sales. Similarly, while Music Metropolis was still in operation in 2015, it has many fewer stores, and most of the metropolitan flagship stores had been shuttered once their initial leases had expired and the rents skyrocketed. National bookstore chains with large music sections that had rivaled many standalone music stores significantly cut, or simply removed, their music sections to make way for more profitable products. Organized retailers have essentially given up on music sales.

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The popularity of mobile phones was not the only factor leading to the decline of music stores: the decline in physical sales was also fueled by the conservative business strategies of music companies. As I noted in Chapter 2, companies like Saregama often focused more on repackaging their extensive back catalog than on developing and promoting new artists. The more or less continuous release of catalog and repackaging of the same songs under different covers helped the company mitigate the risks of releasing new albums. Taken from a different perspective, anything released in the contemporary moment has to compete with all previously released music. On the other hand, T-Series and other companies took an entirely different tack, flooding the market with musics coming from many genres and traditions in an attempt to capitalize on the very small percentage of recordings that might find success. The combination of these two music-company approaches, and the proliferation they spawned, made the life of music retailers much more difficult when curating their spaces. Another contributing factor in the decline of music retail was—from retailer perspectives—that music companies had increasingly dismissive attitudes about the distribution of physical media. The few music retailers who were still in business in early 2015 noted that their interactions with music labels became increasingly sparse, and the people that they interact with from music companies had scant knowledge of their own catalogs and the contents of their warehouses. In 2015 one music store owner in Pune observed that music companies used to have executives who knew—and had a passion for—their products. But these music lovers were replaced by MBA-wielding executives who did not have a depth of musical knowledge and assumed that selling recordings was the same as selling any other commodity. He described one particular interaction with Universal Music in which he was given a catalog of 15,000 titles, but many of the albums he ordered (that were ostensibly available in the warehouses according to computer databases) could not be found by Universal employees. When he visited one of their warehouses to look around, he found that the stock was largely un-inventoried and lying in dirty, disorganized warehouses. Thus, he argued, music labels are holding onto a lot of music they cannot sell because they do not know what they have, nor do they know how to sell it. Second, from the perspective of some family-run music stores, part of this situation was ushered into being through the practices of organized retail itself. As suppliers concentrated their attention on their larger, organized retail clients, centralizing their distribution networks to cater to these clients, they virtually ignored smaller stores. Now only the smaller stores remain. These music stores will only be able to survive by trading on the knowledge of passionate staff and the human sociability that accompanies face-to-face interactions within the store, and most likely by providing other services that online retailers cannot provide. That is to say, it will only be deep knowledge and passion for music— which as I pointed out in Chapter 6 was notably lacking on the shop floor

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of organized retailers—that will enable the institution of the music store to survive. In place of music stores, several new modes of music distribution have come into being, including online shopping sites, music streaming sites, and mobile downloading providers, (i.e., the single computer kiosks that transfer music files to mobile phones). The proliferation of venues for distributing music recordings created new opportunities for online retailing, especially as Internet connections and smartphone apps became more prevalent in India after 2010. Retailers acknowledged that they could not afford to display the kind of catalogs in their stores that online retailers could draw from various music sellers from around the country. Moreover, online retailers do not have the same spatial constraints of physical music due to distributed warehousing in lower rent areas, and the inexpensive shipping costs in India. As a result, online retailers can offer vastly larger selections at comparable prices, thus ameliorating many of the merchandising/stocking issues that I discussed in Chapter 5. Rather than trying to find a store mix within a finite space that fits the needs of the locality, online retailers can stock anything that might be available in warehouses from virtually anywhere. Yet savvy retailers could also take advantage of online systems by managing their store’s sales website or by making arrangements to supply online retailers—both of which Rhythm House had done in the 2010s. Indeed, by 2015 even as purchases within the store space continued to decline, the owner of Rhythm House noted to me that more than 30% of his sales took place online, which required him to beef up his back office staffing. However, like the earliest moments in the Indian music industry, retailers have cause for being worried about being undercut by the music companies themselves, which might at any time choose to sell directly to customers. In essence, it has forced music store owners, and their customers, to assess the value(s) that stores and store employees add to the experience of buying music. At this particular moment, it is clear that some stores will survive into the next decade, but these stores will likely need to focus on a particular niche (i.e., a genre, a format, or human interaction) that cannot be easily served through buying music via an online retailer or at a mobile downloading kiosk.

Value Revisited While this book has been focused upon music stores in India, it aspires to a much larger discussion about facets of India’s particular brand of neoliberal ideologies, the social changes that have accompanied neoliberalism, and the manifold values of music that reflect contemporary manifestations of economic and social ideologies. I have been addressing a specific range of values that accompany music as it circulates as a commodity in Indian music stores, and while each chapter worked through a different sense/ context of value, these values by no means exhaust the potential range

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that music might acquire, particularly with regard to musical sound and aesthetics. For instance, beyond a few examples scattered throughout the book, I do not explicitly address the ways in which people value music in religious or secular ritual contexts, although many of the recordings that circulate do ultimately serve this role when they are played. Similarly, as I suggest elsewhere (2009, 2015), music has a mnemonic value that connects people to their subjective temporal experiences and frequently operates as a commodity that sells other commodities, but that topic deserves much more research. Of course, there are a plentitude of other perspectives from which one could explore this question of musical value as it connects with human sociability writ large. Within the music industry itself, different people use music commodities for different purposes, and music becomes valuable in a variety of ways. To some degree, these segments of the music industry promote different visions of music; each is essentially selling a distinct aspect of music even if they are also in competition with each other. Working from this conception of differential values—e.g., social, economic, promotional, contextual, spatial, classificatory, performative—that I have developed in this book, it is worth revisiting the elements that distinguish music as a commodity from other commodities. As I argued in the first chapter, value is a distinctly social phenomenon that operates beyond the materiality of objects, social practices, and ideologies, among other things. The value of things, the sociabilities that are indexed in their modes of exchange, and the classificatory and evaluative elements accompanying them have long been topics of interest for scholars of political economy, as has the immateriality of particular cultural forms and their reproduction (especially in the context of cultural commodities like music, fashion, tourism, or advertising).5 Following from this line of inquiry—but expanding on it to consider systems of value that lie outside a Marxian outlook—I would argue that it is from this same excess of concatenated values, these generative gaps within and among use, desire, exchange, affect, and meaning, that music, like other cultural commodities, retains the power to be meaningful and authentic, even when it is made into an object that circulates economically and socially. Musical meanings not only emerge from these excesses of value, but these very excesses mean that value(s) are contingent and always subject to being reframed. Music recordings, like other commodities, bear meanings, emerge out of particular sets of human needs, enable participation in ritual practices, and have pragmatic associations in social life. Like other commodities, music can be industrially mass produced; it can alienate the producers from the products of their labor; it can be branded and counterfeited; it can be displayed in stores and ascribed with class, status, or gender meanings; it can rely on packaging to convey added values (branding) as a way of selling; it can be collected by consumers as a sign of status and distinction. However, despite these shared commodity characteristics, one can argue, and without resorting to romanticizing human practices, that music and certain other

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cultural commodities have a special status in the minds of producers and consumers alike. That is, as I have illustrated in this book, people see some part of themselves in music as something to be temporally and affectively experienced by others. They see it as having values that transcend its commodity nature, and as many ethnomusicologists have pointed out, musics have an affective quality to them that can move or mobilize people in the right context. I have found that this attitude of musical exceptionalism is pervasive among music sellers and customers in India, each of whom had a sense that through their affective labor of recommending, buying, and selling music, they were doing something transcendent, something greater than selling or buying a commodity like grain or soap. I would argue that it is the instability that exists between different modes of valuing that distinguishes music from other genres of commodity. As such, music is only ambivalently a commodity; the values derived from its commodity status must be enforced, and are resisted, at all turns. Only with rigorous policing, lobbying, legislation, and enforcement does music fit, however reluctantly, into the industrial mold that has been cast for it. Yet the ways in which music exceeds its commodity status are legion, if one considers, for example, cover bands, pirate modes of circulation, or even Muzak™ mediations. While international copyright laws have enshrined particular kinds of rights to music producers as sacrosanct, and as recordings jump from medium to medium (Attali 1985; Johns 2010), the commodity status of music recordings remains unstable. This instability precisely demonstrates the utility of a multifarious notion of musical values, insofar as it points to not just a characteristic that inheres in some music recordings at certain times, but to particular moments in the social lives of these recordings. These moments can never fully be subsumed because values can be mobilized in so many ways beyond a temporary commodity status.

The Meanings of Value, the Values of Meaning It should be clear by this point in the book that economic values are not the only modes of value at play in the social life of music as merchandise: value also emerges from musical meanings in ways that often work in tandem with, in the service of, or in spite of the commodity status of music. I have argued that in music stores we can witness the confluence of taste-makers, marketing discourses, and musical sound as a stream of music commodities and technologies that flow through consumers’ lives. Thus, even at this particular site within the market (broadly construed), differential conceptions of value are affixed to music recordings as they circulate as objects, to musical performance as a meaningful cultural practice, and to music as a constituent of other cultural practices. As I have suggested here, the practice of selling music in retail contexts is as much about the generation and reproduction of musical values

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through language (whether oral or written) and other kinds of signs, as it is about encounters with musical sound. These meanings might emerge as much from narratives in promotional posters, storytelling in films, or media packaging as they do from face-to-face interaction. In other words, value and meaning are not only components of musical sound, but value discourses adhere to, and circulate along with, music in the market. Accordingly, the exchange value of music is constructed by the collusion of music companies and retail music sellers in generating the “preferred meanings” (Hall 1973) of music commodities. As I have shown here, the promulgation of these meanings does not always succeed, but it can be successful if the potential values and meanings of music are carefully balanced in the context of exchange, ostensibly leading to the successful sale of the music commodity. Following from Steven Feld’s (1984) insight that “speech about music” frequently frames the experience of musical sound, I have illustrated in this book how values and meanings adhere to music commodities. Furthermore, these domains of meanings often have complex articulations within fields of possible signs. For example, a music store owner’s decision to place a recording in a particular part of a store creates and reinforces associations that both he and the customer make with that recording. These levels of meanings are signaled not only by genre assumptions, but also by aspects of the physical recording that directly and indirectly communicate complexes of information about the music contained within. A cassette or CD that is found in a “Film Compilations” section of a music store bears a series of strong assumptions, at minimum the fact that these songs appeared in the context of one or more Hindi films. The packaging suggests a theme that all of the songs fit, the list of songs, music directors, films the songs appeared in, and year of release; pictures on the packaging depict scenes from the film and the actors who were “singing” onscreen. Then there is the small print that lists the record label, an antipiracy warning, date of manufacture, and place of manufacture. On one level, the interpretive moves one makes when reading a cassette cover frames the experience of the music that is on the recording, which provides insight into what can affect aesthetic evaluations of music, even as the physicality of the object itself and the representations on the object are already a site of aesthetic evaluation.6 Thus, the packaging might indicate that a recording is, in fact, a clever counterfeit of the original recording produced by a music label (or, more frequently, an unsubtle one). These narratives, coupled with the interactions with store clerks and other customers, and the information that customers and clerks bring with them, frame the experience in tandem with musical sound. In the context of music commodities, it becomes apparent that values are contingent, fluid, and subject to change and re-evaluation over time. Music stores have been a place where the rubber meets the road, where marketing discourses intersect with salesmanship and practice. There are

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moments of failure: the customer who browses for an hour and purchases nothing, a customer that lowballs a price in negotiation (or in Music Metropolis, a customer that misreads the sales context and tries to negotiate the price), the shopkeeper that does not have what the customer wants and so the customer goes to another shop, or albums that the shopkeeper thinks have great music but simply do not sell. But there are also successes: the customer who loved the last suggestion and wants more of that artist. Relationships are forged on the basis of shared taste and appreciation of an artist or a recording. Store owners frequently acknowledged that they learned a tremendous amount about music from their educated collectors and passed this information on to other customers. As such, the music store has been a nexus of the creativity inherent in selling, as well as the creative use and mobilization of music in capitalist contexts. While stores are not often recognized sites for music-making per se, they have been important spaces for the creation of musical meaning. With the decline and eventual disappearance of music stores, one of the key sites of sociability and meaning-making will be replaced by other social practices and their associated discourses that supplement, and intersect with, the values of music as merchandise.

Notes 1. To this extent, the sound of musics on the street retained their “treble character,” much as Wayne Marshall (2014) has described in the British context and as others have described in an Indian context with regard to the sound of film songs blaring from public address systems. 2. See KMPG-FICCI 2012 industry report, https://www.in.kpmg.com/securedata/ ficci/Reports/FICCI-KPMG_Report_2012.pdf. 3. Even the Indian Music Industry (IMI) was interested in pursuing new intellectual property regimes as a way of recouping revenues from piracy. In a 2010 follow-up interview, Savio D’Souza of the IMI noted that the federation had launched a program called Mobile Music Exchange (MMX), in which a blanket industry license could be purchased that would allow businesses to legally offer music transfers to phones. IMI was asking businesses to compare the cost of a license to the cost of a potential court case—but this tactic had limited success as there was little legal precedent, and no one knew what the outcome of such expensive litigation might be. Although the IMI had managed to sell about 3,000 licenses in 2009 and 2010, he pointed out that many vendors felt that they were not receiving any benefits from the licenses, and argued that customers had no way of even verifying whether or not the music transfers they were receiving were IMI-approved. The program was also meeting resistance from IMI member companies, many of whom were unconvinced of the scheme’s potential and were hesitant to invest more resources in its development as it seemed to undercut sales from other sources (Savio D’Souza, pers. comm.). 4. See Booth 2015. 5. For example, William Mazzarella’s discussion of the “commodity image,” that is, advertising as a commodity based upon representations of commodities—in

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addition to being a commodity itself—has a striking similarity to the unstable status of music as a commodity. Mazzarella notes that there is a generative gap between the particular and the abstract, between use and exchange, which points to the ways in which use can never fully be exceeded, “the very attractiveness of consumer commodities in some sense arises out of their uncanny inability to reify completely the materials upon which they draw” (2003, 20). 6. Indeed, as Berger and Del Negro (2004) suggest, everything has the potential to be aestheticized at any moment of the experience.

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Index

Adams, Bryan 59, 68, 112, 131, 137–8 Amit (Bhopal) 22, 67–70, 117–18; as knowledge producer 67–8, 70, 81, 180; piracy and 69–70; social value and 63–4, 70; as tastemaker 67–8, 70 Antipiracy 16, 77–81, 185 See also IMI, Piracy; bribes and 78–81; evasion of 61, 76, 78; litigation and 16, 50, 78–81, 3n186; national media distributors and 78–80, 14n83; police and 50, 78–81; public service announcements (PSAs) 50 Audiocassette See Cassette Affective experiences, marketing and 89 Affective labor See Labor, Affective Affective status of music 15, 30, 184 Added value 4, 43, 183 See also Value Advertising 65, 134, 146, 183, 186–7n5 See also Marketing; Bhopali music stores, and 117; early music industry, and 50–52; music genre, and 17–19, 113, 120–1, 130; Music Metropolis, and 84, 89, 96–98, 100–1, 107, 119–22, 176–7; print media 33–4, 51–4, 84, 86, 100–1, 103, 107, 148, 177; Rhythm House 51–4; Saregama, and 37–8; subscription services, and 179 Austerity 5, 7, 9, 13 Album packaging See Music packaging Bollywood 111, 114 See also Film songs Brand See also Music Metropolis, branding; affect 89; campaigns 88; chartbusters, and 130–3; consumer identity and 2, 4–5, 85, 88–9, 114; co-brand 51, 115; cosmopolitanism, and 126, 128; counter stores, and 118–19; Customer Service Agents, and 143–4, 148–9, 152, 157, 161, 13n168–9; definition 87–8; edginess

87–9, 97, 99, 100–1, 103, 107, 113, 126, 135, 137; as experience 13, 85–6, 88–90, 115, 130, 148, 157, 175–6; fetish character of 88–9; history of 87–8; ideology 24, 137, 175; identity 4, 26, 85, 89–91, 94, 97, 143, 164; as image 26, 85–8, 90–1, 97, 101, 105–9, 113, 128, 133, 135, 175–6; as intellectual property 87–8, 131–2; international 8n27, 45, 146; merchandising, and 130; Intersection Music Store 2, 75; neoliberalism and 9, 11, 13, 144–6, 148, 159, 175, 177; managers 88–9, 91–2, 108; prestige 30; personality 90–1, 100, 177; synergy 84–5, 90, 97; voicing 88; value 175–7 Bazaars, see Marketplaces Bhopal 1–3, 11, 21–4, 29n29, 59–66, 72, 77, 81–2, 85, 99; Dakshin Bazaar 72; gas tragedy 21, 29n29; Guruwara Market 77; as middle-class city 21; as research site 1–3, 9–11, 21–5, 50, 59–82, 85, 93, 99, 115–19, 152, 170–2, 174, 180; thrift See Thrift, in Bhopal Bombay Rockers 84–5, 97, 103–5, 111–13, 119–20, 128, 138; Pune event 103–5; International genre and 105, 111–13, 119–20, 128, 138; Indipop and 111–13, 119–20, 128, 138 Caste 6, 10, 147, 151–2, 154–6, 8n168 Censorship 7 Chennai 11, 21, 23, 51, 87, 94, 102–3, 133, 7n139, 146 Counter stores 3, 11, 59–62, 66–70, 115–23, 4n138–9, 143; accounting practices 11, 24, 70, 118; branding 118–19; customer interactions in 4,

200

Index

59–61, 63, 67–70, 116–19; designs of See Music store design, counter stores; merchandising 116–18; music genres in 59–60, 67–8, 71, 74, 116–18; shelving 4, 60, 116–18; stock 59–60, 116–19; use of space 4, 59–60, 67, 115–18 See also Music store design Cassette 14, 16, 22, 35, 37–9, 41, 43, 46, 48, 9n57, 60, 67, 69–72, 80–1; as music technology 14, 35, 37–9; as disruptive technology 14, 31, 35, 37–9, 46, 48; new music genres and 37–9; T-Series and 38–9, 43, 48, 9n57; Super Cassettes and 38–9, 48; Dubbing 41, 60, 67, 69–72, 80; compilation services and 22, 69–70, 81 Copyright 4, 6, 15, 35, 39, 47–51, 11n57, 61, 65–6, 75, 79, 174, 184 Commodification, effects of 14–16, 19, 32 Commoditization, music and 39, 46, 11n83, 4n109, 173 Commodity See also Value: classical economic 39 See also Commoditization; definition 14; exchange 63, 77, 81; experience 2, 26, 85–6, 145; fetishism 88, 177; genre 120; image 5n186–7; music as 13–17, 34–5, 54, 144–5, 151, 163, 166, 183–4; status 14–15, 63, 145, 157, 175–6 Compact disc (CD) 1, 4, 13, 40–1, 55, 59–60, 62–5, 73–7, 79, 80, 95, 134, 142, 173, 179, 185 Consumerism 1, 13 See also Consumption Consumerism, middle classes and 3, 9, 13, 146 See also Consumption, middle classes and Celebrity: creation of 84–5, 107; events 30, 52, 84–5, 100–1, 104–5; marketing and 84–5, 95–6, 100–1, 104–9, 141–2 Chartbusters: as brand 126, 130–2; customer development and 125–6, 130, 160; as genre, see Genre, chartbusters; hit parades and 17–18; as metric 131–2 Class See also Middle classes: Customers, high value; Habitus; Customer Service Agents, and; Indian music industry, and 32–4, 39, 44, 174; managerial 8, 27, 146; as

prestige 42; shopping, and 77, 82, 85–6, 176 Computer hard drives 60, 170–1 Connoisseurs 32, 67–8, 70, 82, 91, 107, 117, 152, 158, 163, 167, 180 Consumption 5, 8–13, 35, 63–4, 66–7, 85–6, 114, 145–6, 174, 177; class performance, and 8–13, 32–4, 82, 85, 137, 145–6; conspicuous 85–6, 1n167; genre, and 114; liberalization, and 145–6; middle classes, and 8–11, 13, 12n28; 42, 44, 72, 77, 118, 136; pleasure, and 9, 11, 89–90 Conversion, media format 41, 60–2, 70–2, 170 See also Value-added service, format transfer Cosmopolitanism 112, 167, 175–7; brand, and 106–7, 126, 128–30; customers, and 2–4, 74, 91, 94; Customer Service Agents 148–50; experiences 162–3, 177; music genre, and 137–8; place and 52, 59, 64–5; space and 72, 101, 134, 148–50, 176, 97–9; T-Series, and 39 Compilations, music 22, 59, 61 Customer Service Agents (CSAs): caste, and 147, 151–2, 154–6; class 145, 147–57, 164, 166–7; connoisseurs, and 152, 163, 167; cosmopolitanism of 149–50, 155, 157, 162–63; customer relations and 159, 163; customer service, and 159, 163; demographics of 149; education level 149, 155, 167; gender, and 26, 145, 151–2, 155–7, 164, 166; hiring of 138, 145, 148–51, 154, 157, 163–7; international catalog, and 143, 164–65, 166–7; knowledge gaps 143–44, 149–51, 156, 159, 164–5, 167; language skills, and 147, 149–50; passion of 135, 143–5, 150–1, 156, 161, 163, 164–7, 177, 181–2; performance 92, 144–5, 151–2, 156–7, 160–63; status of retail labor 145, 152, 154–5; training of 143, 151, 158–64, 166–7, 13n168–9, 177; training seminar 162, 164–66; uniform 149, 154 Customers: evolved 8n110, 132, 137; aspirations toward 33–4, 93, 137; loyalty 1–2, 70, 85, 88, 93–4 See also Loyalty program; middle class 9–10, 32, 42, 72, 77, 85–7, 104, 110, 112–3, 118, 132, 136, 138, 145–6, 149–50, 177; high-value 2, 4, 26, 33, 40, 86,

Index 91, 93–4, 96, 106, 126, 145, 148, 150, 167; interactions with staff, and 4, 26, 59–61, 63, 67–70, 116–19, 145 Delhi 13n28, 61, 78, 94–5, 108, 131–2, 7n139, 153–4 Devaluation of music 45, 173. See also Value Display space 1–2, 24, 60, 76, 86, 117, 127, 134, 170, 180 Distribution See Music distribution Disruptive technologies 4, 14, 21, 31, 35, 37–9, 41, 44, 46, 48, 70, 173, 178–9 DVD (Digital Video Disc) 22, 40, 56, 59, 62, 66, 76–80, 120, 149 Economy: formal See also Retail, organized; informal 3, 12, 23, 15n28, 31, 41, 70, 74–7, 118 See also Unorganized retail; liberalization 7, 11–13, 6n27; planned 5–7 Employees See also Customer Service Agents: caste 147, 151–2, 154–6; class 145, 147–57, 164, 166–7; education 149, 155, 167; gender 26, 145, 151–2, 155–9, 164, 166; hiring 138, 145, 148–51, 154, 157, 163–7; training 36, 143, 151, 158–64, 166–7, 13n168–9, 177 Events, promotional 84–6, 90, 93, 95–6, 100–8, 142, 144, 157, 167, 175; celebrity, See also Celebrity; holiday See also Promotion, holiday Film songs 38, 39, 46, 128, 164; as chartbusters 130; evergreens 32, 36–7, 42–3, 46, 128, 138, 9n139–40; Indian music industry and 13–14, 35, 38; as marketing category 1–2, 13, 128, 130, 164, 166; proliferation, and 64; taste, and 114–16, 164 Film and music industry 17, 19–20, 35, 38 FICCI-KPMG reports 19–20, 28n29, 179 See also Trade bulletins Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce (FICCI) 19–20, 179 Financing in the music industry 8, 20, 45 Gandhi, Mahatma 5–9 Gandhi, Rajiv 7 Geeta (Music Metropolis) 50, 143, 148–9, 151–2, 154, 159, 161–3, 165, 9n168

201

Gender See also Customer Service Agents (CSA): gender; back office 155, 164; musical knowledge and 156–57; popular music and 153–4, 157; respectability and 154–56, 157; shop keeping and 154–55; social danger and 153, 154, 177; stigma of heavy labor 154 Genre, music: angrezi (English) 22, 59, 67, 116, 124, 138 See also International; catalog 32–8, 42–3, 48, 94, 131, 133, 143, 166–7; chartbusters 96, 120–32, 160; class and 13, 26, 38–9, 42, 112–13, 118, 132, 136–7, 159, 164–5, 176, 185; clusters in Music Metropolis 128–9; commodity 13, 17, 113, 120, 176, 184; definition of 113–15; deterritorialization 112; devotional 39, 43, 117, 125, 129, 138, 12n68; in early music industry 34–5; electronic dance music 141–3; employee training, and 143, 150–1, 159–60, 164–7; evergreen 32, 36–7, 42–3, 46, 128, 9n139–40; family-run stores, and 118–9; folk 14, 35, 39, 5n57, 97, 99, 120, 129, 137; Hindi film song 17–18, 114–15, 128, 130, 138, 158; homogenization and 112–13, 123, 131, 137; identity, and 114; Indian classical 13, 35, 55–6, 2n57, 9n83, 87, 99, 114–7, 120, 126–7, 129, 156–7, 12n168; Indipop 38–9, 106, 111–14, 116, 120, 125–9, 131, 138; international 3, 34–5, 38, 53, 56, 84, 87, 89, 91, 94–9, 101, 103–6, 8n110, 111–13, 116–17, 119–21, 126–9, 131, 133, 135, 138, 142–3, 149–50, 157–9, 164–7; jazz 31, 107–8, 113, 129, 141, 167; labeling 112, 115–16, 123, 129, 2n138; locations within stores 111–15, 119–21, 125–6, 176–7, 185; marketing, and 35, 38, 5n57, 97–8, 106, 111, 119, 123, 130, 132, 4n138–9; in Music Metropolis 84, 86, 88, 93, 96–8, 106–9, 111, 113, 115, 119–39, 141–3, 150–1, 160, 164–5, 167, 176–7; naming conventions 116, 137–8; negotiation of 114–15, 118, 177; new releases 46, 96–7, 117–18, 120–1, 125–6, 129–1, 134, 137; as oppositional category 114; place 111–30, 185; regional 17, 39, 49, 87, 96, 108, 112,

202

Index

120, 121, 125–7, 129–31, 133, 137–8, 156; remix 73–5, 121, 125–9; re-terrritorialization 112; in Rhythm House 52, 56; space and 24–6, 52–6, 60, 111–35, 8n139, 176, 185; as taxonomy 116, 121–2, 124, 126, 128; temporal classification 120, 124–5, 130, 176; T-Series, and 42–3, 181; Value, and 3, 13–14, 89, 176–7, 185; Western classical 13, 53, 129, 143, 153, 158, 167 Gift, music as 4, 14–5, 50, 62–3, 73, 75, 119, 174 Global capitalism 3, 5, 9, 145–6, 173 See also Globalization Globalization 112–3, 175 Gramophone record 33–7, 150 Gramophone Company of India (GCI) 32, 34–9, 41, 46, 48, 14n58 See also Saregama; relationship to retail stores 35, 14n58 Geet Jagah (Bhopal) 22, 70–2; as lending library 70–2; music piracy and 22, 70–2; media format conversion and 70–2 Hawkers 3, 47, 62, 66–7, 75–80, 11n83, 173 High-value, definition 2, 93 Habitus 9, 12, 96, 145, 148–9, 161, 163, 166; middle classes 9, 96, 145, 148–9, 166 Hit parades, musical value and 17–18 See also Chartbusters Hindi-language music, hegemony of 17, 105, 128–9 See also Language, Hindi HMV (His Master’s Voice) 35–6, 51–6, 148 HMV Store 56, 148 Indian Music Industry (IMI) trade group: piracy and 20–1, 23, 32, 44, 48–51, 61, 63, 78, 15n83, 174, 186ff3; members 20–1; official reporting 20–1 Indore 11, 22, 65, 72 Informal economy See Economy, informal Indian diaspora 84 Innovation 6, 26, 30, 32, 37–9, 57, 114, 174 Innovation: T-Series and 32, 37–9; music technology and 30, 32, 37, 52; disruptive technologies and 37–9

Intersection Music Store (Bhopal) 1–2, 72–5; closure 2; location 1–2, 72; marketing strategy 74–5; piracy 2, 73–5; remix 73–5; store design 1–2, 72 Intellectual property See also Copyright: brand as 87–8; chartbusters as 131–2; enforcement 8, 1; music industry, and 179; IMI, and 48–51, 63, 3n186; state, and the 6, 81, 174; piracy 63, 67; Saregama 37; T-Series 39 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 7–8, 11 Interpretive moves 185 Intersectionality 151–7 Intimacy 3, 25, 108, 142–3, 158–9, 161, 164, 167 Kolkata 11, 21, 23, 35, 56, 87, 98, 108, 7n139, 146 Knowledge production See also Connoisseurs: in counter stores 30, 67–8, 70–72, 81, 118–221; Customer Services Agents, and 143–5, 148–53, 163–7; gender, and 156–9, 12n168 Kuldeep (Bhopal) 1–2, 22, 72–75; as entrepreneur 72, 74–5 Kirana stores See Stores, family-run KPMG market-research firm 19, 179 See also FICCI-KPMG reports Labels, music 13, 18–19, 24, 26, 31, 113 See also Companies, Music; distribution 12n140; genres, and 123; HMV 35–6; IMI, and 49; Music Metropolis, and 101, 133–5; Rhythm House 55; Saregama 4n57, 2n109, 178; T-Series 38–9, 42–3; Universal Music 45, 181; Yash Raj Music 43 Labor 26, 40, 143–69, 177, 183–4; affective 145, 151, 159–60, 163–4, 177; hierarchy and 147; hiring practices See Employees, hiring; caste 147, 151–2, 154–6; call centers 9, 146, 148–9, 153, 155, 167; class 154; education 149, 155, 167; gender and 26, 145, 151–2, 155–7, 158–9, 164, 166 See also Gender; housekeeping 147–8; knowledge and 143–5, 148–53, 158–9, 164–5, 167; managerial classes and 146, 163–5; middle classes and 146, 148, 154–7, 177; in neoliberalism 145–6, 159; operations 11, 24, 146–8; outsourced

Index 146–7; retail 122, 132, 145–6, 152, 177; security staff 147; status 145–6; training 143, 151, 158–64, 166–7, 13n168–9, 177; training seminars 162, 164–6; white collar 8, 146 Language, English 9, 77, 105, 116, 120, 129, 147, 149, 150; Hindi 17, 105, 128–9 See also Hindi-language music, hegemony of; regional 17, 34–5, 49, 105, 122, 125, 127–30, 133, 137, 147, 150 See also Genre, regional languages Language politics 17, 105, 122, 127–30, 133, 137, 145, 150, 184–5; class and 105, 145, 149–50, 166 Liberalization, effects of 4, 7–9, 11–13, 6n27, 38, 40, 85–6, 137–8, 144–5, 164–5 See also Neoliberalism; limits on India’s 8–9, 12, 8n27, 14n28 Listening posts 1, 72–3, 86, 95–6, 107, 141 Loyalty card 1–2, 85, 93–4, 143 Loyalty program 1–2, 93–4, 143, 157, 160, 13n168–9 Malls 11–13, 21, 10n110 Management, retail 11–12, 87, 133, 7n139, 149 Material culture, music and 174 Materiality of music recordings 44 Marketing 161–2, 164, 175, 184–5 See also Brand: advertising displays 17, 37, 53, 59, 67, 117, 120–1, 130 See also Promotions; affect, and 87–9; film 38–9; folk musics 5n57; genre See Genre; gramophone machines 32–3, 35; hit parades as 17–18, 132; holidays, and 12n110; value narratives and 18–19, 39, 43, 5n57, 130, 132, 175; films and 17–18, 38, 97; Music Metropolis 74–5, 85–6, 92, 100–1; print media See Advertising, print media; radio 17–18, 36, 38, 84, 86; shopping malls and 11–13; television and 22, 86; use of celebrity 33, 84–5, 95–6, 100–1, 104–9, 141–2 Marketing discourses 11–13, 15–17, 39, 43, 108, 6n109–10, 121, 123, 161–4, 184–5; high-value customers and 26, 85–6, 93–4, 96, 106, 126 Marketing strategy 11–13, 18, 32, 39, 85–92, 96–8, 100–1, 108, 12n110, 119, 121, 130, 161–4; packaging and

203

87, 119, 122, 136, 5n139, 174–5, 183, 185; Western 11–13, 87–9, 12n110, 161–3; middle classes and 10, 32–4, 42, 132, 136, 138, 177 See also Consumption, middle classes Marketplace, Indian 1, 5, 10–12, 47, 59, 65–7, 78, 81, 116, 174 See also Counter stores Market synergy 17, 134, 136 Market regulation 5–7, 8n27, 14n28, 29n29 See also Economy, planned Media consolidation 84–5 Metrics 91–2, 94, 135, 162 Merchandise, peripheral 55–6, 118, 120–1, 127, 4n138–9 Merchandising 17–18, 66, 72, 84, 89, 92, 96, 111, 128, 130–8, 146, 176–7, 182; marketing campaigns and 17–18, 96; aesthetic judgement and 130–7; brand and 84, 89, 130–6, 176; decision making and 18, 92, 96, 111, 128, 130–7, 177, 182; locality and 128–32, 146, 176, 182; managers 18, 66, 92, 96, 111, 128, 166, 3n167–8, 176; proliferation and 16, 39, 46, 55, 5n57, 63–4, 5n82, 134, 181–2; risk 31–2, 134; social values and 4–5, 13–16, 18, 132, 137, 166, 177 Middle classes: aspiring 9–10, 137; cosmopolitanism, and 112–13; definition 9–10, 145–6; gender and 152–3, 155, 157, 177; music technology, and 32–3; new 3, 9–10, 42, 65, 72, 87, 104, 132, 145–6, 177; old 9–10, 145; values 77, 112, 138, 145, 155 See also Value Mobile downloading 41, 80–1, 170–3, 178, 182; See also Mobile phones Mobile streaming 41, 46, 80, 178–9, 182 Mobile phones 3, 9, 19, 22, 41, 44, 46, 60, 70, 80–1, 8n139, 139, 170–3, 178–82; digital distribution 4, 19, 22, 41, 80, 173, 178–82; as disruptive technology 4, 41, 44, 80, 173, 178–9; downloads and 41, 60, 80–1, 170–3, 178, 182; listening platform 4, 19, 41, 60, 70, 80, 170–3, 178–82; ringtones and 179; soundscapes and 178; storage limitations of 170, 180; transferring music 60, 170–3 MP3 format 40–1, 46–7, 50, 64–5, 70, 76, 78–9, 12n83; CD distribution and 40–1, 50, 63–5, 76, 78, 12n83;

204

Index

as disruptive technology 31, 40–1, 46–7; piracy 40–1, 46–7, 50, 64–5, 76, 78–9, 12n83 Mumbai: as music industry center 23; cosmopolitanism and 52; Fort District 23, 76; Kala Ghoda District 30, 52; as research site 21–3 street hawkers 75–77 Musical exceptionalism 15–16, 144–5, 151, 163–4, 166, 177, 183–4; See also Affective status of music Music categories See also Genre 37, 43, 60, 111–14, 116–31, 134–5, 138, 4n138–9, 8n139, 141, 143, 177 Music commodities: as luxury item 32, 54, 149; exceptionalism of See Musical exceptionalism; sociability, and 26, 62–3, 67, 81–2, 161, 163, 166, 174–6, 181, 183, 186; See also Commodity Music, film songs See Film songs Music, international See Genre angrezi, international: Indipop 38, 106, 111–14, 116, 120, 125–9, 131, 138; evergreen 32, 36–7, 42–3, 46, 128, 9n139–40; devotional 39, 43, 117, 125, 129, 138, 12n68 Music companies, Saregama See Saregama; Sony Music 38, 42, 4n57, 113, 135; Times Music 42–3, 135–6; T-Series See T-Series; Universal Music 38, 45, 132, 181; Venus 38, 101 Music Industry: India 3–4, 13–14, 16–17, 19–21, 23, 28, 28n29, 31–2, 34–41, 44–5, 55, 72, 81, 85; definition 16–17; Gramophone Era 32, 34–7, 81; Cassette Era 16, 32, 37–40, 44, 55; Digital Era 16, 32, 40–1; measuring of 19–21, 72; monopoly 35 Musical meaning 33, 62, 87, 89, 114–15, 124, 137, 138, 3n138, 157, 173, 175, 183, 185–6; brand and 87, 89, 175, 183; genre and 114–15, 124, 137, 138, 3n138, 185 Music Metropolis: corporate history 4–5, 86–7; brand strategies 2, 13, 30, 85–9, 93–5, 96, 177; brand synergies 84–5, 97; as metabrand 175; brand 2, 24, 26, 1n27, 30, 52, 84–110, 126, 128, 130, 132–3, 135–7, 9n139–40, 143–4, 146, 148–9, 152, 157, 159, 161, 164, 13n168–9, 175–7; brand narratives 88, 90, 126, 135, 175;

celebrity events 84–6, 95–6, 100–8, 144; Bombay Rockers and 84–5, 103–5, 111–13, 120; hiring practices 138, 145, 148–51, 154, 157, 163–7; training 36, 143, 151, 158–67, 13n168–9, 177; merchandising practices 66, 84, 89, 92, 96, 111, 130–7, 176–7; music genres and 86–7, 89, 93, 96, 98, 106–9, 111–15, 120–31, 133–9, 141–3, 150–1, 160, 164–5, 167, 176–7; store promotions 26, 84–6, 90, 93, 95–108, 142, 144, 157, 160, 165–7, 175; store events 84–6, 90, 93, 95–6, 100–8, 142, 144, 157, 167, 175; workshops 26, 100, 105–8, 165–7, 175; festival season 97–100; marketing strategy 18, 85–103, 108–9, 5n109, 111, 119, 121–3, 130, 132, 7n139, 161–2, 164, 175; in-store radio 90, 95–6, 104; sound system 90, 95–8, 103–4; logo 95, 121; metrics 91–2, 94, 135, 162; stocking 18, 24, 26, 111–15, 130–1, 133, 137–40, 142, 158, 161, 167, 177; locations 21, 23; catalog 94, 121, 131, 133, 143, 166–7, 13n168–9; chartbusters 96, 120–1, 125–6, 129–32, 10n140, 160; cosmopolitanism 4, 10, 72, 91, 94, 97–9, 101, 103, 106–7, 124, 126, 128–30, 135, 137, 148–50, 152, 155, 162–3, 175–7; data mining 93–4; design aesthetics 1, 85–6, 90, 95–6, 108–9, 114–15, 119–22, 130, 161; employee turnover 148; evolved customers 8n110, 132–7; flagship stores 1, 12, 18, 23, 84–6, 94–6, 103, 107, 9n110, 119, 124, 126–7, 8n139, 141, 147, 149, 153, 159, 180; franchising 2; genre clusters 127–9, 9n139–40; high-value customers 26, 86, 93–4, 96, 106, 126, 145, 148, 150, 167; jazz seminars 107–8, 167; listening posts 86, 95–6, 107, 141; loyalty program See Loyalty program; media campaigns 95, 97, 100–1, 106–7, 130, 134, 136, 144; new releases 96–7, 120–1, 125–6, 129–30, 134, 137; organizational logic 111–39; product life cycle 130–1; satellites 87, 94–5, 10n140; shelf talkers 121–2, 130; signage 95, 120–3, 138; space 86–7, 103–4, 107, 110, 122–30, 132–4, 138, 8n139,

Index 146–7, 176; taxonomy of 121–2, 124, 126, 128; televisions in 18, 95–6, 141 Music stores, family-run 3–4, 11, 21, 23–6, 14n28, 40–1, 60, 62, 66–7, 70, 115–18, 120, 122–3, 4n138–9, 12n140, 158, 180–1; See also Counter stores Music stores, corporate See Organized retail Music store design 1–2, 4, 12, 59–60, 72, 85–6, 90, 95–6, 108–9, 114–18, 119–23, 130, 146, 161; counter stores 1, 4, 59–60, 115–16, 122–3 Music distribution 4, 16, 19, 22, 27, 31, 35–41, 45–8, 50–2, 60, 63–5, 76, 78, 12n83, 170–1, 173, 178–82; advanced rights, and 31, 45; digital 16, 27, 31, 40–1, 46–7, 50, 60, 63–5, 76, 78, 12n83, 170–1, 173, 178–82; physical 38–9, 48, 51–2, 178–9 Music videos, marketing and 18, 95 Music production 16–18, 23, 32–5, 38–48, 51, 62–3, 66–7, 71–2, 74–5, 81–2, 128, 130, 174 Music packaging 1, 4, 39, 42–4, 11n57, 60–2, 77, 82, 87, 119, 122, 136, 5n139, 174–5, 181, 183, 185 Music retail: decline of 178, 180, 181; space 113, 119–21, 125–6, 132–4, 138, 8n139, 146, 148, 176, 180, 182 See also Organized retail, space Music sales: digital 16, 19, 40–1, 46–7, 60, 170–1, 173, 179; physical 10, 38–9, 43, 46, 179 See also Display space, Gramophones, Cassette, Compact discs, MP3 format Music technology 3–4, 13–14, 19, 43–4, 59–60, 81, 8n82, 134, 139, 8n139; cassette See Cassette; digital 19, 31, 40–1, 46–7, 60, 170–1, 173, 178–82 See also MP3 format, Mobile phones; compact disc (CD) See Compact disc; disruptive 21, 48, 178; DVD See DVD; GCI and 37, 41, 46, 48; gramophone See Gramophone; MP3 See MP3 format; T-Series and 32, 38–9, 41, 43, 48–9, 9n57; video CD 22, 50, 56, 62, 66, 78, 8n82 Music World 2n109, 9n139–40, 180; evergreen category and 37, 9n139–40; RPG and 37

205

Neoliberalism: consumption and 7–10, 13, 145–6, 177; customer service and 144–5, 159; See also Labor, neoliberalism; definition of 5–6; India and 4–9 11–13, 6n27, 38, 40, 85–6, 137–8, 144–5, 164–5, 173–5, 182; new middle classes and 3, 7, 9–13, 147–8, 182; store design and 146, 175, 180; retail and 11–2, 144–8, 159, 166, 173–5, 177, 180, 182; sales models 146–8, 159, 180 Non-resident Indian (NRI) 98, 105, 158 Organized retail: browsing, and 1, 4, 41, 52, 101, 119, 123, 128–9, 141 161–2; chartbusters See Genre, chartbusters; customer service, and 30, 145, 152, 159, 160–1, 163–5; definition of 10–12; distribution, and 12n140; genre labels, and See Genre, labeling; homogenization and 113, 122–3, 131; history of 86, 2n109; promotion and See Store promotions; sales training in 159–60; signage 95, 120–3, 138; space 110, 113, 119–21, 130, 138, 8n139, 146, 148, 176, 180, 182 See also Music store design; taxonomies of 116, 121–2, 124, 126, 128 Passion 26, 107, 143–5, 150–1, 159, 161, 164–7, 177, 181–2; music commodities and 164–7, 181–2; sales and 26, 143–5, 150–1, 161, 163, 164–7, 177, 181–2 See also CSAs, passion of Piracy 3–4, 12–13, 16, 20–1, 23, 26, 31–2, 40–1, 44, 46–51, 61, 63–9, 73–82, 12n83, 15n83, 172–4, 176, 3n186 See also Antipiracy; counter stores and 59–61, 68–70, 78–81; as distributed production 39, 77–81; high-value customers and 4, 77; IMI narrative 47–51, 63, 80, 82, 3n186, 174; intellectual property rights and 8, 47–51, 63, 67, 81–2, 174, 3n186; as lost value 32, 47–8, 80; mobile downloading 41, 80–1, 170–3, 178, 182; organized retail and 4, 174, 176; packaging and 39, 11n57, 60–2, 77, 82, 174, 185; remix as 73–5; reported revenue and 20–1; social networking and 176; store employees and 176; technology and 2, 22, 31–2, 40–1, 46–7, 50, 59, 61–5, 68–73, 76,

206

Index

78–81, 12n83, 15n83; values and See Value, piracy and Prestige: aspiration towards 9, 34, 85, 136–7; discourses of 4, 32–33; high-value customers and 2, 4, 26, 33, 40, 94, 106, 145, 148, 150; Music Metropolis and 4, 30, 85; music playback hardware ownership 33, 44; packaging and 42–4, 174; Rhythm House See Rhythm House, prestige; Saregama brand strategy, and 32, 36–7, 39, 42–3 Prestige value 2, 4, 32, 34, 44, 128, 132, 137 Proliferation, crisis of 16, 5n82, 134, 174, 181 Promotion: artist visit 84–6, 103–5; celebrity appearance 84–5, 95–6, 100–1, 104–5, 108; Christmas season 97–9; concert tour 84, 97, 103, 113; Diwali 97–100; holiday 24, 97–100, 109, 12n110, 13n110; media companies and 13, 33–4, 38, 84, 89, 93, 97–100; newspaper 33–4, 84, 100–1, 107, 177; product 32–4, 38, 89; spectacle and 100–4; Valentine’s Day 98–100, 13n110 Quality, musical 2, 13, 17, 31–2, 39–40, 42–3, 46, 50, 60–2, 77, 133, 135–6, 141, 174 See also Value, aesthetic Rao, Narasimha 7 Radio 4, 17–9, 22–3, 31, 33, 36, 38, 44, 46–8, 53, 84, 86, 103, 113, 132, 178–9 Radio jockey (RJ) 90, 96, 104, 141 Rajeev (Music Metropolis) 130–7, 165–6 Recession 25–6, 91, 104 Raids, piracy 78–81, 174 Remix See Genre, remix Recordings, original 2, 4, 12, 26, 44, 59–62 Repackaging as market strategy 32, 36–7, 181 Retail stores See also Organized retail: average bill value 92–4; customer conversion rates 92, 94; customer service agents See Customer Service Agents (CSAs); footfalls 92–4, 106–7, 162; merchandising See Merchandising; metrics of 91–2,

94, 135, 162; selling See Organized retail, customer service Retail, online 179–82 Recording industry, India See Music Industry Rhythm House (Mumbai) 5, 23, 25, 30–2, 51–6, 58, 93, 152, 158–9, 180, 182; in the 2010s 5, 180; advertising 53; as media store 55–6, 180; as Mumbai institution 23, 30–2, 52, 56; business strategy 31, 52–6, 180, 182; celebrity shopping 30, 52; closure of 180; cosmopolitanism 52, 56; employee training 158–9; genres in 53, 56; history 30, 52–6; innovation 52–6, 58; Kala Ghoda Arts Festival and 52; listening cabins 53, 55; location 30, 52, 56; music label 55; musical knowledge 30–31, 53, 158–9; prestige 30, 52, 56, 93; staff 30, 152, 158–159; store layout 52–5; ticket sales 55 Rights See also Intellectual property rights: access 46, 178–9; advanced soundtrack 31, 45; distribution 31, 35–7, 45; music ownership 4–6, 16, 39, 47–49, 4n57, 75, 9n139–40, 184; TV & radio 179 Royalties 19–20, 35, 45, 49, 51, 75, 174 Reproduction hardware 4, 17, 31, 33, 41, 71–3, 15n83; entrepreneurship and 41, 71–3; piracy and 4, 31, 71–3, 78–81, 15n83 Revenue: decline and explanations for 31, 180–2; Indian music industry and 28n29, 31; reporting 19–21, 24–5, 28n29 Saregama 32, 36–7, 39, 42–5, 4n57, 2n109, 135, 9n139–40, 12n140, 178; See also Gramophone Company of India Sangeet Mahal (Bhopal) 22, 67–70, 117–18 See also Amit; design 117–18; music piracy and 68–70; status 68, 70, 117–18; VCD rental and 22, 70 Selling: CSA practices of See Customer Service Agents; customer service, and See Organized retail, customer service; gender and 26, 145, 151–2, 155–7, 158–9, 164, 166; as performance 92, 144–5, 151, 156–7,

Index 161, 167; performative failure and 167, 185–86 Store operations 11, 24, 85, 146–8 Super Cassettes 38–9, 48 See also T-Series Siddharth (Bhopal) 22, 59–60, 64–65, 67, 76, 78–81, 118–19 Siddharth’s Music Store (Bhopal) 22, 59–60, 67, 76, 78–81 118–19; closing 80–1; as counter store 59–60; design 59–60; location 22, 59; media format conversion, and 60; media technologies and 22, 59–60, 81; music piracy and 59–60, 78–81; music genres and 22, 59, 118–19 Singh, Manmohan 7 Store promotions 24, 75, 84–6, 90, 93, 95–109, 12n110, 13n110, 142, 144, 157, 167, 175; Intersection music store 74–5; holidays and See Promotion, holidays; Music Metropolis See Music Metropolis, store promotions; spectacle and See Promotion, spectacle Stores, family-run See Music stores, family-run; retail See Music stores, retail Salman (Bhopal) 22, 43, 66, 70–2, 81; as entrepreneur 66, 70–2; musical knowledge of 71–2; music technology and 43, 66, 70–2, 81 Shopping See also Malls: bazaar 10–11; cosmopolitanism 4; in counter stores 62–5, 78; enculturation 12; as experience 2–4, 10, 13, 82, 85–91, 95–6, 108, 115, 138, 12n140, 145, 148, 157, 163; habitus 9, 12, 145; in Music Metropolis 95–6; in neoliberalism 5; as performance 12, 82, 85, 88, 137 See also Consumption; in Rhythm House 30; as spectacle 2–4, 10, 13, 82, 85–7, 91, 176; structural adjustments, India and 7; speculation in the music industry 31; Social Economic Classification (SEC) 146, 2n167; space 23, 110, 113, 148; as location 53; spectacle 146; value, and 16 T-Series See also Super Cassettes: 32, 38–9, 41–3, 45, 48–9, 9n57, 101, 135–6, 181; business strategy 32, 38–9, 41, 48–9, 181; class, and 32, 39, 42–3, 48, 101, 135–6; distributed

207

production 38–9, 45, 48; founding 38; as innovator 32, 38–9, 41, 48–9; as market disruptor 38–9, 48–9; MP3-CD distribution 41; music genres 38–9, 42–3, 48, 181 Taste, musical: chartbusters, and 131–2; counter stores, and 118–19; Customer Service Agents, and 148, 151, 160, 163–4, 186; high-value customers, and 93–4, 8n110, 135–7; music companies, and 37–9, 42; regional 108–09; taste-makers 16, 184; value, and 176 Technology See Music technology: disruptive See Disruptive technology; entrepreneurs and 41, 66, 70–5; marketing and 22; social outlooks and 14, 34, 61–2, 66 Trade bulletins 19 Television 4, 7, 17–19, 22–3, 28n29, 31, 33, 36, 44, 46, 84, 86, 95, 101, 141; music promotion and 22, 38 Tariffs, trade 4, 7, 53 Tere Naam (2003) 136–7 Thrift 7, 61, 63–6, 81–2, 85; in Bhopal 63–6, 81–2, 85; middle class 7, 9, 85 Tower Records 12–3 Unorganized retail 10–12, 15, 15n28, 60, 62, 70, 75–6, 85, 108, 113, 115, 122 See also Music stores, familyrun, Counter stores; browsing, and 59–60, 72, 78, 115–6 Value: affective 30, 89, 163, 183–4; brand 85–89, 175 See also Brand; commodities and 1–2, 10, 13–17, 27, 33–4, 46–7, 57, 60, 62–6, 77, 81, 89, 113, 144–5, 157, 163, 166, 173–7, 182–6; consumer 1, 5 See also Consumption, middle classes and; cosmopolitan vs. traditional 3, 12–13; customer service and 30, 145, 163, 166; definitions 13–14, 16; display 33, 44, 82, 116, 174; domains of 166, 185; economic 3, 5, 13, 17, 33–4, 37, 47, 60, 62, 76, 5n82, 88, 144–5, 166, 184; ethical 49, 62; experiential 182–5 See also Shopping as experience; genre and 3, 13, 89, 93, 112–15, 125–6, 131–2, 138, 176–7, 184–5; in neoliberalism 5–9, 144–6, 174–5, 177, 182; innovation and

208

Index

32, 57, 174; instability 26, 184, 5n186–7; as meaning 15–19, 89, 113–14, 175–77, 183–6; memorial 89; mnemonic 30, 183; musical 3, 13–16, 26, 42–3, 47, 52, 62–3, 85, 113, 130–1, 143, 173, 175–6, 183–5; narratives 46–7, 185; new middle class 3, 10, 149–50; new releases 46, 79–80, 130, 133–4; novelty 33, 38, 40, 52; organized retail 4, 13–15, 166; overlapping categories of 13, 16–17, 19, 144, 163, 175; piracy and 4, 12–13, 16, 26, 49–50, 75, 174; as position 19, 113–15; prestige See Prestige value; sociability as 26, 62–3, 81, 166, 174–6, 181, 183; social 2–5, 8, 13–16, 18, 26–7, 31, 50, 66, 70, 81–2, 85, 89, 112–14, 130, 149–50, 166, 174; social status

49, 82, 88, 108, 175–6; sources of 3, 15; technologies and 14, 40–1, 81; as viscous 173, 175 Value-added service 2, 46, 61, 68–72, 80, 173, 178–9; compilation and 2, 61, 63, 68–72, 12n83; format transfer 4, 12, 41, 60–2, 70–2; mixed tapes as 50, 61; mobile phones 46, 80, 173, 178–9 Vimal (Bhopal) 77–81 See also Antipiracy Veer-Zaara (2003) 43, 131, 134, 136 Video rental 66, 70, 118 Virgin Megastore 1, 12–13, 86 Wholesale markets 77–9, 171, 12n140 Youth 1–2, 13, 72, 87, 90–1, 96, 99, 101, 103, 107, 114, 119, 148, 157