Introduction

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 (for example, classical musics oriented toward cultural elites, new film songs oriented toward urban youth), its format or medium (for example, cassette or C.D, original or pirated), the meanings produced for marketing and promotion (for example, A.R. Rahman's "newest blockbuster hit"), the actors with which a song is pictured in the context of film or video (for example, 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, 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. 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 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 influential discussion of how the invention of the printing press was necessary for the spread of capitalism and popular nationalism in Europe and beyond. 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 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. 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”, and he argues that it was a factor in the deterioration of civil society in Indian villages.

I think that Manuel's argument overreaches a bit in terms of the one-sided 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”. Appadurai notes that objects and behaviors tend to oscillate between commodity status and other roles available within a cultural value system (for example, 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.

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. 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.

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 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. 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, 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 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” 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