Tolga’s Reviews > Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India > Status Update

Yes Eyoki, it's quite interesting (even if it seems a bit dated since we have Internet). I had already taken some notes, so I would like to add some of them for you:

"Like some of the other new media, cassettes and tape players constitute a two-way, potentially interactive micro-medium whose low expense makes it conducive to localized grassroots control and corresponding diversity of content. Cassettes, unlike films, can be used at the owner’s convenience and discretion; they thus resist various forms of control and homogenization associated with the capital-intensive, monopolistic "old" media of television, cinema, and radio. The emergence of cassette culture in India thus must be seen in the context of a new world information order with new potentialities for decentralization, diversification, autonomy, dissent, and freedom."

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"Benjamin’s well-known essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written in 1930s, spoke optimistically of the mass media as potentially liberating forces; in subsequent decades, most critical theorists found the manipulative and stupefying aspects of the mass media far more apparent. With the advent of new forms of media more open to reciprocity and subaltern control, Benjamin’s optimism might seem considerably more credible and prescient today."

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"The advent of a new medium, such as cassettes, with dramatically different characteristic patterns of ownership and control, presents remarkable possibilities for new, diverse forms of expression."

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"…the dramatic transformation of Indian popular music since the late 1970s. In this period, film music –whose dominance might previously have been assumed to indicate its exclusive popularity– fell from roughly 90 percent of the recorded-music market to around 40 percent (as will be discussed below). A vast and diverse body of regional, pan-regional, devotional, and secular genres arose as new, mass-mediated popular musics. If, as Kakar’s approach approach would imply, the media and their owners and directors are merely "incidental" editors and transmitters of popular taste, then we must assume that a spontaneous and unprecedented revolution occurred in the realm of musical aesthetics throughout the subcontinent. It should be clear, however, that the transformation of popular music was not due to any such revolution, but rather to the emergence of a new mass medium –cassette technology– that brought with it new patterns of ownership, control, access, and production."

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"The spread of cassette technology decentralized and diversified the formerly oligopolized Indian recording industry by making the means of musical mass production, as well as playback technology, accessible to an unprecedentedly broad and heterogeneous public."

"The cassette boom has altered not only the structure of the music industry, but the nature of popular music itself."

"The decentralization of the music industry led to several forms of musical diversification, most notably within the parameters of region, language, genre, and performer. The increase in geographical and linguistic variety is perhaps the most visible of these. The pre-cassette recording industry had largely neglected many, if not most specific language areas of India."

"Cassettes have also greatly diversified and increased the number of performing artists. As noted, the domination of film music by a tiny handful of vocalists, and a slightly larger clique of producers, constituted a degree of monopolization unparalleled in the international recording industry."

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"The advent of cassettes dramatically changed the elite domination of the music industry.

The class background of producers was significantly diversified. Setting up a cassette company does require a certain amount of capital, starting with around five thousand rupees (about three hundred dollars) for a duplicating machine. Most small producers find themselves obliged to invest considerably more. Nevertheless, many founders of cottage cassette companies, while not proletarian or peasants, are at most lower-middle-class, perhaps expanding into cassette production from owning a small electronics shop or recording studio. In this sense their class background is quite distinct from that of film and film-music producers, which is exclusively corporate elite. It has been noted that emergence of oppositional, proletarian mass-media content has often been inhibited by elite ownership of the media. Working-class expression can only be ideologically contradictory when that class does not own the relevant means of production—the mass media (Limón 1983). The extension of music-industry ownership in India to lower-middle classes could constitute a significant precondition for the emergence of more oppositional forms of music.

Certainly, cassettes have become vehicles for the dissemination of a wide variety of lower-class genres which are scorned by both rural and urban elites."

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"Cassettes, as we have seen, have led to decentralized grassroots control of a significant sector of the mass media; they have stimulated the revitalization and creative syncretization of a wide variety of traditional musics; they have created opportunities for innumerable singers and artists to be represented on the mass media, in a manner inconceivable in the context of the film music industry; finally, they have facilitated the dissemination of a far greater diversity of topical themes than were present in film music, thus contributing to the ability of diverse Indian communities to affirm, in language, style, and text content, their own social identities on the mass media in an unprecedented manner"

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"In 1987 media theorist Dennis McQuail asserted, “The new media, in their most interactive forms, are as yet not very widely diffused and have not acquired a clear definition as alternatives to the dominant media still in use" (1987b: 158). While McQuail's statement may still be accurate in reference to integrated systems of digital networks (ISDN) and other high-tech innovations, the spread of cassette technology in India illustrates how some new media have in fact already displaced old media (here, records), engendered new forms of media content, and revolutionized patterns of control, consumption, and dissemination of the relevant media–here, the music industry."

ecc. ecc.

Of course he also gives many examples throughout the book of Indian popular music.

Yes, it's exactly like you said :)

But in England there were no "cassette culture"? For example, throughout the 80s and 90s, cassettes were almost the only available medium for listening to music in Turkey.

Yes, sure. We did those kind of tapes and also there was a "market" for it. You were going to a music store and they were doing some kind of "mix tapes" for you, using their CDs or records. But mostly for some "old" albums, from 60s or 70s. Because it was not easy to find them as regular albums. I clearly remember that in this way I learned 60s music in the middle of the 90s. But there was a rapid shift to CDs towards the end of the 90s.