Abstract
In India, music lacks an identity and it's usually packaged with films and bankrolled by the film producers. This leaves no room for artists who want to appeal to audiences of niche genres. A significant breakthrough happened in the 1990s, when independent music found some acceptance but it never really lasted. The tightly-held Indian music industry which made only mainstream film music till then, slowly started loosening up bit by bit. This process has only speeded up, mainly due to the ever increasing spread of digitalization, creating a level-playing field for the independent artists. This paper tries to study this phenomenon in the context of Indian independent music. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n1s1p429
Highlights
The Indian music industry is pretty different from the music industry in any other part of the world, since it has a close association with the film industry
The central region represents the area of hits or revenue generators, while the tail area represents the albums that are for the niche market and gets sold in small numbers
Indie music labels unlike the major labels16 that constantly try to curb piracy, are in the continual process of discovering talent at a grassroots level, exploring new sounds, and taking the risk to invest in indie artists
Summary
The Indian music industry is pretty different from the music industry in any other part of the world, since it has a close association with the film industry. Most of the Indian songs are composed for films. The Production companies buy audio and video rights from music composers for a one-time fee. They sell those rights to record labels. Film music still dominates close to 65 percent of the music sales in India. Bollywood music dominates at least half of that, followed by other film music markets such as Kollywood, Tollywood, Sandalwood et cetera. Success of these music albums is perfectly correlated with the film's success and more often than not have the backing of huge promotional spends by the film fraternity. “On an average, the music sales contributes a fifth of the revenue from the movie and in numerous cases, is the deciding factor for the success or failure at the box office (Baker, 2008).”
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