Music Commodities, Markets, and Values

Music as Merchandise

Jayson Beaster-Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367596552
• eBook ISBN: 9781317365389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry

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 ten-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.

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 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 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 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 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, 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 soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Music Commodities and Value Discourses in India
• 2 Prestige and Innovation in the Indian Music Industry
• 3 “Is Se Kuch Sasta Hai?”: Music Commodities, Circulation, and Value in Indian Markets
• 4 Experiencing the Brand, Branding the Experience
• 5 Putting Music in Its Place: Merchandising in Space and Time
• 6 Music, Passion, Knowledge: Music Retail and Affective Labor
• 7 Conclusion: Music Stores in the Age of Mobile Phones
• Bibliography
• Index