In early nineties the cable TV invasion made us aware of the way music is sold in the west. Prior to that, we were only limited to the Bollywood songs that played on Wednesdays and Fridays in ‘Chitrahaar’ and on Sundays in ‘Rangoli’.
With this exposure came the awareness of a business model that was yet to be tapped and it started with the remixes of the yester year’s hit songs either re-mastered or just cover versions done by new comers in the industry.
And then the culture of Indian popular music, fondly called Indipop started to grow. I recall my favorite music video of nineties was from ‘Deewana’ from Sonu Nigam’s first of a kind of an album. Here is the music video.
The music videos definitely helped the sale of the cassettes and nineties is known as one of the most profitable year for indian music industry.
There wasn’t just the pop music that was getting wider acceptance but also with Late Jagjeet Singh and Pankaj Udhas coming with light Ghazals with notice worthy videos also gave the audience a variety in terms of genres and boosted the revenue.
It also gave rise to Pop stars like Alisha Chinoy and Baba Sehgal who were majorly working on the pop music field. We cannot miss Daler Mehndi who was played on every music channel at that point in time. The music scene became hot with new labels coming in like Magnasound and Cresendo.
That reminds that the arrival of the music videos brought in the channels which played music videos only for the whole day. MTV which was earlier playing the music videos from the west started playing Hindi music during day time. Channel V was launched by Star TV as a competition to MTV and both the channels did great.
Slowly during the start of the new millennium entered internet into our lives and the hip hop started taking over the world music, the lovely music videos with storyline and beautiful models got replaced with only party/rap/hip hop music.
Since mp3 format made music sharing over the net easier it also threatened the industry with piracy attack. It started killing good music as the accessibility to music made easier as well as the return on investment started going down.
This led to the death of the music videos with storyline, and we were deprived of the short stories with nice soft romantic tracks. However the revenue model of the music found new avenues like ring tones and caller tunes.
However with time this trend seemed to be fading and with the fresh arrival of the music videos from Amaal Malik ‘Chal Wahan Jaate hain’ and by Honey Singh “Dheere Dheere” featuring in the first one Tiger Shroff, Kriti Sanon, and the latter with Hrithik Roshan and Sonam Kapoor gave a new life to the story based videos.
I loved both the tracks as well as the videos hopefully the music industry will rise again.
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