Essays

Music is the organization of sounds with some degree of rhythm, melody, and harmony. Popular Music is music produced for and sold to a broad audience. Indian popular music, which is most strongly influenced by Indian folk music, is shaped by social, economic, and technological forces. Popular music is closely linked to the social identity of its performers and audiences.

Indian Popular Music has one of the world's most extensive popular music industries. Most Indian popular music is associated with the commercial film industry, centred on Mumbai, in which song-and-dance scenes are inserted into, plots. Film songs are heard all over India, in city streets and even in remote villages, and have also become one of the country's major cultural exports. It is a remarkably eclectic genre, borrowing freely from other Indian music us and popular music's from around the world, including some Western harmonic procedures.                        

Both Indian cinema and its film music are widely popular' elsewhere in the developing world, from Africa and the Middle East to Eastern Europe and other parts of Asia. While it is difficult to generalize about such a vast and diverse entity, certain observations can be made about Indian popular music. Like classical Indian music and Indian folk music, it is overwhelmingly monophonic, melodies are sung or played solo, rather than in harmony with another singer.

The Indian music industry got off to an early start with the production of local recordings in 1901. By the 1950s the film industry had grown phenomenally, and soon became the largest in the world, producing some 700-feature films annually. Music directors like Naushad and S. D. Burman composed scores for hundreds of films, while top singers like Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, Mohammed Rafi, and Kishore Kumar have each recorded several thousand film songs. Most were sentimental love songs designed to fit the romantic and often escapist cinematic melodramas.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s the spread of cheap audio cassette players dramatically restructured the popular music industry. Since cassettes and cassette players are so cheap, portable, and durable, many millions of poorer rural consumers could afford them and thus enter the popular music market. As a result the popular music industry has become much more decentralized, and its products much more diverse in terms of style, language, and subject matter.

90 % of the people, whether they are of the new generation or the old, say that music has lost its sentimental values. It is no longer made the way it used to be. These days the focus is not in giving a message but just to give some typical masala or dance sequence in the film. Whereas the remaining 10 % say that the trends and traditional values are changing and in this ever changing world one must keep up to date.

There are the exceptions people like Javed Akhtar, A.R. Rehman, Yash Chopra and so many others are still there who respect the values of Indian music and cinema and make movies like Dil Se, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Dil to Pagal Hai and Hum Apke Hai Kaun. These are only a few of the Indian movies which depict the actual Indian sentiments.