Episode 14 (ft. Amit Gurbaxani): What India's music industry can teach us about paid YouTube views, musical regionalism and the productive uselessness of charts
Mumbai-based music journalist Amit Gurbaxani joins this episode to discuss the latest trends defining the Indian music business. We start by examining the implications of Amit's early reporting on Badshah and Sony Music India, who openly admitted to buying views on YouTube in order to "break" the platform's record for most views in the first 24 hours —a practice that YouTube formally banned shortly thereafter. We then expand to wider industry issues, including but not limited to how language might be more important than genre in determining an artist's success in the Indian music market; why the terms "non-film music" and "independent music" are both flawed in an Indian context; what the first-ever India charts for Spotify and YouTube, both launched this year, reveal about local music-industry trends; and why charts in general have always been meaningless — and why that isn't necessarily a bad thing. At the end, we discuss whether radio payola and record labels launched by film studios are overrated or underrated.