Value of Popular Music in India: Gregory Booth

Vol. 59, No.
2 Ethnomusicology Spring/Summer 2015
Copyright Law and the Changing Economic

Value of Popular Music in India
Gregory Booth / University of Auckland
Abstract. Using archival and ethnographic data, this study examines Indian
understandings of music as intellectual property, as expressed in industrial logic
and practice, in industrial, legal and public discourse and through the content
of, and approaches to, the Indian Copyright Act. Those understandings were
powerfully influenced by changing technology, market dynamics, and Indian
relations with the world economy (after 1984). Collectively, these phenomena
led to sometimes extreme changes in the nature and economic value of music
commodities in India between 1970 and 2010, and, ultimately, to the Copyright
(Amendment) Bill 2012, the “Bollywood” amendments.
T his article examines the history of popular music as a commodity in India,

a country in which: a) popular music has almost exclusively meant popular
songs produced for commercial films (primarily in Hindi) and b) the mass pro-
duction of popular song in sheet music format never played a significant role in
shaping industrial structures or local understandings of intellectual property.
I focus on independent India, roughly from 1957 (when the Indian Copyright
Act was originally passed into law) to 2012 (when the most recent amendment
to that Act was passed). I contextualize this history by tracing the changing
economic value of Indian popular music at the broadest level, and relate those
changes to Indian understandings of music as intellectual property as those
understandings were expressed in the content of and approaches to the Indian
Copyright Act and other intellectual property (IP) conventions and treaties.
My goal in this process is to show, first, how a steadily changing set of con-
ditions—in technological formats of music production and consumption, the
nature of the Indian market, India’s relations with the world economy (in general
and with specific regard to music), and so on—affected a series of changes in
© 2015 by the Society for Ethnomusicology
From Ethnomusicology, Vol 59, No. 2, 2015. Copyright 2015 by the Society of Ethnomusicology.
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Booth: Copyright Law and Popular Music in India 263
popular music’s economic value. Second, I show how those changes have acted
as a primary motivating factor behind the growing attention to the laws gov-
erning song and film as intellectual property. Recent changes to those laws are
now re-defining the rights of musical ownership and use; what is more they are
refocusing attention in IP matters onto the control of and access to recorded
music, rather than the sale of music recordings per se. Ultimately, I will suggest
that Indian law-makers and music industry leaders are now in the process of
undertaking the first major revision of their collective understandings of Indian
copyright laws since those laws were first enacted in 1957. In doing so they are
confronting global concepts of intellectual property that are now taking on
increased importance as India’s music industry is ever more firmly integrated
into the global music economy. This study reveals the distinctive nature of the
Indian music industry’s approach to matters of music copyright; more impor-
tantly, perhaps, it makes clear Indian popular culture’s unique understanding
of the very concept of the popular song.
In India, through the mid-1970s at least, popular music meant Hindi (and
regional) film song; but recorded music, regardless of genre, had very little eco-
nomic value as a standalone commodity. From the early 1970s, however, issues
affecting the control of music resources grew to be the focus of long-standing
music industry contention in both the market place and Indian courts as the
economic value of popular music increased consistently (although certainly not
at a consistent rate) through the turn of the millennium. From roughly 2002,
digital music piracy and changing patterns and technologies of music consump-
tion, among other factors, caused a downturn in popular music’s economic value
from which India’s music industry had only partially recovered by 2014.
A coherent and complete understanding the industrial, legal, and economic
contexts that have shaped music production and consumption in post-colonial
and globalized India is a goal that continues to elude scholars of contemporary
Indian music, including myself, as well as Arnold (1991, 1993), Beaster-Jones
(2011), Fiol (2013), Morcom (2007), Zuberi (2002) and others. Although each of
these scholars has addressed specific factors that shaped that context, no research
has directly confronted the legal-industrial context of India’s latter twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries, during which so much change has, and continues to
occur. This study contributes one component of the framework in which these
issues can be addressed.
This study is based on archival research and on interviews with individuals
who have been (or were) participants in India’s music industry and related fields.
Neither of these sources is sufficient. Reports in the mainstream press and in the
primary trade publication of the twentieth-century culture industry, Screen, as
well as public and private estimates by those in the trade form one basis of the
information in this study; but verifiable figures on sales, revenues or production
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264 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2015
in this period are almost non-existent. Many of India’s music producers were
privately held companies and under no legal obligation to publish information
about their business. The Indian press had little choice but to rely on (or at least
print) the figures given to them by those in the industry. While many in the
music industry reported as accurately as they were able, they were themselves
often working with estimates and partial information.
Other figures in the music industry were clearly reporting figures or devel-
opments in line with their own (or their company’s) partisan interests. A fire
in the Mumbai branch office of the Gramophone Company of India (hereafter
GCI) in 1988 is alleged to have destroyed all the records maintained by that
office; but it remains unclear just what records were being kept in any case.
Some contributors to this research have suggested that the company did not
consistently retain recording masters (especially in the film song category), let
alone records of their sales. Joshi (1988) has partially corroborated this assertion.
Consequently, the figures I report in this article must be understood as accurate
indicators of general trends, but not as precise statements.
The Indian Music Industry and the Global Music

Economy Before Cassettes
Prior to Indian independence, the music economy and the music market of India
were part of the colonially constructed and controlled global music economy.
Kinnear (1994), Shope (2007), Parthasarathi (2005, 2013) and Hughes (2007,
2013) have all described aspects of the production and consumption of local
and global musics in colonial India. These processes were ultimately controlled
by companies such as Odeon, Columbia Record Company, or the Gramophone
Company (“of India” or not) and the slightly later giant Electric and Musical
Industries (EMI) that engulfed many of those smaller companies. Collectively,
the music-industry of the colonial era was proto-typically transnational as Dowd
(2003) has noted.
McDowell is one scholar who has commented on the radical transformation
of India’s position in the world economy that occurred after independence in
1947: “For the first 35 years after its independence . . . India pursued national
and international economic and political policies that were distinct from a path
of development under market capitalism; . . . India sought and achieved some
distance from full integration with patterns of international trade and invest-
ment (McDowell 1997:59).
It may be impossible to overestimate the impact of India’s economic isola-
tion (enforced by a regulatory system that grew gradually from 1952 onward
and came to be known colloquially as the “license raj”) in the Indian culture
industry and on its products. The apathy (not to say antipathy) towards mass
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mediated popular culture expressed by India’s socialist governments (largely in

the form of extremely high tax rates and debilitating legislation) was effectively
overcome in the development of a uniquely structured system of commercial
cultural production driven by the commercial cinema and box-office returns, a
system that proved creative, prolific, and extremely popular, not only in India
but in much of South, West, and Southeast Asia as well.
The broad range of outcomes in India’s culture industry that resulted from
economic isolation and Indian government attitudes are well beyond the scope
of a single article. Among many other things, these conditions left Indian music
production almost entirely in the hands of GCI. Although there were a num-
ber of small, long- and short-lived independent record labels in India, GCI’s
national, monopoly position was significantly reinforced by its ownership of
the county’s only record pressing facility until 1970. Sovan Saha is the current
owner of Hindustan Records (established in 1930), one the longest lived “minors”
that sought co-existence with GCI in post-colonial India. He has reported that
contracts for record pressing (of Hindustan discs) that were imposed by GCI
in 1948 and 1956 effectively prohibited Hindustan from producing recordings
of Hindi film songs (Personal Communication, 4 October 2012, Kolkata).
In 1970, Polydor of India Ltd. became the first transnational music company
to appear in the Indian market (and challenge the GCI monopoly by building
its own production facilities) since Indian independence in 1947. From that
point, the value of recorded music commodities began to increase and owner-
ship and control of music resources became a matter of increasing contention.
Vijay Lazarus joined Polydor in 1970 and has estimated the total value of sales
of recorded music in India at that point was approximately three crore Indian
rupees (the equivalent of roughly three and a half million U.S. dollars in the
exchange rates of that time) (Personal Communication, 4 October 2008, Mum-
bai).1 Other industry figures have agreed that this estimate seems reasonably
accurate (Email Communication, Atul Churamani, 16 January 2010; Personal
Communication, Kumar Taurani, 29 January 2014, Mumbai). Sovan Saha has
argued that in the 1970s, “GCI had a turn-over of about two crores,” which
may have represented slightly more than half of the total market in that period
(Personal Communication, 6 October 2012, Kolkata).2
This figure may represent something of a low-point in revenues from re-
corded music in India, the result of the slump in sales that occurred when
the shellac (78 rpm) disc was replaced in India by the vinyl micro-groove
(33-1/3rd rpm) disc in the early 1960s. Amin Sayani, who began producing
and broadcasting radio programs featuring Hindi film song in 1952, has made
two complementary arguments that capture the differences between sales in the
two formats, but also between Mumbai where he worked and the vast majority
of the Indian sub-continent. He has argued that sales of 78-rpm discs “were
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booming,” especially in the large, cosmopolitan urban market that Mumbai

represented; but that for the majority of small town and village India, and
especially after the shift to vinyl format, “radio was the only medium that
brought this music [film song] to the public, to their homes, apart from the
cinema theatres” (Personal Communication, 12 April 2004, Mumbai). Drum-
mer Nondon Bagchi has made a similar argument for the distinctive nature of
Kolkata as a large and diverse local music market (Personal Communication,
4 July 2011, Kolkata).
Regardless of the precise value of Indian music revenues, two understand-
ings are certain. First, at the point at which audio cassettes entered the Indian
musical market—which is the point at which music, so to speak, became “copy-
able”—that market was quite small and had been so for at least ten years. Second,
as Vijay Dubey has estimated, through the 1960s and 1970s at least, sales of
Hindi film songs represented eighty to ninety percent (depending on the year) of
those revenues (Personal Communication, 23 February 2004, Mumbai). Dubey
led A&R development for GCI’s Mumbai office from 1967 until his retirement
in 1998. Mumbai was the center of Hindi film (and film music) production,
as well as the site of GCI’s “western region” home office, servicing the states of
Maharashtra, Gujarat, Goa and parts of Madhya Pradesh. Dubey’s perspective
was necessarily directed towards the semi-national Hindi-language industry,
rather than the “regional” culture-industry counterparts that produced films
and songs in Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali and other languages in other film
(and film music) production centers. Nevertheless, whatever profit was to be
made from the sale of recorded music in post-colonial India, almost all of that
profit was generated by sales of film songs, primarily those in Hindi.
Suresh Chandvankar, an avid collector of vinyl and shellac discs in Mum-
bai (a major center of music consumption and perhaps the most diverse urban
market in India at this time), has reinforced our understanding of the economic
value of film song relative to the more diverse and uniquely Indian category of
music called “non-film.” As a collector, Chandvankar sought out the wider range
of genres and styles in the non-film category. He recalled that their producers,
GCI, often discounted non-film discs because demand appeared to be quite low.
“Stocks [of non-film discs] were moving very slowly. Many times unsold stock
would end up in flea markets . . . or the sales offered at retail outlets. Around
1978, HMV used to have an annual sale of LP discs—four discs for one hun-
dred rupees—and people would queue up at the shops before they opened in
the morning”3 (Email Communication, 29 August 2012). Chandvankar’s com-
ments reinforce the fundamental paradox of sound-disc consumption in India
at this time: although there was clearly a demand for recorded music, pricing
and production capability limited consumption, thus keeping total sales low.
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For GCI and Polydor/Music India, that paradox extended beyond the vinyl era
into the time of the magnetic tape audio cassette.
The beginnings of the audio cassette revolution had been readily perceptible
even in 1978 when Suresh Chandvankar was queuing for discounted discs. GCI
had begun the construction of a facility for the production of pre-recorded cas-
sette tapes in 1977, the same year that India’s cassette pioneer, Gulshan Kumar
Dua, began producing pre-recorded cassettes at his new Super Music Center in
Delhi. As a recorded music commodity, the audio cassette had all the advantages
that Manuel (1993) has noted. Among other things, the ease and the low cost
of cassette production (and re-production) transformed the economic value of
recorded music in India and led directly to increased interest in, and conten-
tion over, the ownership and control of music resources, forcing Indian music
entrepreneurs to attend to the industrial implications of Indian copyright law
for the first time.
Film Song Ownership in Indian Copyright Law

The Indian Copyright Act (hereafter, the Act) was originally passed into law by
the Indian Parliament in 1957. Section 13 of the Act specified that copyright
subsisted in “(a) original literary, dramatic, musical and artworks; (b) cinemato-
graph films; and (c) sound recordings” (Copyright Act:17). The Act further rec-
ognized the rights of authors to own their works in the first instance (Section
17). Thus copyright subsisted in songs and composers and lyricists—both of
whom were authors in the language of the Act—owned the copyright for their
contributions to those songs, at least to the extent that those existed as abstract
creations. Although many portions of the Act were adapted from British law,
the Act said almost nothing about publishing with regard to music; for the most
part, it treated copyright as a unitary concept and did not distinguish more than
one category of right.
Interactions between the various provisions of the Act and the culture in-
dustry’s production practices, led to complexities that are central to this study.
Section 17 (c) specified that “where the author is employed under contract or
apprenticeship, the employer shall be first owner of the copyright” (Copyright
Act:22) The composers and lyricists who produced India’s popular film songs
were invariably employed under contract to the producer of the film for which
those songs were composed (Booth 2008). Film producers were therefore the
first owners of film songs.
Despite their enormous cultural and aesthetic importance, film songs’ pri-
mary industrial or commercial purpose was to ensure film distributor uptake
of, and public box office response to the films of which those songs were a part
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(Morcom 2007). Considered in the context of Lazarus’ estimates of music rev-

enues in the early 1970s, a film producer’s motivation for film song production
must be understood, in economic terms, not as a desire for profits from the
sale of musical commodities, but rather as a need for publicity for, and public
awareness of, his or her upcoming film.
In order that the songs they had produced might fulfil these functions, film
producers routinely sold their film songs to music companies literally as soon as
they were recorded. Through the 1970s, however, no money changed hands at
the time of these transactions. Film producers simply transferred their ownership
of film songs in contractual agreements guaranteeing them ten-twelve percent
of any future sales (royalties). Atul Churamani, who has worked in the music
industry—with Magnasound, Saregama, Virgin, and other companies—since
the early 1980s, has recalled, “they [film producers] used to assign the dialogue,
the whole background score, the songs, everything, to HMV. We owned the
dialogues to all the old films, also the background music. If you look at the con-
tracts, they’re old EMI contracts, everything to do with the sound recording is
with the record company; everything” (Personal Communication, 13 September
2008, Mumbai).
Before 1970, film producers had no choice but to sell their songs to In-
dia’s only major record company and the owners of India’s only record pressing
plant, GCI. After 1970, they could choose between GCI and Polydor (or its
later incarnations). By the mid-1980s, film producers’ choices began to expand
considerably; but until that point, the owners of the copyright for India’s popu-
lar music repertoire were one of two companies that generated the majority of
their revenues through the production and sale of film song recordings that they
acquired at no direct cost to themselves.
A legal note, written in 1977 pointed out that, as set out in Section 13-4,
film song composers did “retain the right of performing [their compositions]
in public for profit” (Copyright Act:19). Furthermore, a handful of the most
popular and powerful composers were able to demand a share of the royalties
paid to a film producer by the record company. The songs, however, as Chura-
mani explained above, were owned, in their entirety by the music companies.
For most composers, royalties and profits from public performance were at best
marginal and largely hypothetical sources of income. Despite the provisions of
Section 13 (above), a composer’s ownership of the musical work he or she cre-
ated for a film was a purely abstract concept, especially because there was no
publication, no notated or recorded form of a film song prior to its recording
in the film recording studio when it became the film producer’s property. As
“musical works,” film songs existed as part of the cinematic experience (owned
by film producers) or as the experience of the recording (owned by the record
company); but they had no other physical expression or commercial existence.
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Cassettes, Economic Liberalization and the Growing Value

of Indian Popular Music
From the mid-1970s onward, audio cassette tapes cassettes enabled a host of
musical, cultural, and industrial changes (Manuel 1993, Beaster-Jones 2009,
Booth 2011). They allowed music companies, new and old, legitimate and illegal,
to meet the demand for recorded music that had been present in India through-
out the twentieth century, but to which the music industry had been unable to
respond, especially with vinyl discs. As a result, the economic value of music
increased at rates that were quite extreme. In 1983, Kajal Basu reported that “in
1982 the Indian music market was worth Rs 50 crore” (The Sunday Observer,
13 November, 1983). This growth, an increase of more than 150 percent from
Lazarus’ estimate twelve years earlier, was only the beginning.
Copyright and Cassette-Based Growth in an Indian Market

Corbridge and Harriss have argued that “there is a strong case for believing
that the economy of India was reshaped—if not entirely reinvented—by the
programme of economic reforms that was put into place by . . . Narasimha Rao
and by his Finance Minister Manmohan Singh” (2000, 120). Nevertheless, Singh
had also acted as Finance Minister under the earlier prime ministership of Rajiv
Gandhi (1944–91), whose early efforts at economic liberalization—specifically
the relaxation of the electronic import policy in 1984 and an abolition (beginning
in 1986) of the excise tax that had crippled the major music companies—began
to have an impact on the music industry. By the end of the 1980s, audio cassettes
came to completely dominate the market. In 1989, according to O. P. Malik,
“Indians spent 400 crore on recorded music” (The Times of India, 5 December,
1990), a 700 percent increase in music sales between 1982–89.
To understand the extent to which India’s music industry had been “re-
shaped—if not entirely reinvented” by cassette technology, even before economic
liberalization occurred, it may be enough to consider the title of Kajal Basu’s 1983
article (above). Although he was effectively reporting an enormous increase in the
financial value of the Indian music market, which was growing at a rate that was
more than four times that of India’s GDP over the years in question, Basu’s title
asked, “Will the Indian music industry collapse?” The cause of Basu’s unexpected
pessimism was the fact that while music revenues had indeed increased, the share
of those revenues coming to “the legitimate music companies fell to Rs 18 crore
from Rs 23 crore in 1979–80” (The Sunday Observer, 13 November, 1983). As he
went on to note, “after the switch from disc to cassette, pirates have taken over
the music business and raked in a phenomenal Rs 32 crores last year.” Basu’s
estimate of 50 crore, therefore, was the sum of both legal and illegal revenues;
the negativity of his headline had its origins in the distribution of profits across
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these two fields. That legal revenues themselves were considerably greater than
the total market’s value ten years earlier apparently seemed irrelevant.
Basu complained that “while the Indian government knotted itself up in
red tape about granting cassette licenses to HMV and Music India [the Indian-
owned company that took control of the Polydor infrastructure and its (Indian)
catalogue when that company pulled out of India], the pirates flooded the market
in 1977, three years before the first legitimate cassette hit the stalls” (The Sun-
day Observer, 13 November, 1983). The extreme increase in recorded music’s
economic value from the mid-1970s reflected not so much a growth in demand
as the ability of cassette producers (legal and illegal) to meet that demand in a
way that Indians could afford.
The sudden change in music’s economic value caught the Indian govern-
ment, as well as the established music industry, off guard. Through its colonial
and post-colonial eras, India had a long history of engagement with intellectual
property organizations, signing the cornerstone Berne Convention on Intellec-
tual Property in 1948 and acceding to that treaty ten years later. In 1971, India
signed the Paris Convention that updated the original Berne accord, including
the Phonograms Convention of the World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO). India formally joined WIPO 1975. Bodies representing the phonograph
industry—Phonographic Performance Ltd. (PPL) and the Indian Phonographic
Industry (IPI) had been in place from the 1930s. The Indian Performing Rights
Society (IPRS) was created in 1969. Despite these formal structures and relation-
ships, the laws, practices, and (perhaps) attention necessary to combat cassette
piracy seemed lacking at the governmental level.
In 1986, at what was perhaps the height of cassette piracy, Jaganath Dom
reported that “in 1985 legitimate companies sold five million cassettes while the
pirates sold 180 million, or 95 per cent of the market” (India Today 31 March,
1986:112). Explaining the formation of an anti-piracy cell (led by a highly re-
spected former Indian policeman) as an IPI response to government inaction,
Dom quoted IPI President Pradip Chanda who observed that “the police do not
give this problem any importance.” The article also quoted Sukumar Shidore,
IPI’s general secretary, who argued that “if anybody was going to do anything
about music cassette piracy, it had to be ourselves” (ibid).
The greatest number of illegal recordings was that of new film sound tracks,
which have historically and consistently produced the largest and quickest re-
turns in India’s music market. Probably the majority of the first wave of blatantly
illegal cassettes was imported from overseas; but Indian-produced pirated cas-
settes were quickly available. One entrepreneur, named Satpal, in Delhi’s famous
electronics and music hub, Lajpat Rai Market, moved into the production of
blank cassettes in 1983 with his two brothers. “Then this [cassette] boom came,
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and we saw that there was this new thing. So we thought we would get into it.
We made cassettes, blank cassettes. We made five lakh cassettes every month”
(Personal Communication, Satpal, 21 July 2010, Delhi). The majority of those
blank cassettes were destined for small-scale pirate producers many of whom
copied directly from cassette to cassette using machines that could record on
multiple cassettes at one time. Satpal, however, claimed he and his brothers had
no awareness, at that time, of recorded music as intellectual property until it
was brought to their attention in a forceful manner.
In the beginning, nobody thought about all this copyright business. We were in the
market, no? Things came, we sold them. If they sold fast, we sold more. Like that.
But then one time, I think it was 1985 or ’86, just here, in front of us, there was a
raid. The police came and arrested these guys. And they said the merchandise was
pirated that they were selling. So when we saw that, we agreed that from that point,
we would not sell any pirated merchandise. So the relationships we had with the
businesses selling pirated merchandise, we closed those relationships. (ibid)
The straightforward copying of existing commercial recordings was bla-
tantly illegal as many of those engaged in this enterprise must have been aware.
As Savio D’Souza, IPI Secretary General has explained, investigators acting as
accredited representatives of the music companies whose material was being
pirated, presented evidence of illegal activity to the police along with evidence
of the ownership of copyright, at which point the police would often conduct the
kind of raids that Satpal witnessed in the mid-1980s (Personnal Communication,
Savio D’Souza, 9 January 2014, Mumbai).
The practical and legal processes of Indian law enforcement meant IPI was
required to initiate each police action against music piracy and that each action
had to be directed against the pirating of a single, specific song by a specific
pirate operation. The next pirated song, or the next illegal enterprise required
a new initiative. The law and police attention on other criminal activity made a
comprehensive or automatic response to music piracy impossible. Among other
things, this was because music piracy, although illegal, was not a punishable
offence in the original Act. In a legal oddity that reflected the unique nature
of the industry and the unlikely eventuality of music piracy in 1957, infring-
ing copies and copying equipment could be seized and destroyed, but only in
1994, following an amendment of the Act did music piracy become an offence
punishable by fines and imprisonment.
Blatant piracy was costly to established music companies, and indeed was
partly responsible for the losses reported by both GCI and Music India in the
early 1980s. Supriyo Coomer, former head of the Legal Department at Saregama,
has explained that “finally, in 1984, the company was declared sick. That lasted
until 1990 . . . Business was going on, recordings were being released; but the
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biggest music company in India was absolutely demolished because of piracy”

(Personal Communication, Supriyo Coomer, 18 September 2008, Kolkata). GCI’s
“sickness” was thus conceptualized in a newly enacted statutory condition under
the Sick Industrial Companies (Special Provisions) Act (1985) that placed the
company under the control of the government’s expert Board for Industrial and
Financial Reconstruction (BIFR). Although akin to the notion of receivership
(not to say bankruptcy), industrial “sickness” in India was as a condition from
which industries were expected to recover. GCI did, in fact, regain its economic
health in 1990.
Although cassette piracy continued to be a threat through the 1990s, a
more complex controversy, resulting directly from the growth in music’s eco-
nomic value and the provisions of its copyright act, generated a long history of
company-versus-company contestation—in Indian courts and in the press—
over the control of musical resources, new film songs in the first instance, but
also the back-catalogue of older film-song hits owned primarily by GCI. Ver-
sion songs and remixes, as they were called in India, forced the Indian music
industry, together with the legal profession and some of the country’s high
court judges, to consider notions of creativity and authorship, the nature of
popular song as intellectual property, and the elements that constituted a film
song’s identity.
Version songs were re-recordings of Hindi film songs that adhered closely to
the original recordings, and that first appeared in the mid-1980s. Remixes (under
a variety of marketing labels) appeared in the latter 1980s. Although these were
also re-recordings of film songs, remixes featured new dance rhythms (based on
rock, disco and similar musical styles) generated on electronic drum machines.
Unlike versions, remixes constituted a distinct musical genre; although many
fans of traditional film song disapproved, they were less industrially and legally
contentious than version songs.
Version songs were produced by all Indian music companies that sold film
song recordings, including GCI, who actually started the practice in 1971 as an
aggressively competitive move against Polydor’s efforts to enter the Hindi film
song market (Personal Communication, Vjay Lazarus, 4 October 2008, Mum-
bai). Because the statutory licensing provision of the original Act (Section 52)
came into effect a mere two weeks after the date of a recording’s release, con-
sumers could often purchase version recordings quite soon after the originals
had appeared. When new cassette-based companies, such as Super Cassettes,
began large-scale programs of version recordings, the generally lower cost and
wider distribution of their products (together with the lower cost and battery
powered nature of cassette playback) meant that these recordings were the first
recordings of film-song hits, old or new, that many Indians could afford to own
and experience outside of the contexts of radio broadcast or theatrical exhibition.
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The version recordings of the 1980s and 1990s were, therefore, a direct threat to
GCI (Music India to a lesser extent), to whom most film producers still turned
to release their new film songs and who owned the historical repertoire.
Most version recordings featured vocalists who were initially unknown, but
whose voices were thought to be similar to those of the playback singers who
had originally recorded the song. Similarity to the originals was version songs’
primary virtue for many consumers; but similarity was also a source of tension
and confusion in the music industry, India’s legal system, and the Indian press.
Journalist Ravi Shankar asked whether version recordings were simply “a legal
tag to piracy” (The Sunday Observer, 15 December, 1985). In his attempt to sort
out the complexities of meaning and identity in version song practice, Shankar
invoked an east-west (and north-south) comparison. “One has come across
several version music albums of the great Bach or Beethovan (sic). It is like
listening to [vocalists] M. S. Subbalakshmi or M. L. Vasantakumari rendering
the same Muttuswami Dikshitar kriti” (ibid).
As Shankar implied, “version recordings” of Bach or Dikshitar were accept-
able, because those compositions had been created and were still performed and
recorded in traditions that expected songs to be sung (and recorded) by different
singers at different times. Shankar contrasted these traditions with the values of
Hindi film song: “If one is served Anand Bakshi’s or Anjaan’s lyrics with music
composed by Ravindra Jain or Bappi Lahiri and sung by Junior Kishore Kumar
or Junior Lata Mangeshkar [i. e., imitators of the original vocalists], it is hard
to stomach. This is what has happened in India today. A film song which has
become a hit has been recorded using different voice” (ibid.). Shankar’s com-
parison effectively, if obliquely identified the fundamental difference between
the conceptualization of a musical work in the West (or in classical South India)
and in the Indian film song industry.
Historically, the practices and commercial realities of Hindi film song pro-
duction had meant that there had only ever been one vocal recording of any
song. Literally all the experiences of all listeners were based on the same record-
ing, whether on disc, radio, or screen. In every instance, the “original record-
ing” automatically included an “original singer.” Far more than in the cultures
Shankar evoked in his comparison, and until the advent of version recordings,
experiences of a specific song included the experience of the same specific voice.
In effect, songs were published as recordings; their identities (and it seemed to
some, their legal identities) included their singers.
When version songs appeared, and became a significant economic force (or
threat), this understanding of a song’s identity began to interact with India’s copy-
right statues that had been borrowed, in many cases, from cultures where songs
and singers had no inherent connection and where “version recordings” were
the norm (as Shankar noted). The British (and other European and American
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laws) were written for systems of production in which a song’s publication was
in an abstract form embodied in sheet music. Kernfeld (2011) is one scholar who
has made clear the extent to which songs as published and notated commodities
were both objects of considerable value and of industrial contention (including
piracy) in the United States; but comparable piracy only appeared in India with
the advent of the cassette. In the American, British, and European markets, and
in contrast to the Indian market, songs enjoyed an identity that was more firmly
and historically distinguished from any recordings thereof.
The conflict between cultural understandings of song and the Indian Act
were highlighted when journalists began framing their questions about ver-
sion songs in terms of the Act and the provision causing the greatest tension.
Journalist Jasmine Nishar noted that “the non-recognition of intellectual copy-
rights especially in the field of music in India is truly shocking.” She wondered,
“where else in the world does the law (Section 52 (1) j of the Copyright Act of
India) itself permit the making of cover versions without permission needed!”
(Playback And Fast Forward, January/March, 1990:68).
The Act’s statutory licensing provision (Section 52) specified acts that were
not considered copyright infringement. Such statutes were by no means uncom-
mon in other national copyright laws; but like the British statute (from which
Section 52 had been adapted) those laws had been written for industries in which
the acts of song publication and song recording were quite separate physically
and legally and for cultures where the song and the voice were not assumed to
be identical. Among other things, statutory licensing laws were intended to give
copyright owners, especially authors and publishers, some control over whether
their songs could be recorded at all; many statutory licensing laws also protected
authors—to some extent—from unwanted alterations of their compositions.
Among the non-infringing acts specified by Section 52 was “the making of
sound recordings in respect of any . . . musical work” as long as two basic provi-
sions were met: 1) “sound recordings of that work have been made by or with
the license or consent of the owner of the right in the work” and 2) “the person
making the sound recordings has given a notice of his intention to make the
sound recordings, has provided copies of all covers or labels . . . and has paid . . .
to the owner of rights . . . royalties . . . at the rate fixed by the Copyright Board”
(Copyright Act:44). An additional provision that added further confusion speci-
fied that “no alterations shall be made which have not been made previously by
or with the consent of the owner of rights or which are not reasonably necessary
for the adaptation of the work for the purpose of making the sound recordings”
(ibid).
An article—entitled, “Copyright—right to copy?”—based on an interview
with B. H. Aggarwal, the managing director of Fraternity Ltd. (which was op-
erating under the cassette label, Gem Music), highlighted the confusions that
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Section 52 created. Aggarwal argued that the Act “emphasizes that there should
be no alterations at all. ‘Versions’ is the practice of the industry not the law”
(Playback and Fast Forward, December, 1988:30). Aggarwal was largely accurate
in his assessment; but, as I have noted, the producers of most version recordings
strove for similarity, not for the kind of variations envisaged by the authors of
the British Act. In effect, the provisions of Section 52 were originally designed
to protect against acts that no one wished to undertake in any event.
Despite their musical similarity, the replacement of the original singer with
a new singer, even (or perhaps especially) if that new singer “sounded like”
the original vocalist, constituted a significant change for many Indians. In the
musical understandings of many film song fans, a change of singer challenged
the very identity of the song. This argument was made very persuasively in a
judicial decision in the Delhi High Court.
The voice is the soul and essence of a vocal rendering in a sound recording. Invari-
ably the vocal performance is remembered not only by the melody but also by the
identity of the singer. In my view such alterations fall under the proviso to Section
52(1)(j). To construe the above proviso to be giving an avenue to version record-
ings which involve the change of singer and/or orchestra without consent of the
original owner, would definitely amount to encouraging and putting a premium on
in what (sic) my view is a blatant and an ill-concealed attempt to plagiarize under
the misconstrued interpretation of Section 52(1)(j). (Mudgal 2003, Paragraph 21)
Justice Mukul Mudgal’s argument made clear the impact of the original
recordings (and vocalists) in the Indian construction of musical (or at least song)
identity. Version songs were frequently understood to challenge the provisions
of the Act because they also challenged India’s understanding of music as intel-
lectual property, the nature of popular song as such, and the structure of the
Indian (film) music industry.
In addition to these fundamental problems arising from the conflation of
singer and song, Section 52-1-j also highlighted the more technical conflation
of the musical work and the sound recording. In the case of India’s film song
repertoire, the “owners of the right in the work,” for whose protection the Act
appeared to have been intended, were the record companies who inevitably
made recordings of the works they owned. What is more, and as I have made
clear, the film songs they owned did not exist in any other form but that of the
original recording.
It was the music companies who routinely undertook the first public ex-
pression of the creative work and who were, therefore, the publishers of their
songs as well. This became clear retro-actively in the context of a number of legal
decisions and industrial negotiations. IPRS, who was the government-sanctioned
performance rights licensing and collection society, and who acted on behalf of
authors, sought to define those individuals as the owners of their compositions.
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In the mid-1970s, IPRS filed a number of lawsuits against music companies and
film producers, in which, as one Indian high court judge argued, “the main ques-
tion . . . is whether the composers of lyric and music, in fact, have a copyright
in the musical works incorporated In the sound track of a cinematograph film”
(Mitra 1974, Paragraph 3). The unambiguous “work-for-hire” clause of the Act
allowed (or forced) the courts to reject the suits without exception. Twenty
years later, after a number of unsuccessful legal challenges based on successive,
alternative interpretations of the law, IPRS finally signed a Memorandum of
Understanding with a number of prominent music companies:
IPRS . . . could not collect public performance revenues as it was made up only
of composers and lyricists, who were not the rights owners. Subsequently, they
inducted film producers into the society as they [authors] had assigned the works
to the film producers. That was a non-starter too, as the producers had, in turn,
assigned the rights to the music labels! So in 1994, the IPRS signed a memorandum
of understanding with the then Indian Phonographic Industry (IPI) admitting the
labels as publishers to the IPRS. The agreement was that IPRS would collect public
performance royalties and disburse 50% to the composers and lyricists. The music
labels agreed to share royalties as “encouragement” to the creative community.
(Email communication, Atul Churamani, 16 January 2010)
What is most instructive perhaps about this story is IPRS’s extended (if
futile) effort to gain control of key resources (and revenue streams) through
attempts to relocate ownership, first with authors, then with film producers,
before accepting the necessity of dealing with the record companies.
In both public perception and legal consideration, the confusion created
by version songs was exacerbated by the marketing practices of some cassette
producers who issued version recordings in packaging that appeared to obfus-
cate the true nature of the recording. IPI, noted journalist Pragati Kapoor, “has
accused Super Cassettes and Mr. G. [Gulshan] Kumar, the managing director,
of duping customers into buying version recordings by misrepresenting that the
cassette is a compilation of songs sung by well-known artistes whereas it actu-
ally contains the same songs sung by lesser-known singers” (Economic Times,
19 March, 1993). In fact, as Nikhil Bhardwaj—one of Super Cassettes’ leading
legal advisors in the 1980s—has implied, Gulshan Kumar had made a particular
conceptual leap that may only have been possible in the context of Indian film
song: for Kumar and Super Cassettes, “the Hits of Lata Mangeshkar” referred, not
to Mangeshkar’s actual recordings, but to the songs she had sung and which most
Indians did indeed recognize as “her” songs (Personal Communication, Nikhil
Bharadwaj, 5 December 2008, Delhi). “Aayega, aayega, aane wala”, for example,
a song sung by Mangeshkar for the soundtrack of the 1949 film, Mahal, was a
hit “of Lata Mangeshkar,” even if the particular recording in question featured
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another voice. In their accusations, however, IPI was pointing to further and
potentially misleading confusions of identity that could arise when version songs
were marketed in confusing or misleading packaging. These questions came to
a head and were resolved in the combination of a hit Hindi film score and an
infamous version-recording cover.
The release of the Rajshri film, Hum Aapke Hain Kaun in 1994 was “a defining
moment in the box office history of Hindi cinema” (http://www.boxofficeindia
.com/showProd.php?itemCat=126&catName=MTk5MC0xOTk5). The film’s
family appeal and musicality, together with the overwhelming financial success
of both the film and its sound track, led to higher financial benchmarks for all
subsequent Hindi films. As the owners of the sound recording, GCI benefitted
significantly from the film’s popularity; but a version recording released by Su-
per Cassettes two weeks later (according the provisions of Section 52) offered
potentially disastrous competition.
In the lawsuit that followed, GCI argued that Super Cassettes had “launched
an audio cassette by adopting ‘Hum Aapke Hain Kaun’ as its title with its design,
colour scheme, get-up and lay-out deceptively and confusingly similar to that
of the plaintiff ’s. . . . Hence the suit of the plaintiff for permanent injunction
restraining the defendants from manufacturing, selling, or passing of audio
cassettes under the said title or from using a carton or inlay card identical or
deceptively or confusingly similar . . . to the packaging used by the plaintiff ”
(Singh 1995, Paragraph 2).
Justice Jaspal Singh’s decision did not address the actual legality (or illegal-
ity) of version recordings. Instead, Singh first argued that the Super Cassettes
version did not “embody” any part of the film’s sound track (a claim not put
forward by GCI), but was “only a version recording by using another voice or
voices and with different musicians and arrangers.” Because the Super Cas-
settes recording was not a mechanical copy of the original recording, it did not
fall within the definition of “infringing copy” as defined by the Act (ibid). In
other words, it was not the song itself that was the original entity that might be
copied; but the sound recording of the song. Just as remarkably, Justice Singh
decided that because the songs in question did not exist in printed form (in
fact no film songs existed in printed form), they did not constitute “musical
works” in the legal terms of the Act. Justice Singh then noted that “this leads to
a confused scenario” and asked rhetorically, “What then should be done?”(ibid.,
Paragraph 24).
Justice Singh responded to his own question by choosing to consider the
case “as one of passing off,” that is, packaging so as to deceive consumers. His
ruling argued that “a substantial body of music lovers would be confused into
believing the [Super Cassettes] record was made by the plaintiff company” (ibid.)
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He prohibited Super Cassettes from releasing their version recording of the songs
of Hum Aapke Hai Kaun in misleading packaging; but he did not prohibit them
from making or selling version recordings.
It was not until 2003 that the practice of version recording was addressed
directly in the judicial decision written by Justice Mukul Mudgal (above). Mud-
gal was responding to a rather bizarre suit initiated by Super Cassettes against
another company (Bathla Industries) for copy-right infringement. Bathla had
released a version recording that Super Cassettes claimed was based on their
version recording of a GCI-owned song. Mudgal’s decision demonstrated his
familiarity with musical content and process (his family had a background in
classical Indian music) and argued that version song production, as practiced
in India at that time, was, itself, illegal: “Since the plaintiff himself did not have
any rights in law, in what was averred to be his substantially new product, he
cannot be heard to protest when such a modus operandi is sought to be applied
to him by the defendant” (Mudgal 2003, Paragraph 45). This judgment became
the defining position in Indian law on the matter of version songs; but by 2003,
the matter was increasingly irrelevant, as I will explain below.
From the 1980s through the first years of the twenty-first century, the value
of India’s music market continued to increase and was worth well over 1000 crore
as the new millennium began. Over this period, law suits continued to contest
the ownership of songs and a series of amendments to the Act were passed (in
1983, 1984, 1992, 1994 and 1999), none of which sought to change fundamental
understandings of music as intellectual property.
The music industry first came under legislative scrutiny in the 1994 amend-
ment. The term “record” was replaced with the broader term “sound recording,”
belatedly acknowledging cassettes and encompassing the appearance of compact
discs. A change to Section 33 required that all copyright societies be registered
by the central government and specified, in sub-section 3, that the government
normally not register “more than one copyright society to do business in re-
spect of the same class of works” (parliamentofindia.nic.in/Is/bills/1994/1994–31
.htm). The 1994 amendment also defined more clearly the rights of performers
and added punishment (imprisonment and fines) for copyright infringement.
Finally, and more importantly, the 1994 amendment revised Section 52 so as
to respond (to some extent) to both the technological possibilities for music
copying that had developed and the growing value of music for its owners: The
length of time during which songs and recordings were protected from copying
under the statutory licensing provisions (Section 52) was extended from two
weeks to two years.
Aside from this last change, the changes made to the Act in the 1990s had
relatively little impact on the music industry or the unique processes that pro-
duced film songs, which were still India’s primary popular music. In fact, legal
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responses lagged far behind industrial and technological development. By the

time the next (and most recent) set of amendments was passed in 2012, digital
technology had made many of the issues of the 1990s moot: version songs were
a thing of the past, the sale of physical format recordings was no longer the sole
basis of music commerce, India’s media landscape and digital infrastructure
had changed radically, and the Indian music industry was very much part of
the larger global music economy.
Globalization and the Indian Culture Industry

“Globalization is inextricably linked to the current workings of capital on a
global basis” as Arjun Appadurai has argued. “Its most striking feature is the
runaway quality of global finance, which appears remarkably independent of
traditional constraints of information transfer, national regulation, industrial
productivity, or ‘real’ wealth in any particular society, country or region” (Ap-
padurai 2001:3). In the music industry at least, colonialism had contributed to a
particular and early globalization of capital, and to the integration of India into
the emergent global music economy (controlled by the colonial powers) of the
early twentieth century. In post-colonial India, however, the growing barriers of
the license raj inhibited global capital’s “runaway quality.” Those barriers and the
Indian government’s limited concern with music piracy certainly contributed to
the withdrawal of the first wave of transnational music corporations from the
Indian market from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.
Polydor, the first of the recent arrivals, was also the first to withdraw, selling
its Indian operations and catalogue to a new, Indian-owned company, Music
India, in 1976. CBS Records, which began operations in 1982 with six new disc-
pressing plants and a cassette production facility, pulled out of India entirely
shortly after its absorption by Sony in 1984. EMI, the epitome of transnational
music commerce, had retained its pre-Independence control of GCI throughout
the post-colonial era. In 1985, however, EMI sold more than half of its fifty-one
percent holdings to the long-established Indian industrial family of Ram Prasad
Goenka (the RPG Group), who became majority owners; by 1996 EMI had shed
the rest of its holdings in the Indian company, including its ownership of one of
the world’s great popular music catalogues.
Barely ten years after CBS’ departure, however, journalist Arun Varghese
asserted that “international music companies are finally beginning to see India
as more than an exotic, sitar-strumming backwater and are willing to stake big
money to tap its potential market. . . . Polygram [who had been one of the foreign
owners of Polydor India], EMI, BMG, Warner, and Sony [who had absorbed
CBS] are some of the music giants looking to concretise [sic] their presence in
the Indian market by replacing flimsy licensing agreements with solid equity
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participation tie-ups” (The Sunday Observer, November 27, 1994). There had, in
fact, been some “flimsy licensing agreements” in the latter 1980s and early 1990s,
most famously, perhaps, the short-lived agreement between the Indian pop label,
Magnasound, and Warner Music. The gradual dismantling of the license raj bar-
riers that began in the late 1980s, however, apparently encouraged transnational
corporations to think they could retain greater control of their operations and
more direct ownership of their content than had previously been the case in India.
Economic liberalization reinforced the position of global capital relative
to local, Indian capital. The industrial agreements of the license raj may have
been flimsy; but the alleged solidity of “participation tie-ups” tended to work
in the transnationals’ favor, especially in their dealings with Indian companies
who were trying to expand India’s popular music market beyond the realm of
Hindi film song. As their oral histories demonstrate, labels such as Milestone or
Crescendo emerged badly damaged from their engagements with global giants
(EMI and Virgin India and BMG/Sony respectively) in the late 1990s and early
2000s (Personal Communication, Suresh Thomas, 14 October 2011, Mumbai;
Personal Communication, Rajeev Sharma, 28 February 2014, Mumbai). Never-
theless, the Indian market’s transformation from a “sitar-strumming backwater”,
took place in the context of extreme changes in the value of the Indian music
market and in the logic of India’s music industry.
In 2006, Mr. Yash Chopra (1932–2012), one of Mumbai’s most successful
film producer/directors, observed that during the 1990s, the growing value of
revenues from the sale of the film songs, in which he was investing in any case,
encouraged him to form his own music company so as to retain direct owner-
ship of those songs and thereby reap the majority of the financial returns from
their sale as music commodities. “The amount of money we could get from the
music companies [for a film soundtrack] was fabulous until about four years
back: sometimes seven, eight, nine, ten crores of rupees. From 1990 to 2000
was a glorious period for money from music companies. So I started my own
company [Yash Raj Films-Music]. . . . [Now,] the music is good, but the sad part
is, the money is not coming because of piracy” (Personal Communication, Yash
Chopra, 12 January 2006, Mumbai).
Mr. Chopra continued by noting that it was not only the reappearance of
music piracy (in the new mp3 format), but also the evolution of new media
platforms that collectively had a negative impact on the economic value of In-
dia’s primary popular music: “The music market has crashed; there is no profit
now in music. Piracy, that’s the big factor; mp3. Now more people are seeing
the films, more people are hearing the films; but they are not buying the music.
Why should they? They can see on TV” (ibid).
Globally, 2003 was a very bad year for the music industry. According to a Re-
uters report, “global music sales fell 7.6 percent in 2003 . . .the steepest decline since
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the advent of the compact disc” (http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/

news/2004/04/62985). Much of the decline was blamed on mp3-based piracy by in-
dustry observers such as the International Federation of the Phonographic Indus-
try (IFPI). The effects of piracy were still more problematic in India: “In the 2001–
2003 period, the legal music market shrunk (sic) by 27% in unit terms and 38%
in value terms (http://www.hindustantimes.com/business-news/sectorsinfotech/
music-industry-booms-in-digital-makeover/article1–1027881.aspx). Suresh
Thomas, one of India’s non-film and western popular music pioneers, has offered
a more detailed and personal perspective on the sudden turnaround in the value
of recorded music in India: “2003 was a really bad year for everybody. Universal
was down five-six million dollars; Sony was down; Saregama, eight million dollars;
Tips was down six million and I [Crescendo] was down two million” (Personal
Communication, Suresh Thomas, 14 October 2011, Mumbai). The enormous
losses of 2003 cost Thomas his record catalogue, which he had mortgaged in the
attempt to survive. It took him more than six years to recover from the downturn
in music revenues; but by that time he had adopted a “post-physical” industrial
logic: “Now I’m not concentrating on physical format distribution. I licensed my
entire rights to another company who are doing physical and eventually I’ll start
seeing royalties. . . . It’s more publishing business than physical” (ibid).
The changes that occurred in the early 2000s led to a long-term restructur-
ing of the Indian music economy in the context of global changes in the music
market. It was not until 2007 that the Indian market regained its late-1990s
position, with an estimated total revenue of 700 crore (http://www.nextbigwhat
.com/digital-music-growth-in-india-stats-and-outlook-297/). By 2007, however,
twenty percent of those revenues were being generated by digital rather than
physical sales. In 2014, the importance of digital revenues in India appears to
have surpassed the global average (ibid; Personal Communication, Atul Chura-
mani, 9 January 2014, Mumbai), reflecting, as Manabe (2008) has suggested,
the importance of local cultural, economic, and technological contexts in un-
derstanding local responses to global developments in music consumption.
The rapid and extreme decline in physical format sales, the continued presence
of global music capital in India and the consequent need to align the Indian
music and film industries with global norms, all contributed to the Copyright
(Amendment) Bill, passed into law in 2012.
The “Bollywood” Amendments

Late in 2009, India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development issued a press re-
lease announcing that “amendments are being made to bring the [Copyright] Act
in conformity with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Inter-
net Treaties, namely WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) and WIPO Performances
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and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT) which have set the international standards
in these spheres . . .. While India has not yet signed the above two treaties it is
necessary to amend domestic legislation to extend the copyright protection in
the digital environment” (http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=56444).
The free flow of global capital, in other words, was to be facilitated by the free
flow of the concepts that enabled that flow, and that were embodied in global
treaties. Even though the treaties themselves had not been signed, the under-
standings of intellectual property those treaties propounded were to be written
into Indian law.
Atul Churamani has agreed that “the intention [of these changes] was to
bring the Indian music business in line with global practices regarding copy-
right (Email Communication, Atul Churamani, 31 May 2013). Churamani also
pointed out, however, that the film (and film music) industry posed specific chal-
lenges in this respect: “there was the peculiarity of film music whereby composers
and lyricists as well as performers were paid a onetime fee by film producers,
which often resulted in the creative fraternity not being entitled to royalties.”
Because of their explicit focus on the management of copyright in India’s film
and music industry, some specific provisions of the Copyright Amendment Act
of 2012 have come to be known as the “Bollywood” amendments (Saikia 2013:1).
The Copyright Office press release specified that the goal of these provisions was
to “protect the Music and Film Industry and address its concerns” (ibid).
Among the changes that became law in 2012 was the removal of the prob-
lematic statutory licensing regulation, Section 52, which had earlier caused so
much confusion. The new statutory licensing wording, found in Section 31(c),
makes clear that version recordings are legal under the provisions of the Act.
Because demand for version songs had largely disappeared by 2012, however,
this change carried less import and generated less controversy than others hav-
ing to do with the rights of authors.
The original Act made vague references to authors’ rights outside the context
of the film; these were analogous to the “moral rights” of authors found in some
European IP statutes (those of France and Germany especially). In film music
production, however, the absence of pre-recording publication (in any form)
and the “work-for-hire” clauses of Section 17 had made any such rights largely
ephemeral. Sections 18 and 19 of the post-2012 Act spelled out a new set of
authors’ rights; but what is more, they defined those rights as non-assignable.
Section 19, sub-section 9, set out these new key provisions: “No assignment of
copyright in any work to make a cinematograph film shall affect the right of
the author of the work to claim an equal share of royalties and consideration
payable in case of utilization of the work in any form other than for the com-
munication to the public of the work, along with the cinematograph film in
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a cinema hall” (http://copyright.lawmatters.in/2012/05/new-film-and-music

-royalties-under-2012.html). The subsequent sub-section provides that authors
involved in the production of non-film recordings retain the right to claim an
equal share of the royalties for any use of their work whatsoever.
Changes to Section 2 imposed more stringent regulations on the fore-
grounding of rights management information, in order to protect copyright and
license holders. New provisions also sought to ensure that authors and composers
would be able to exercise more power in the management of copyright societies
(Section 33), so that royalties collected by those societies would flow through
to these individuals. Finally, the amendment changed the licensing provisions
so that authors and composers could claim some share of the royalties resulting
from the commercial exploitation of their work (Section 37).4
The Copyright Office had argued in its press release that authors’ rights had
been “hitherto denied and wrongfully exploited, by the producers [of films] and
music companies” (http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=56444, accessed
4 January, 2014). Javed Akhtar (b. 1945), a member the upper house, the Rajya
Sabha, of India’s Parliament, worked as a lyricist and screenplay writer on many
significant Mumbai films. His personal (not to say financial) interest in authors’
rights made him the political champion of these changes. His eloquent, if some-
what disingenuous, “maiden speech” to Parliament—broadcast on the Indian
Parliament’s television channel, Rajya Sabha Live—offered his understanding
of the question of authors’ rights in the film industry:
When a record is made, it generates two royalties, one is the sound recording royalty,
and that royalty is owned by music producer, the music company. The other royalty
is the performing royalty and that is for the writer, for the musician. This is the law.
Not the coming law; this is the law now. This is the law abroad also. . . . . But in this
country, the composer’s widow is begging in the train station. . . . and the royal-
ties are with the music companies. (Hindi Speech to Rajya Sabha, 17 May, 2012.
Translation by the author. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2_dw7OmS2U)
Like the Copyright Office, Akhtar invoked a deliberate comparison with
international law. Later in his speech, he read to Parliament the standard con-
tract signed by authors as employees of film producers, stressing the clause that
assigned “all rights whatsoever, in any form now and in future” to the producer.
Akhtar then asked, rhetorically, “If this isn’t bonded labor, then what is it?” (ibid).
There can be no question that Indian music companies, as the owners of song
rights, benefitted the most from film song composition and production in the pre-
2012 system. Nevertheless, the exploitation of authors alleged by the Copyright
Office’s press release (above) had been sanctioned by the Indian Copyright Act
for fifty-five years and routinely upheld in Indian courts. The representation of
this process as exploitation, therefore, has been a recent development in Indian
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understandings of film song as intellectual property, based largely on global

understandings set out in the documents the Copyright Office acknowledged in
its press release (above). As Atul Churamani more accurately characterized the
situation (above), authors in the film industry had not been “entitled” to royalties.
India’s music companies may have exploited the creators of the songs that
they sold; but it must also be said, that such “exploitation” took place in the
context of a frequently chaotic and very high-risk system of film (and film
music) production in which only a small percentage of films made a profit, but
in which film revenues were the ultimate source of almost all culture industry
revenues. While it may be difficult to justify some of the behaviors demonstrated
by the music companies, the system of production, as it existed, wove authors,
music companies, and film producers into a single industrial, symbiotic web.
That system enabled the survival of Indian music companies in a low demand
market and earned considerable sums for the more successful authors. It also
allowed them to produce songs without taking on the very considerable risks
of film and record production.
Mandar Thakur, Chief Operating Officer of Times Music, has summarized
these tensions, arguing that it was the new possibility of profits from digital
commerce in music that motivated new demands by authors.
[Some authors in the film music industry] started talking about who owns the sound
recording, who owns this or that, the mechanicals and all this, because income
started coming up due to ring tones and call backs and all these things. Now these
composers had sold all their rights in perpetuity to producers, who had sold them
to music companies. And the composers had been paid handsomely for it; but sud-
denly they started saying, “we need the money [royalties] for those songs.” (Personal
Communication, Mandar Thakur, 10 September 2012, Mumbai)
As Javed Akhtar’s comments show (above), the globalization of the Indian
music industry has provided a pathway for authors to reframe the Indian (or
perhaps the Bollywood) system of song production in terms of exploitation. The
music company view is quite different, as one would expect.
In her assessment of the “Bollywood Amendments,” Nandita Saikia has
argued “the amendments contained in the 2012 Act are themselves at times
unclear, while at other times, it is the rationale underlying them which is un-
clear. And at virtually all times, the likely effect of the amendments is open to
debate” (2010:52). Her assessment has been echoed by many industry figures.
It will certainly be some time before any real sense of the changes enabled by
the 2012 Act emerges. If nothing else, this article has made clear the sometimes
unpredictable ways in which IP legislation—especially when imported, so to
speak, from other cultures and industries—can be powerfully transformed by
local cultures, market conditions, and industrial practices.
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As I argued at the beginning of this study, the 2012 Act represents the first
substantial change to Indian IP legislation since 1957. In making these extensive
structural changes, Indians law makers and industry figures have explicitly in-
voked the confrontation with global concepts of intellectual property, thus reaf-
firming the Indian music industry’s integration into the global music economy
and, I suggest, the inevitability of the processes of globalization. The tensions
between the “Bollywood system” of popular music production, including the
approaches to IP that were part of that system, however, collectively highlight
what is perhaps the most important conclusion to this study. Our understand-
ings of music industry, commerce and indeed, of globalization must take into
account more than the actions and structures of hegemonic, transnational pow-
ers—whether cultural, political or industrial. They must also consider the mul-
tiple and diverse industrial histories and market cultures that result from local
difference and that demonstrate that even industries can be cultural “arenas
where resistance to hegemony occurs” (Wallerstein 2011:65).
Acknowledgements
Much of this research was supported by The University of Auckland. None of the work would
have been possible without the time and information given so generously by the music industry
figures identified in this study.
Notes
1. The use of “crore” and “lakh” remains a distinctive feature of Indian numeric expression.
I use these terms throughout this study to allow more direct comparison with quoted comments
and reports in the Indian press. One lakh is one-hundred thousand; in effect it represents a “one”
(or whatever number is stated) followed by five zeroes. Following the same principle, one crore is
the equivalent of 10 million, a “one” followed by seven zeroes. Three crore is thus 30 million rupees.
2. India’s state-run radio, which was the only radio in India at the time, as well as Radio Ceylon
do appear to have paid royalties to the record companies (who owned the recordings) when they
broadcast their recordings. The Indian Copyright Act has consistently required this. Neither the
consistency and accuracy of those payments, nor the extent to which those payments were reported
by industry figures is clear, however. In the everyday business of popular music production in India,
especially prior to 1999 when Indian airwaves were first privatized, radio is beyond the scope of
this study.
3. The issue of nomenclature with regard to the Gramophone Company of India (GCI) is
slightly confused by a name change and by common practice. The company changed its name
to Saregama in 2000, by which time it was a subsidiary of the RP-SG Group. In common usage,
however, many Indians continue to refer to the company by that company’s former primary record
label, HMV (His Master’s Voice). I identify the company as GCI or Saregama depending on the
chronology of the specific reference.
4. The matter of performers’ rights in the context of the 2012 Amendment of the Indian
Copyright Act is an issue of concern for many performers and one that deserves further research.
It is beyond the scope of this study.
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Vol. 59, No.

2 Ethnomusicology Spring/Summer 2015

Copyright Law and the Changing Economic

T his article examines the history of popular music as a commodity in India,

© 2015 by the Society for Ethnomusicology

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The Indian Music Industry and the Global Music

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mediated popular culture expressed by India’s socialist governments (largely in

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booming,” especially in the large, cosmopolitan urban market that Mumbai

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Film Song Ownership in Indian Copyright Law

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(Morcom 2007). Considered in the context of Lazarus’ estimates of music rev-

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Cassettes, Economic Liberalization and the Growing Value

Copyright and Cassette-Based Growth in an Indian Market

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biggest music company in India was absolutely demolished because of piracy”

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responses lagged far behind industrial and technological development. By the

Globalization and the Indian Culture Industry

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the advent of the compact disc” (http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/

The “Bollywood” Amendments

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a cinema hall” (http://copyright.lawmatters.in/2012/05/new-film-and-music

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understandings of film song as intellectual property, based largely on global

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