Hindi Film Music on YouTube and Torrents: Of Piracy, Memory and Love

This paper intends to explore the communally built collection of Hindi film music on YouTube by the listeners of the genre as a site for the unfolding of the affective relationship between the listeners and the music. I attempt to understand this collection as a non-traditional and non-institutional archive driven by the love and work of fans, collectors of film songs; it becomes, thus a source of tracking fan culture. In the last ten or fifteen years, the internet has emerged as one of the most popular technologies for listening to music and has become the space where not only do many scanned documents of listening and record societies exist but also where most listeners conglomerate and provide expression to their relationship with music.
Through the study of this collection, the paper proposes to look at the changing materiality of the archive from physical to virtual, and consider how sites like YouTube allow us to track that materiality through the traces of other texts (TV logos/ user comments/ DVD/CD logos/ technological disruptions or interruptions) present in an intertextual matrix that surrounds the video/ song text. In tracking this matrix of texts, one may rethink the notion of the text, the archive and perhaps our understanding of history as well.

Date: 
11 OCTOBER THURSDAY
Start time: 
13:30
Venue: 
Conference Room 1
Title (author 1): 
Ms
First names (author 1): 
Vebhuti
Surname (author 1): 
Duggal
Institution: 
Jawaharlal Nehru University
Country: 
INDIA
presentation type: 
spoken