Paper short abstract:

Our paper discusses the consumption of digital music on the increasingly ubiquitous multimedia-enabled mobile phone platform, largely enabled by a rich infrastructure of media piracy. The users we focus on come from low-income households in three sites located in rural, semi-urban, and urban India.

Paper long abstract:

The recent Media Piracy in Emerging Economies report (J. Karaganis et al., 2011) claims that global media piracy results from three main factors: high prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies. The proposed paper will discuss an ethnographic engagement with a media ecology where the presence of these forces (among others) has led to escalating rates of piracy. It focuses on low-income consumers of digital music on the increasingly ubiquitous multimedia-enabled mobile phone, in sites belonging to rural, semi-urban, and urban India.

Mobile coverage is on the rise in India, including in remote areas. Competitive pricing of voice/data plans and a consistent fall in the prices of mobile phone instruments have led to greater adoption and use. Multimedia-enabled phones are especially popular and affordable at Rs. 1,000 ($20) and are increasingly becoming a universal entertainment device for low-income users, housing varied audio-visual content. Just as cassette culture (P. Manuel, 1993) expanded the music market in India, we study an emerging mobile culture that incorporates copying, sharing, and distributing (pirated) music via mobile chip downloads. We discuss recent measures adopted by the Indian Music Industry (IMI) to address the financial losses of recording companies attributed to mobile chip piracy and how these measures play out in the market to impact distribution practices, also from an enforcement perspective. In addition, we examine perceptions about piracy that result from inadequate levels of understanding and awareness and a historic lack of access to multimedia content.