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Pod#87 - How Pakistan's Music Industry Died (feat. Ahmer Naqvi)
1 hour 37 minutes Posted Dec 14, 2020 at 3:00 am.
Intro
Music’s place in our society, defining what “industry” means and the importance of 1971’s events
The 80’s: Zia, a cinema industry in trouble, the golden era of TV and the introduction of piracy
The 80’s: Pop music’s inroads into urban elite & diaspora, jeans on TV
The 90’s: Folk/traditional vs pop music, wild concerts & the facade of an industry
The 90’s: Dish/Satellite TV arrives, the rise of piracy and the collapsed facade
The 00’s: Musharraf, private channels showing change is possible, the last real era before the internet and a tragic end
The 00’s: Coke Studio, NFAK, artistic experimentation & a sponsor’s limits
The 10’s: The internet arrives, only free music allowed, people have other places to spend their money
The 10’s: The struggles of working in a streaming music service (Patari) in a country with no music infrastructure
How those without financial freedom eventually get kneecapped (feat. Lyari Underground’s story) & where the real money is now
The control of & dependency on corporate sponsorships, and how good trends never seem to last
How today’s musicians end up moving into video, drama, social media influencing, and how Nescafe Basement stripped artists of their brand identity
Despite the darkest of dark times and all the difficulties, music remains a part of the nation’s psyche (feat. a very dark anecdote)
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Show notes
Some podcasts we do are group chats, some are smaller conversations with one or two people and some others still are friends just hanging out. This is probably the first episode that seems closest to a distilled lesson, where there is somebody with the information and we ourselves are part of the audience.
Pakistan's music industry is dead. Pakistani music survives in patches and bursts but there exists no real industry in any sense of how the word is understood in the modern world. Ahmer Naqvi, columnist, podcast host, prolific commentator on cricket & music and esteemed member of the Pakistani Twittersphere is on the show.
The episode was supposed to be a discussion on how the industry is dead and what this artist said and what that show did but it quickly turned into a journey through time with events, decisions, social structures and personal memory linked in an intricate and nuanced manner. the story is tragic and the "what could have been" unimaginable, which is probably true for most things related to this country. But hope remains in some places and understanding our history must be the key to not repeating it. Check out the chapters below and take your time with this one.
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LINKS:
Ahmer's Twitter: https://twitter.com/karachikhatmal
Ahmer's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karachikhatmal
Ahmer's writings for Dawn: https://www.dawn.com/authors/130/ahmer-naqvi
Ahmer's writings for CricInfo: https://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/story/author.html?author=527
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