Introduction: Platform Challenges to Creative Industries in India

ABSTRACT

Recent developments in digital technologies in South Asia require special attention on the restructuring of industries based on creativity, arts and culture. More specifically, powerful players from the communication industries have been at the heart of changes in the legacy creative industries. The aim of this special section is twofold. On the one hand, to critically assess transformations taking place in the industrial and policy dynamics shaping the creative industries in India; and, on the other hand, to identify the peculiarity of Indian dynamics amidst what is widely perceived as a fairly uniform set of global phenomena. Through examples focusing on audiovisual and music sectors, the contributions explore how these dynamics are deeply anchored within social and political contexts at the local, national and global scales, and how – far from its emancipatory promise – the digital often tends to reinforce uneven economic scenarios and power relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative industries
• platforms
• India
• digital dynamics
• digital media economy

Across the world, powerful private companies in communication industries, e-commerce and internet technology, who are at the forefront of digital capitalism, have been at the heart of changes in industries based on creativity, arts and culture. There is a growing body of literature on South Asia that explores the relationship between creative industries and rapidly changing dynamics of the global digital economy. What requires further attention, however, are the deployment and affirmation of different digital platform operators, and the transformations and challenges imparted by ‘platformization’ to music, broadcast and cinema industries. By platformization, here we mean the reconstitution of commercial practices, industrial relations, and market dynamics of the legacy creative businesses (see Athique and Parthasarathi 2020; Bouquillion and Ithurbide 2022).

Recent developments in digital industries, especially data mining, algorithms and geolocalization, have contributed to accelerate transformations in the nature of creative works, their circulation, and their usage. The ‘digital’ is often presented as a driver of the cultural economy as well as a vector of democratization and emancipation, which enables and promises more collaborative and interactive ways of conceiving artistic work (Landry 2016). However, the deployment of digital technologies is also accompanied by numerous challenges related to geographical and demographic access, sustainable business models, rights of creative workers and new power relations in production and monetization processes. Discourses on the emancipatory potential of digital technologies have helped to legitimize and accelerate the re-engineering of work processes and re-skilling of cultural labour (Nieborg and Poell 2018; David 2020; Woodcock and Graham 2020). They have also raised debates on new forms of technological dependency, extraction and appropriation of resources, and hegemonies (Jin 2015; Couldry and Ulises Mejias 2019) – matters which require further analysis in creative industries.

This special section focuses on the socio-economic restructuring of the creative industries in the context of the development of digital platforms in India. The scale of these transformations and the stakes that they raise have provoked individual interrogations therein: how is platformization changing the dynamics in the recorded music industry, and of musical work itself? What technological and industrial confluences have propelled the rapid growth of online audio-visual markets? How have messaging platforms emerged as a significant site/mechanism of audio-visual piracy and what are the implications of this on the formal, ‘legal’ media industries? How has the increasing importance given to ‘the digital’ in national development permeated the policy framework of cultural industries? In addressing this, two analytical challenges are being highlighted. One, how to critically assess transformations taking place in the industrial and policy dynamics shaping the creative industries in India; and two, how to reconcile the peculiarity of Indian dynamics amidst/with what is widely perceived as a fairly uniform set of global phenomena.

Creative industries as vantage-point

The notion of ‘creative industries’ was first proposed during the mid-1990s in reference to countries of the global North; importantly, this stemmed, not from academic quarters but political leaders and think tanks of New Labour in Britain (Garnham 2005). The central question raised was one of the commodification and industrialization of culture. UNCTAD and UNESCO reports began to consider creative industries as driving new forms of economic development and international trade, but also social and human development and thus of employment and various forms of emancipation (UNCTAD 2008; UNESCO & UNDP 2013).

At the same time, questions have been raised about the organization of cultural production, the means of making it more rational, of mechanizing human labour to reduce costs and standardize production (Paterson 2001; Garnham 2005; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2010). Paradoxically, rationalization and ‘technologization’ (the replacement of the labour factor by the capital factor) must be carried out while increasing the symbolic and therefore market value of creative production by highlighting and promoting the work of creators, which is considered to be the basis of the value of these goods. In this perspective, the artist is replaced by the creator and the various forms of art and cultural industries are to be merged into a generic category, namely the creative industries.

Two technologies are seen as central to the processes of industrialization and commodification. Firstly, design, which is seen as a tool for the conception, symbolization and promotion of creative products. Secondly, information and communication technologies, and the electronic marketplaces they spawn, are seen as a means of dissemination of creative products on a global scale. Creative industries have emerged as a global idiom for governments, industry and higher education to engage in the management of populations for the primary purpose of extracting economic value from a heterogeneous array of cultural and new media practices (Chaganti 2007). In the Asia-Pacific, this discourse has received particular attention and has grown in importance in national and urban policy agendas as evidenced in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou (see Kong and O’Connor 2009). In doing so, it has also raised debates regarding the transfer of creative policies from one context to another. Policymakers, industry bodies, and scholars in South Asia entered this debate quite late. Even today the concept of creative industries has received marginal attention in policy debates and seen slow implementation at a regional scale as observed by the Director of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) Cultural Cooperation (see Tshering 2016)

Digital platforms under scrutiny

Along with the spectacular development of digital platforms in the last decade, a growing body of work has been analyzing the deployment of platform operators reshaping creative industries, the evolution of power relations between cultural industry and communication industry players, and the transformation in the nature of creative works (Casilli 2016; Graham, Hjorth, and Lehdonvirta 2017; Nieborg and Poell 2018; Hesmondhalgh and Meyer 2018; Ithurbide and Rivron 2018; Athique and Parthasarathi 2020; Bullich and Schmitt 2019; Mohan and Punathambekar 2019; Bouquillion et al. upcoming).

Since the 2000s, the notion of the digital platform has been addressed by numerous authors in several disciplines. These questions and attempts at definition can be understood in connection with industrial transformations in online markets, given the major achievements of Google’s search engine offerings, Amazon’s or eBay’s e-commerce devices, and Apple’s content offerings such as iTunes. These industrial offerings have thus served as references for many authors who have sought to characterize the specificities, or even the ruptures, brought about by these offerings and the various issues they raise for the organization of the industries concerned, competitive relationships, modes of financing, the allocation of resources and the distribution of added value, the emergence of new modes of valuation, modes of consumption and public policy. At the same time, the authors will also attempt to diversify the multiple realizations they try to theorize. In doing so, rather than arrive at a precise and consensual definition of the notion of platform, the various research studies across this sector allow for the identification of trends.

Early research studies in this area were developed in management studies. Platforms were described as linking users who were considered both suppliers and consumers of goods and services. The whole dynamic of platforms would be based on externalities: each user of the platform has an interest in the presence of other users. Thus, the power of a platform depends on the number and quality of its users. Proponents of the concept of Multi-sided Platforms (MSP), continuing the previous reflection on two-sided markets (Tirole and Rochet 2003), underline the direct interaction between affiliated users allowed by MSP. Given the importance of externalities, platforms have a natural monopoly tendency. Yet, platforms are often considered as neutral actors – that is, merely intermediaries connecting affiliated producers, distributors and users without influencing the interactions between them. Others have challenged this idea of ⁣⁣neutrality to show how platform operators construct intermediation and attempt to acquire dominant positions in the value chain (see Gillespie 2010; Srnicek 2016). The control of these processes by big capitalist actors is then considered as a new form of colonialism marked by the centrality of data (Couldry and Ulises Mejias 2019).

Similarly, platforms are considered to be infrastructures (Parks and Starosielski 2015) by highlighting three aspects. Firstly, the biggest platforms become key spaces, a framework offering essential resources so that actors can develop activities, but these platforms are also essential or even enclosing and constitute spaces of domination and capture of value. Secondly, the infrastructural dimension is ideological in scope. As Plantin and Punathambekar (2019) argue, ‘Coming to terms with major digital platforms thus involves paying attention to the aesthetic and affective power that digital infrastructures have come to wield in public cultures across the world’. Third, some of the platform operators finance the development of infrastructure in the material sense of the term hardware and especially telecommunications networks and cloud equipment (Amazon Web Service for example). These findings can lead to reformulations in geopolitical norms, such as global standards for content governance being imposed by non-state actors such as the GAFAMs (Nieborg and Poell 2018).

Here again, this work has been conceived with reference to the situation in the global North and many authors, particularly in management, consider the MSP model to be universal. From this perspective, the questions addressed by the four contributions in this section, rooted as they are in Indian empirical realities, variedly move away from the mainstream of debates on the platform phenomenon and of the creative turn presented above. This then also demands a theoretical corpus to enable scholars to think about the specificities of platformization in India. Here, a great deal of work has already been done to characterize the specific characteristics of platform dynamics particularly in India. Athique and Parthasarathi (2020) capture a process that ultimately operates at two levels. At an operational level, they describe a new form of convergence. With the platforms and the cross-subsidies they allow, an interconnected set of activities has been built, characterized by an ‘increasing mobility and monetization of both content and users across this interlinked ecology of platforms’ whose issues are deeply rooted in ‘the everyday transactions of trade, culture and politics across India’ (Athique and Parthasarathi 2020, 4). The second level of the platformization process is ideological and political. The process of platformization unfolds in the context of an attempt to revive the Indian economy.

This understanding of platforms as a process embedded at once in the geopolitical and the regional is at the heart of this special section, one that differentiates itself from other significant works in this domain.

Locating digital creative industries in India: legacy and novelty

Several scientific journals have recently offered special issues on the question of platforms in South Asia, a sign of the great topicality of this subject. Nevertheless, the axes adopted are different from those which have been retained in this section. For example, Chadha, Kumar, and Parameswaran (2021) have questioned the transformations of the digital media ecosystem from the point of view of the phenomenon of domination, and surveillance, notably by political authorities, but also of the enlargement of the public or even the emancipation of groups of minorities or the reappropriation by local media or activists. The issue of platforms is thus placed in a broader digital framework, the digitization of society, while the issue of creative industries is not central. Mukherjee and Nizaruddin (2022) focused on the inscription of platforms in everyday life in India. Again, the spectrum covered is broader than that of the creative industries although the contributions do not aim to explore the challenges of platformization for the creative industries. Steinberg, Mukherjee, and Punathambekar (2022) bring together the role of large industrial players from Asia, envisaging them as mega corporations offering super apps. This perspective is in line with a desire to identify specifically Asian characteristics in the field of platforms. If the reflection is rich on the platform side, the question of the creative industries is not at all at the centre of the debate.

Indeed, India occupies a special place in the platform economy of South Asia, while the issue of the creative industries has had a specific reception in India. Due to its large user base, created by the proliferation of cheap mobile devices and widening broadband infrastructure, India has become an increasingly attractive market for global players. Powerful private companies, both domestic and transnational, with diversified interests in various sectors of the digital economy have been steadily investing in the distribution and production of digital content.

To study the Indian situation presents a double interest. On the one hand, India is one of the most strategic countries in the world in terms of market growth of digital creative industries. On the other hand, the situation in India is characterized by significant specificities compared to North America, Japan or Europe, as well as China and other so-called BRICS countries. These specificities include linguistic and cultural fragmentation; the process of appropriation of the concept of ‘creative industries’ in policy discourse; the lack of a tradition of public support for culture yet the widening role of national regulatory frameworks in structuring the digital/platform economy; the complex interlacing of informal and formal dynamics of labour, capital, and products; and the importance of foreign investments in the digital creative industries, especially in distributing positions, coexisting with an already large and increasingly export-oriented domestic audiovisual production sector.

A rupture more than a continuity?

The contributions show the importance of the dynamics of platforms within the creative industries and how platforms indeed contribute to processes of commodification and industrialization. Is it a matter of continuity of relations between creative industries and technical industries, or is it a break with the forms of the markets between the two industries which converge? Attention has been paid to long-term historical processes in the creative industries in South Asia, especially on the adaptation of cultural producers to ‘new’ technologies (Manuel 1991; Parthasarathi 2013), challenges to extant regimes of intellectual property (Praveen and Sukumar 2006; Booth 2015) or the role of piracy in expanding the market for creative commodities (Sundaram 1999; Liang 2011; Govil and Hoyt 2014).

The contributors ask the question of continuity or rupture and the elements they bring tend rather towards the side of the second term of this alternative. The history of these phenomena is of course taken into account but for all that, the authors insist on the course taken for culture via the creative turn but especially via the deployment of digital platforms. Mehta and Cunningham, in their attempt to show how strong the links are between professionally-generated (PGC) and user-generated content (UGC), (in other words between the audiovisual industries and offers such as YouTube) show how much

a vital aspect of the Indian online video market is the interlocking of diverse sectors of commerce, communications, technology, and content enterprises that consistently use the data as a critical point to integrate multiple social and economic exchanges within a single transaction.

They define the interdependencies between these human agents as the ‘new screen ecology’. Their use of the term ‘new screen’ and ‘ecology’ explores the social relations and power structures shaped by the dynamism of platforms, portals, creators, and intermediaries on the internet.

Mehta and Cunningham demonstrate both the linkage and the coexistence of platform-portal creator and content-based linkages with the example of PGC which thrives alongside UGC on platforms such as YouTube or Facebook. They also point out the migration of talent towards platforms and portals facilitated by the existing film and television industry structures. As such, they show ‘how the contemporary platform-portal linkages are rooted in the informal-formal exchanges within which the Indian film and television industries are situated’. They argue that

the digital creative industries infrastructures in the form of platforms and portals adorn a distinct site of disjuncture as well as continuity – they are part of the media industries but are diversifying far more in content, talent, and genre sources.

In their study of music platforms, Aditya Lal, David Hesmondhalgh and Charles Umney pinpoint the importance of telecommunications operators offering advertizing-financed streaming music. This corresponds both to the strategies of these operators seeking to build the loyalty of users as well as the low willingness to pay for cultural content by Indian consumers. In exploring this, the authors draw attention to two phenomena. First the altered balance of power between industrial actors catalysed by the deployment of platforms – something which resulted in – moving the centre of gravity of the recorded music industry from traditional publishers to their ‘new’ distributors. Second, the platformized ecosystem of the Indian recorded music industry has created a unique opportunity for the rise of non-film music in India. If film music is a super-genre, then non-film music has emerged as a super-genre in opposition that encapsulates all music that is not ensconced in films when it is first made available for audience consumption. They also show platformization strengthens the powers of Indian ‘majors’ against transnational majors. They own the broadcasting rights for local titles and in music, as in other fields such as audiovisual, Indian consumers mainly consume local-language content. Platformization also strengthens the position of local majors vis-à-vis artists, in particular, because of contractual practices in terms of the transfer of rights. Thus, the question of intellectual property rights and oligopolistic markets are at the heart of discussions on the recorded music industry in India.

The largely informal dimension of the creative industries in India is a key factor that structures the creative work and industries as well as the way platforms develop. It helps to understand how the remuneration of less powerful stakeholders is established, and the difficulties of implementation, if not the inappropriateness, of globally conceived regimes of intellectual property rights (see Athique 2018; Parthasarathi 2018). The informal dimension also explains the particularities of the implementation strategies of foreign actors, given that a large part of the creative ‘market’ and creative labour is outside the formal economy. At this point, some more questions emerge: is the thrust of global capitalism in the creative industries in India more financial than industrial? Is the digital turn in the creative industries fostering the formalization of a host of informal practices?

The contributions bring new elements relating to the issue of the informal economy within the creative industries and the role of platforms in this regard. Do they promote the extension of informality or, on the contrary, are they a factor in the integration of the informal economy into the formal economy? The contribution dedicated to Telegram, an encrypted digital messaging application, shows how piracy is re-structured online and how hackers are trying to find a viable economic model. The author shows that Telegram pirates rely on similar monetization models to industry players, namely subscriptions and advertisements. However, Telegram has several features that make it attractive for pirates including the ability to share large files at scale coupled with an emphasis on privacy and security that allows for such sharing to be carried out largely anonymously. Finally, the paper argues that the analysis in terms of economic models represent a valuable contribution to current debates on copyright enforcement. Audiovisual companies harmed by piracy via Telegram seem to have difficulty finding technical means of combat. The lack of reliance on technological tools by industry to facilitate takedowns on Telegram is also compelling. These findings may be factored into the debate around pushing for greater algorithmic regulation of platforms.

A new dynamic in the employability of cultural creators would be at work thanks to the deployment of platforms. According to Mehta and Cunningham, the new screen ecology in India also facilitates a dynamic informality or fluidity in its creator culture whereby writers become directors, talent agents become producers, stand-up comedians become writers or actors, vloggers become actors, intermediaries become producers’, and so on. However, the question of the working conditions and remuneration of these content creators remains a subject of concern. For Mehta and Cunningham, the existence of YouTube, Facebook, and more recently, the emergence of short-form video platforms MxTakaTak (backed by portal MxPlayer), HiFi (backed by portal Zee5), while offering further alternatives for commercialization, offer a significant opportunity for commercializing amateurs to work their way towards the PGC landscape. While others have come to different conclusions with remaining difficulties for artists to claim their economic or moral rights (see Ithurbide 2020), Lal et al. find ‘the wider opportunities for autonomous work and self-realization co-exist with systemic challenges that may adversely affect their working conditions’ (our emphasis).

Amidst all this, what is striking is the role of the state in both promoting the digital creative industries and insulating them from predatory tendencies of the platform economy. This is where the contribution by Bouquillion and Ithurbide gains significance. It explores the tensions emanating from state interventions shaping the creative industries in light of three factors: cultural policies largely remaining centred on heritage rather than tangible creative industries, the traditional lack of state support to cultural production akin to that in parts of Europe, and the rising importance of national identity and sovereignty underlying wider state policy towards the online economy. The latter is epitomized in the several initiatives encompassing the policy goal of ‘Digital India’.¹ The authors analyse this government initiative to assess its implications for the cultural and creative industries, especially with the role of cultural operator being increasingly assumed by transnational digital platforms.

In the wake of the COVID19 pandemic and a push for large-scale adoption of digital technologies, the growth of platform-based work with the gig economy and the increased use of digital payment interfaces, the impetus for research on the implications of these shifts on creative industries emerges quite significantly. The contributions in this special section highlight this changing digital landscape of creative work in India, including conditions of labour, distribution and consumption, emerging models of business and the need for a more in-depth understanding of their various intersections, as brought about by platformization. In doing so, this special section also attempts to identify emerging trends and patterns, which offer scope for research and policy-based interventions in digital creative industries in India.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Ithurbide

Christine Ithurbide is a research fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS / Laboratory Passages). Her research focuses on the social and spatial reconfigurations of cultural industries in India in the context of globalization and digital transition. After a PhD on the geography of contemporary art in Mumbai (ENS Editions, 2022), she has studied the deployment of global technology players and their consequences in the local dynamics of music, audiovisual and craft sectors in India. She is the coordinator of the International Research Network « SOUTH-STREAM » (2023–2027). Her recent publications include articles in Global Media and Communication and SAMAJ.

Philippe Bouquillion

Philippe Bouquillion is a Professor of Communication at the University Sorbonne Paris Nord. He is director of the Laboratory of Information and Communication Sciences (LabSIC) and of the Laboratory of Excellence ‘Cultural Industries and Artistic Creation’ (Labex ICCA). Inspired in the political economy of communication, his work focuses on cultural and creative industries, and especially on the issues of concentration and financialization, transnationalization and the transformations of public policies in the cultural and creative industries. His most recent research deals with audiovisual digital platforms in Europe and India. His recent monographs include Vivendi. A Global Media Giant (Routledge, 2021).

Vibodh Parthasarathi

Vibodh Parthasarathi maintains a multidisciplinary interest in media policy, digital transitions, and policy literacy. Associate Professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, he has been a visiting scholar at the University of Queensland, KU Leuven, University of Helsinki, and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Parthasarathi has been at the forefront of media policy research in India and a winner of numerous grants including from the Ford Foundation, IDRC, and University Grants Commission. His edited works include Platform Capitalism in India (Palgrave, 2020), the double volume The Indian Media Economy (OUP, 2018), and Pedagogy in Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Puthiya Purayil Sneha

Puthiya Purayil Sneha is a Senior Researcher with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS),Bengaluru, India. Her areas of interest and work include digital media and cultures, higher education and access to knowledge. Her recent work includes writing on the digital turn in archival practices in India, and exploratory research and collaborative work on mapping digital language practices and efforts to create a multilingual internet.

Notes

1 See https://digitalindia.gov.in/