Radios, ringtones, and memory cards or, how the mobile phone became our favourite music playback device

Abstract

This article explores the co-constitution of mobile phones and music consumption in India to examine the changing relationships between music, listeners, playback technologies and music markets. Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted between 2011 and 2013 and archival material from 2003 to 2013, we trace the intersections of vectors such as mobile phone technologies, the digital im/materiality of sound recordings, legal and extralegal economies, practices of listening, sharing and storage. It is the intertwined and reciprocal relationships between these vectors that we elaborate upon in our narrative. In doing so, we are concerned with the rapid emergence in this historical moment of the mobile phone as an exceptionally popular music playback device, the legal and extra-legal practices that afforded this emergence, and the shifts in music-as-commodity as well as music listening that accompany the mobile phone.