The spread was galvanised by the advent of cheap plastic tape cassettes which were produced in the millions till the industry crashed in 2000. Р”Р‡or over five decades, these songs formed the staple of popular music in South Asia and along with Hindi films, was an important cultural export to most countries around Asia and wherever the Indian diaspora had spread. Bollywood music has drawn its inspiration from numerous traditional sources such as Ramleela, nautanki, tamasha and Parsi theatre, as well as from the West, Pakistan, and other Indic musical subcultures. In multi-cultural India, as per film historian Partha Chatterjee, 'the Hindi film song cut through all the language barriers in India, to engage in lively communication with the nation where more than twenty languages are spoken and. The Hindi film song now began to make its presence felt as a predominating characteristic in the culture of the nation and began to assume roles beyond the limited purview of cinema. The Hindi song was such an integral features of Hindi mainstream cinema, besides other characteristics, that post-independence alternative cinema, of which the films of Satyajit Ray are an example, discarded the song and dance motif in its effort to stand apart from mainstream cinema but each having songs embedded in them such that it is incorrect to classify them as 'musicals'. Within the first few years itself, Hindi cinema had produced a variety of films which easily categorised into genres such as 'historicals', 'mythologicals', 'devotional, 'fantasy' etc. In 1934 Hindi film songs began to be recorded on gramophones and later, played on radio channels, giving rise to a new form of mass entertainment in India which was responsive to popular demand. Right from the advent of Indian cinema in 1931, musicals with song numbers have been a regular feature in Indian cinema. However, the practice subsided and subsequent films usually featured between six and ten songs in each production. This was closely followed by Shirheen Farhad (1931) by Jamshedji Framji Madan, also by Madan, which had as many as 42 song sequences strung together in the manner of an opera, and later by Indra Sabha which had as many as 69 song sequences. Hindi film songs are present in Hindi cinema right from the first sound film Alam Ara (1931) by Ardeshir Irani which featured seven songs.

8.1 Top ten since 1985 (Source: Box Office India).

As of 2021, T-Series is the most subscribed YouTube channel with over 170 million subscribers. As of 2017, 216 million Indians use music streaming services such as YouTube, Hungama, Gaana and Saavn. As of 2014, the largest Indian music record label is T-Series with up to 35% share of the Indian market, followed by Sony Music India (the largest foreign-owned label) with up to 25% share, and then Zee Music (which has a partnership with Sony). The industry was dominated by cassette tapes in the 1980s and 1990s, before transitioning to online streaming in the 2000s (bypassing CD and digital downloads).

The Indian music industry is largely dominated by Bollywood soundtracks, which account for nearly 80% of the country's music revenue. In addition, Punjabi is also occasionally used for Bollywood songs. Urdu poetry has had a particularly strong impact on Bollywood songs, where the lyrics draw heavily from Urdu poetry and the ghazal tradition.

Linguistically, Bollywood songs tend to use vernacular Hindustani, mutually intelligible to self-identified speakers of both Hindi and Urdu, while modern Bollywood songs also increasingly incorporate elements of Hinglish.

The first song recorded in India by Gauhar Jaan in 1902 and the first Bollywood film Alam Ara (1931) were under Saregama, India's oldest music label owned by RPSanjiv Goenka Group. Though Hindi films routinely contain many songs and some dance routines, they are not musicals in the Western theatrical sense the music-song-dance aspect is an integral feature of the genre akin to plot, dialogue and other parameters. Hindi film songs are now firmly embedded in North India's popular culture and routinely encountered in North India in marketplaces, shops, during bus and train journeys and numerous other situations. Hindi film songs form a predominant component of Indian pop music, and derive their inspiration from both classical and modern sources. Derived from the song-and-dance routines common in Indian films, Bollywood songs, along with dance, are a characteristic motif of Hindi cinema which gives it enduring popular appeal, cultural value and context. 1735 (Rajasthan)Р”В«ollywood songs, more formally known as Hindi Geet or filmi songs, are songs featured in Bollywood films.

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