India has one of the most distinctive relationships with music videos in the world. Long before YouTube made the format global, and years before MTV brought it to living rooms, Indian filmmakers were producing elaborate, cinematic song sequences that functioned as music videos in everything but name. This isn’t just an interesting historical footnote – it explains why music videos hold such an extraordinarily powerful grip on Indian popular culture today, shaping fashion, language, and public life at a scale that is difficult to overstate.
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The cinematic origins: song picturization as India’s first music video
In Western cinema, songs were typically contained within the logic of a scene – a character performing at a nightclub, for instance. Bollywood took a fundamentally different approach, treating song sequences as a distinct storytelling layer that could transport characters into an entirely separate visual and emotional world. These sequences, known as song picturizations, were often the most expensive and creatively ambitious portions of a film – involving grand sets, hundreds of background dancers, and intricate choreography.
The moment that truly defined this tradition came in Raj Kapoor’s 1951 film Awaara. The film contained a now-legendary dream sequence for the song “Ghar Aaya Mera Pardesi” – a visually spectacular, nearly nine-minute production featuring shifting sets designed to represent heaven and hell, elaborate costumes, and complex choreography. This sequence took three months to shoot and was the first ever set constructed at RK Studios. It was unlike anything Indian audiences had seen and set a new benchmark: a song could be a standalone cinematic event.
Filmmakers were quick to understand the commercial logic behind this. Song picturization became a powerful pre-release marketing weapon. In an era without social media or digital advertising, a film’s songs were released weeks in advance on radio platforms like All India Radio and the popular programme Binaca Geetmala. Audiences who heard a hit song on the radio would become eager to see how it had been “picturized” on screen. The visual promise of the song sold the film’s fantasy – glamorous locations, fashionable stars, lavish sets – before a single ticket was purchased. This model, established in the 1950s, cemented music videos as a key film publicity tool, a practice that continues in updated form today.
The Chitrahaar era: music videos enter the living room
For decades, the primary venue for experiencing these song picturizations was the cinema hall. That changed decisively in the 1980s, when television began bringing them directly into people’s homes. At the time, India had a single national broadcaster: Doordarshan. Within this landscape of extremely limited content, a weekly programme called Chitrahaar became a cultural phenomenon of the first order.
Chitrahaar first aired in 1982 on DD National. The programme – whose name literally translates as “a garland of pictures” – aired twice a week at 8 pm on Wednesdays and Fridays, and consisted of thirty minutes of Bollywood song clips. It was widely watched throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and for millions of Indians without access to cinema halls, it was the primary window onto Bollywood’s world of glamour, fashion, and spectacle.
Chitrahaar (and its Sunday counterpart, Rangoli) did something more than just broadcast songs. They created a shared national experience. Songs featured on a Wednesday broadcast would be the topic of conversation in schools, offices, and markets by Thursday morning – making it, in effect, the original viral content. The programme demonstrated conclusively that the public appetite for music video content extended far beyond the cinema hall. It solidified the music video’s place in everyday domestic life.
The 1990s explosion: satellite TV, MTV, and the birth of Indi-pop
The early 1990s brought a transformation that reshaped the entire media landscape. India’s economic liberalization opened the country to satellite television, and with the advent of cable television in 1992, Indian TV suddenly had a young urban audience that existing channels had never catered to. MTV and Channel V arrived and began broadcasting music video content around the clock.
Around 1994, Star TV ended its contract with MTV, which paved the way for both Channel V and MTV India to develop separately, each introducing homegrown Video Jockeys (VJs) who spoke the same Hindi-English hybrid their young audience used. These VJs – figures like Purab Kohli, Nikhil Chinapa, and others – became celebrities in their own right, creating a new cultural archetype that sat between Bollywood stardom and street-level cool. The music channels had created, as one observer noted, a space between mainstream family television and the big screen.
This new ecosystem had two major effects on the music video landscape in India:
Film music gained a permanent, round-the-clock platform. Bollywood producers no longer had to wait for a fortnightly Chitrahaar slot. Songs could enter heavy rotation immediately, dramatically amplifying their marketing power. A new genre – Indi-pop – was born and thrived. Artists like Alisha Chinai, Lucky Ali, Baba Sehgal, Euphoria, and Silk Route became superstars based entirely on their music videos, not on film connections. For the first time, an artist outside the film industry could reach a national mass audience. The early 1990s were a defining period for the Chitrahaar generation – music on television was no longer restricted to a biweekly Doordarshan programme, and it was now about more than just Bollywood.
The modern music video industry
Today, the Indian music video industry operates on an entirely different scale. India has over 550 million YouTube users, making it one of the platform’s largest markets globally, and the country’s music industry is projected to reach approximately ₹7,800 crore (around US$889 million) by 2026, growing at a compound annual rate of 13.4%. YouTube has become the single most important platform for music video distribution, with domestic Indian music expected to account for 78% of an estimated 471 billion streams by the end of 2025.
Production standards have risen to match this reach. Modern Indian music videos are no longer simple performance recordings. They are cinematic short films, shot in foreign locations – London, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Europe – with top-tier directors, cinematographers, and visual effects teams. International collaboration is now standard practice: it is common for Indian artists to feature performers from abroad, or for videos to incorporate local artists and dancers from filming locations to add an authentic regional feel. CGI and animation are routine in electronic and hip-hop productions.
The relationship between music videos and fashion is particularly powerful. Globally, musicians have long been known for experimenting with new styles and collaborating with fashion designers, but in India this influence is especially direct and fast-moving. What a star wears in a hit music video becomes what millions of people want to wear within days. Specific clothing items, hairstyles, and makeup looks from successful videos immediately become trends, while hook steps – simple, memorable choreographic moves embedded in each video – are engineered to be replicated on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, ensuring the song spreads virally. New slang and catchphrases from song lyrics regularly enter everyday speech.
Bollywood music videos have consistently set the terms for popular fashion, from Madhuri Dixit’s iconic looks in the 1990s to the streetwear aesthetics of today’s rap and hip-hop videos. The music video has evolved from a film publicity tool into a full-spectrum cultural engine – simultaneously a commercial product, an art form, a fashion statement, and a social media event.
Regional music and the digital turn
One significant development of the post-YouTube era is the growing influence of regional music. South Indian and vernacular music markets – from Tollywood (Telugu) and Kollywood (Tamil) to Punjabi pop – are now significant drivers of music video consumption, particularly on YouTube, where regional content has a substantially wider presence than on audio streaming platforms. International streams of Indian artists increased by over 2,000% between 2019 and 2023, and India’s music video culture is no longer just a national story but a global one.
The arc of the Indian music video – from a nine-minute black-and-white dream sequence in 1951, to a Wednesday-night ritual on Doordarshan, to a billion-stream YouTube phenomenon – reflects the broader arc of Indian media itself: a constant negotiation between tradition and transformation, between local identity and global aspiration.
What do you think? Does the dominance of high-budget, foreign-location music videos risk disconnecting artists from the everyday realities of their audiences? And with regional music now competing directly with Bollywood on digital platforms, how might the definition of an “Indian music video” change in the next decade?
References
- https://serenademagazine.com/the-influence-of-bollywood-on-indian-music-trends/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awaara
- https://roobla.com/22821/awaara-1951/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitrahaar
- https://www.wionews.com/photos/remembering-9-iconic-doordarshan-shows-as-channel-celebrates-60th-anniversary-250043
- https://www.thejuggernaut.com/mtv-india-channel-v-video-jockeys-trendsetting-legacy
- https://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/what-killed-indipop-111060400036_1.html
- https://www.ibef.org/blogs/india-s-music-industry-today-streaming-high-growing-fast
- https://wedoeffects.com/blog-post/music-video-production-in-india/
- https://www.hercampus.com/school/casper-libero/how-major-film-productions-and-music-videos-are-shaping-global-fashion-trends/
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