The Ragascape of Hindustani Music: VI

Methodology and the data source

Research design for this study had first to determine the set of Raga-s to be considered.  The list of “Candidate” Raga-s was compiled by merging the under-graduate and post-graduate syllabi of the major teaching universities and examining bodies granting certifications/ degrees/ diplomas in Hindustani music. This list was submitted for suggestions/ approval to a panel of musicians known for their vast Raga repertoire and academic orientation. Through this two-tier process, a list of 97 Raga-s was finalized, for which audience engagement measures were to be computed.

For compiling the data, the YouTube platform was searched for each Raga. The coverage of “significant” musicians performing each raga was attempted as a census (100% coverage), and not as a sample.  The assessment of “significance” utilized my own knowledge of musicianship over the last century on the national as well as regional levels. Considering the global scope of the enquiry and the diversity of material, my judgement of “significance” could have been less than 100% defensible. Care was taken to include significant musicians representing (i) vocal music and all significant instruments (ii) Dhrupad, Khayal, and Thumree genres (iii) contemporary/ fusion genres where recordings explicitly claimed and performed Raga-based music (iv) musicianship originating in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan performing Raga-based music (v) musicianship originating in the US, Europe with credible performing attainments (vi) musicianship originating from the Carnatic tradition but performing Hindustani/ shared Raga-s in Hindustani style.

Media researchers have found that YouTube on-screen data is singularly unhelpful for systematic research. This would seem intentional because unambiguous data can be used for competitive purposes (can help some musicians at the cost of others). This can jeopardize YouTube’s impartial status as a media owner/ platform provider, and damage its commercial interests. Having conducted a major study in 2015 based on YouTube data, (Refer Chapters 15 through 20, in The Musician and His Art – Essays on Hindustani music: DK Printworld, New Delhi 2019) I had developed a method of usable data acquisition from YouTube. This method obliged me to personally create every one of the 8100 records for analysis. Despite utmost diligence in database creation, I am unable to vouch 100% for the soundness of my results. YouTube’s evasive purpose is fulfilled.  

A notional limit of 100 data-points was envisaged for each Raga. The data-base compilation was completed in the last week of March 2020 and the first week of April 2020.

The Audience Engagement Indicator has been computed as follows:

 Limitations of YouTube data

YouTube as data source is far from ideal for systematic research, and that I am using it in full awareness of its limitations. Despite this, it is now being used by researchers even in the more advanced research environments. Presumably because it has usable value, its use will not stop; and because of its known limitations, the controversy over its value will not end.

The perception of limitations will obviously be guided by the researcher’s objectives – what he is looking for, and what he may instead be measuring. My concerns are focused on the following infirmities.

YouTube reports “views” for each upload. The basic question is: what is a view? What minimum duration of exposure qualifies a “visit” as a “view”? The information displayed on the screen does not distinguish between a 10% viewing of a video and a 40% viewing of it. The difference matters to me.

The duration aspect of viewership is also connected to a change in YouTube policy some years ago. There was once a duration limit on uploads. This affected Hindustani music very significantly, as most performances exceeded the limit, and had to be split into 2, 3, and sometimes 4 parts for upload. After the duration limit was lifted, mostly complete performances were uploaded. Looking at that data today, we implicitly equate the engagement measure of a concert split into 3 parts with that of a complete performance. This seems unreasonable.  

YouTube viewership data is cumulative from the date of uploading. By using that data, I am implicitly accepting one view of 2010 on par with one view of 2018.  Intuitively, we know the assumption is flawed. During this period, YouTube content has changed substantially, viewership has grown exponentially, and audience profile for every kind of content has almost certainly changed radically. No correction factor can help.

Another problem with cumulative data is that it effectively equates 20,000 views accumulated over 20 months with 40,000 views accumulated over 40 months. Intuitively, this equation does not look reasonable. If the propensity of a recording to accumulate viewers is important, 40,000 over 4 years is more valuable. And, if the speed of audience accumulation is considered important, 20,000 over 20 months is more valuable. YouTube data is unhelpful in this respect.

The YouTube audience is global, and so is the audience for Hindustani music. But, we have no data on the geographical spread. By implication, we are accepting that foreign audiences of Hindustani music and foreign musicians —across all nationalities and cultures -- have the same relationship with the music, as Indians have. This is unrealistic. The opacity of the geographical spread can easily mislead us – as it has the possibility of doing in this study.

YouTube viewership – by whatever criterion registered – is a partially manipulated expression of audience engagement. This is because a sophisticated program guides the viewer into “viewing” content beyond his purpose, and spending much more time on YouTube than was necessary or planned. As a result, the numbers we see include “incidental” viewership. A separate reporting of the primary (search word) and incidental viewership would be very helpful.   

Although YouTube is a video medium, the nature of the content is itself not uniform. In fact, even the notion of “viewership” may be irrelevant to a lot of the content. Do 100 people listening to an audio recording with just a photograph of the musician on the screen represent the same level of audience engagement as 100 people watching him or another musician in action on film? If not, how much can we depend on a standard measure of audience engagement across different content formats?

With specific reference to Hindustani music, YouTube neither offers a uniform media experience to its audience, nor publicly provides a rigorous measurement of audience engagement. What, then, does YouTube data provide? It cannot be said to provided “statistics”, but can suggest “orders of magnitude”. Inferences can be drawn judiciously from its analysis, with every inference reflecting the analyst’s awareness of data limitations.

YouTube has invested heavily in generating analytics for user management and advertising value assessment. At some stage, it will have to start understanding itself as a cultural force. It will then benefit by cultivating communities of media researchers through a more transparent stance with respect to its data assets.

Until this happens, the Indian musicologist should be content with indicative inferences. Is this better than the “Delphi method” of polling 10 veteran connoisseurs and observers of the music scene? I believe so because, firstly, surveying this population globally is an almost impossible task, and secondly, present-day oracles – whether of Delphi or anywhere else -- are susceptible to "personal" preferences, biases and prejudices; impersonally generated numbers are not.

Concluded

The Ragascape of Hindustani Music: V

Whose music engages on YouTube?

We started with the hypothesis that the Ragascape is a dynamic cultural force constantly shaping, and being shaped by, the world of performance. Imperceptible changes take place every day, and   accumulate perhaps over a generation or two to become visible periodically as paradigm shifts. YouTube holds the music of perhaps four generations of musicians and has two generations of (adult) listeners having access to it. All the music is probably not engaging all the living generations of listeners. The data at our disposal allows us to examine the interplay of generations, though superficially.

I draw upon Jose Ortega Y Gasset’s landmark work “Man and Crisis” (George, Allen & Unwin, London, 1959) for his perspective on history as a product of inter-generational interactions.

Extracts from “Man and Crisis”

 “Community of date and space are the primary attributes of a generation. Together, they signify the sharing of an essential destiny. The keyboard of environment on which coevals play the Sonata Apassionata of their lives is in its fundamental structure one and the same. This identity of destiny produces in coevals certain secondary coincidences which are summed up in the unity of their style. A generation is an integrated manner of existence or, if you prefer, a fashion of living, which fixes itself indelibly on the individual…

“In the “today”, in every “today”, various generations co-exist and the relations which are established between them according to the different conditions of their ages, represent the dynamic system of attractions and repulsions, of agreement and controversy, which at any given moment makes up the reality of historic life. The concept of generations, converted into a method of historic investigation consists in nothing more than projecting the structure upon the past.

“A generation is the aggregate of men who are the same age. …. The concept of age is not (however) the stuff of mathematics, but of life. Age, then, is not a date but a zone of dates.”

For understanding the historical process as an interaction between various co-existing generations, he proposes the following analysis of generations:

According to Ortega, lives can be divided into five phases of approximately fifteen years each. (1) Childhood: 0-15, (2) Youth: 15-30, (3) Initiation: 30-45, (4) Dominance: 45-60, (5) Old age: 60+. In some ways, Ortega suggests, the face of the world changes every 15 years. However, he classifies the third and fourth stages, representing the 30-year period from age 30 to 60 as the historically significant phases of an individual’s/ generation’s life.

In his 30’s man acquaints himself with the world into which he has fallen, and in which he must live. Between 30 and 45, he begins to react on his own account against the world that he has encountered, starts to reshape his world, and learns to defend it against the generations that rule it. Between 45 and 60, he devotes himself fully to the development of the inspirations he has received between 30 and 45. The period of 30-45 is his period of gestation, creation and conflict, while the period between 45 and 60 is his stage for achieving dominance and command over his world.

Following Ortega’s argument, I divided all the musicians covered by this 97-Raga study into three broad categories.

(a)  Contemporary: This category consists of currently active musicians, typically between the ages of 30 and 65.

(b)  Modern: This category consists of musicians whose most influential period spanned the last quarter of the 20^th century (1975-2000). Many of them are alive, above 65, and still have a following.

(c)   Vintage: This category consists of musicians whose prime performing period ended in, or before, 1975.

I regard 1975 as a defensible borderline between “Modern” and “Pre-Modern” (Vintage) Hindustani music. The significance of the year is notional and symbolic more than historic. Ameer Khan’s demise that year all but ended the era of classicism. Starting around then, the romanticists captured Khayal vocalism, to dominate the stage for two generations. This was also around the time when the first generation of post-independence musicians began surfacing on the concert platform. Incidentally, by this time, concert length recordings on Long Playing and Audio-Cassette media had commercialized Hindustani music, and stimulated an international market for it.

I isolated the “Modern” segment from the “Contemporary” on the criterion that, beyond the age of 65, even a living and active musician is past his influence period. The theoretical basis for this proposition, following the argument of Jose Ortega Y Gasett (Man & Crisis), is discussed above.  

Birth dates were not available for all the musicians covered by this study. The computations may, therefore, lack chronological precision. A different or more refined approach to this query is possible, and may lead to different conclusions. I am sharing my results fully aware of the limitations.

The aggregate rating (views/month) for all uploads across 97 Raga-s is 526. A sub-set of the data, music of the Contemporary generation, shows a rating of 721 points, while the Modern and Vintage generation ratings report 449 and 223 points respectively. From contemporary to Modern music, we observe a 30% drop in audience engagement levels. From the Modern to the Vintage, we observe another 50% drop. Thus, from contemporary music to vintage music, we observe a 70% drop.

Aesthetic Obsolescence

In a broad sense, this pattern supports the idea I have explored in my earlier writings -- that there is no such thing as “timeless music”, that aesthetic obsolescence is a reality. (Refer: Chapter 1.5: in Hindustani Music – a tradition in transition. DK Printworld. 2005)

The proposition is that Hindustani music, as performed, is an interactive product created by musicians along with their audiences. Every musician is a product of his generation, and tends to communicate most effectively with audiences of his own generation. Allied to this is the idea that audiences relate best to music that they grew up with, and develop a form of aesthetic sclerosis after a certain age. As a result, the greater the distance of time between a listener and the music, the lesser would be his ability to relate to it. Declining engagement across aging segments is therefore expected, but also supported by a demographic reality. The audience that relates well to the music of the older musicians is itself old, and steadily dwindling in numbers.

The proposition is simply elucidated by relating the generations mentioned here notionally to approximate periods. Contemporary musicians: Born: 1960 +, Modern musicians: Born:  between 1930-1960, Vintage musicians: Born: between 1900-1930. The patterns evident in the graph here are effectively telling us that the world has changed totally since the “Grandfather” generation was setting the rules. None of the influences operating in the Grandfather’s times are operating any longer. The “Grandson” generation is now in command. It is natural that his music would neither be similar to that of the Grandfather generation, nor meet the Grandfather’s approval.  

Aesthetic obsolescence may not, however, totally explain the loss of audience engagement we notice. There is also an element of technological/ acoustic obsolescence hidden behind these numbers. A lot of Hindustani music is in monochrome video, or audio of varying/ indifferent acoustic quality. These weaknesses may be more prominent in modern and vintage segments than in the contemporary segment. Technological factors may depress the engagement of audiences. On the other hand, the scarcity / vintage / nostalgia value of some Modern and Vintage uploads may elevate their ratings. We have no way of knowing how the two forces balance out.  

The combined effect of aesthetic and technological obsolescence could be assessed by running a linear correlation between the three ratings series. The coefficient of correlation between the Contemporary and Modern series is 0.33; the coefficient between the Modern and the Vintage is 0.29, and the coefficient between Contemporary and Vintage is 0.22. This is possibly as sharp a “generation gap” as could have been measured from so unlikely a database.

The drop in audience engagement levels across generational divides is, by and large, expected. This line of enquiry permits us to go a bit farther – to map three different Ragascapes, one for each generation. Though the data-base does not permit authoritative conclusions, some indications are available. Table 3 shows the “Top-30” Raga-s on the audience engagement rating under (i) contemporary (ii) modern and (iii) vintage categories.

Continuity and Change

We observe that 25 of the top-30 Raga-s are common to the three lists. This suggests a considerably stable Ragascape in terms of visibility on the horizon. The low correlations between the three series highlight how differently today’s audiences relate to the same Raga-s performed by different generations of musicians.  The divergences surface sharply in the following detail.

The “Contemporary top-30” list has five Raga-s that are not amongst the top-30 of the other two groups. (i) Jaunpuri (ii) Madhuvanti (iii) Multani (iv) Nat Bhairav and (v) Shuddha Sarang. Based on our results, these five Raga-s may be considered distinctly/ prominently “Contemporary” in their appeal. In the “Modern” generation top-30, three Raga-s are exclusive to this list. They are (i) Jaijaiwanti (ii) Madhmad Sarang (iii) Sohini. The “Vintage” list has only two Raga-s exclusive to its top-30 table: (i) Pahadi and (ii) Shree.

 

These are, once again, analytical outputs suggestive of the present-day reality. We have no evidence here to explain how and why each of these “star” Raga-s of each generation acquire their special status.

By unselectively hosting the music of three or more generations of musicians, YouTube has become a pivotal player in the cultural processes of Hindustani music. Its role is most potent as a platform for contemporary music and musicians. Contemporary musicians feed it with content because platform is engaging relevant audiences who seek/need a connection with contemporary music. Musicians use it for accessing the faceless global audience, for monitoring the music and activities of their rivals, and for circumventing the hold of intermediaries over the concert market. Because of its broad-based usefulness, the volume of music in the Contemporary segment is likely to be growing the fastest, bringing with it a growing usefulness.

Despite technological and aesthetic obsolescence, the Modern and Vintage inventories on YouTube are valuable for their cultural significance. They service the musical needs of the older generations of listeners, who may not relate to contemporary music. Modern and Vintage recordings also provide the reference point against which contemporary music establishes its conformity and registers its dissent. All contemporary music will, some day, cease to be “contemporary” and become Modern, and ultimately Vintage. Besides “internal” accretions, YouTube also receives modern and vintage uploads from individual and institutional collectors. As a result, YouTube is becoming an increasingly valuable cultural resource, the kind of which would be beyond the capacity of any individual or institutional collector to assemble, maintain, and offer online.  

The pedagogical value of this asset is limited only by the imagination of our educators. Almost every facet of Hindustani music can be taught more efficiently with the aid of landmark recordings than an exclusive reliance on personal tutoring or books. Of the three processes in music making – ideation, individuation, and ritualization – it is ideation that distinguishes the great musician from the merely good. And, there cannot be a more effective ideational guide than an archive so generously endowed.  

The contemporary Hindustani music inventory on YouTube is aiding the creation of an “efficient market” for classical music talent, while the modern and vintage repositories are shaping the YouTube into a valuable archive. YouTube policies, terms of use and commercial practices are global, and designed to generate profits for YouTube. In the process of pursuing profits globally, YouTube has created a valuable cultural asset for Hindustani music. The continued success of YouTube policies worldwide will decide how secure and useful India’s cultural asset remains in its hands, and for how long.

... Continued in Part VI

The Ragascape of Hindustani Music: IV

Instrumental music and the Ragascape

In the post-independence era, the re-engineering of older instruments, the entry of newer instruments, developments in sound engineering and outstanding musicianship are believed to have helped instrumental music challenge vocalism in terms of popularity, if not also stature. Dr. Ashok Ranade, the eminent musicologist, believed that the major instruments have, by now, developed their own distinctive languages for communicating the Raga experience, and no longer require vocal music as a reference point for the validation of their idiom. The results of this study would advocate a cautious stance on this matter.

Audience Engagement Indicators are reported separately (Table 1 in Part I) for vocal music and instrumental music, along with the composite rating for two modes of presentation for each of the 97 Raga-s. A correlation run on the two series establishes that the vocal music rating (Coefficient: 0.94) is a more categorical determinant of the composite rating than the instrumental music rating (Coefficient: 0.85). This pattern does not suggest the ascendency of instrumental music over vocal music in the musical culture.

The gross numbers do, indeed, exhibit a bias in favor of instrumental music. But, this bias is easily explained by the large constituency Hindustani music has cultivated abroad since the mid-1960s. Although this constituency does have some interest in vocalism through the Dhrupad genre, it is primarily attuned to instrumental music. This difference can, sometimes, show up dramatically in YouTube numbers and distort our perceptions of the reality.

Graph 2 plots the Views  /month for instrumental music and vocal music for each of the 97 Raga-s in descending order of the composite rating score. The plot shows moderate correlation (Coefficient of correlation: 0.66) between the two data series. The distorting instrumental music data-points (outliers) can be seen at the higher end of the audience engagement continuum.

Is the foreign constituency of Hindustani music large enough to misinform our interpretation of YouTube viewership?  We do not have figures from YouTube. But, as indicative data, I have country-wise statistics of readership generated over 12 years for my blog http://swaratala.blogspot.com. The blog has registered a total of 800,000 page views from the date of inception to the present (May 15, 2020). Of these, 400,000 page views originated from USA, and only 200,000 page views originated in India. It is significant that 75% of my page views have originated outside India, and that USA accounts for as much as 50% of the page views on my blog.

Though YouTube and my blog are not comparable, the logic of the numbers remains. Indian audiences being outnumbered by foreign audiences (including overseas Indian citizens) seems understandable in the present context. Internet penetration in the US is much higher than in India, and Hindustani music enthusiasts outside India would need to depend much more on online sources for their needs than Indian audiences would. This reality can possibly explain some of the counter-intuitive indications emerging from this study.

... Continued in Part V