Filmi Chakkar

Filmi ("of films") music soundtracks are music produced for India's mainstream motion picture industry and written and performed for Indian cinema. In cinema, music directors make up the main body of composers; the songs are performed by playback singers and the genre represents 72% of the music sales market in India.

Filmi music tends to have appeal across India, Nepal, Pakistan and overseas, especially among the Indian diaspora. Songs are often in different languages depending on the target audience, for example in Hindi or Tamil. Playback singers are usually more noted for their ability to sing rather than their charisma as performers. Filmi playback singers' level of success and appeal is tied to their involvement with film soundtracks of cinema releases with the highest box office ratings.

At the "Filmi Melody: Song and Dance in Indian Cinema" archive presentation at UCLA, filmi was praised as a generally more fitting term for the tradition than "Bombay melody", "suggesting that the exuberant music and melodrama so closely identified with the Hindi commercial cinema produced in Bombay (Mumbai) is truly pan-Indian."

Origins

In the earliest years, filmi music was generally Indian (classical Carnatic, Hindustani, and village folk) in inspiration; over the years, Western elements have increased significantly. However, film soundtracks continue to be very diverse, sometimes fusing genres or reverting to entirely classical music. Examples of this can be found throughout the history of filmi music.

Music directors

R. C. Boral, Harishchandra Bali, Pankaj Mullick, Anil Biswas, Naushad Ali, Khwaja Khurshid Anwar and S. Rajeswara Rao were noteworthy music directors of the 1940s. Rao, who scored the 1948 Tamil '' Chandralekha'', the first all-India hit, continued music directing in Chennai until the 1980s. The 1950s and 1960s, included music composers like Shankar Jaikishan, S. D. Burman, O. P. Nayyar, Madan Mohan, Hemant Kumar, C. Ramchandra