[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":181},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-en-cassette-breaks-the-monopoly":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"category":147,"description":148,"era":149,"extension":150,"featured":151,"heroImage":152,"imageCredit":153,"imageLicense":154,"imageSource":155,"meta":156,"navigation":151,"path":157,"rawYear":158,"seo":159,"sources":160,"stem":179,"translated":151,"url":163,"__hash__":180},"storiesEn\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fcassette-breaks-the-monopoly.md","When the Cassette Broke the Broadcaster's Monopoly",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":137},"minimark",[9,13,16,21,24,27,35,38,42,45,48,51,55,58,61,64,67,70,74,93,100,110,114,117,124,127,131,134],[10,11,12],"p",{},"Somewhere in a cupboard in Sri Lanka there is a cassette with a title written on the shell in ballpoint. Nobody at a radio station approved it. No panel graded the singer. No record company decided the song was marketable. Somebody recorded it, somebody copied it, and somebody bought it in a shop that also sold batteries.",[10,14,15],{},"That object — cheap, blank, recordable, copyable — did something to Sinhala music that no artistic movement had managed. It removed the state's veto.",[17,18,20],"h2",{"id":19},"the-chain-of-permission","The chain of permission",[10,22,23],{},"To understand what changed, you have to see how tightly the previous arrangement held.",[10,25,26],{},"From the 1900s to the 1960s a Sinhala song reached the public along one narrow path. First a record company had to want it, and the companies were foreign — HMV, Columbia, Parlophone, Odeon — with their factories in Calcutta and their agents in Colombo department stores. Then, after 1925, it had to get onto the radio, and after independence the radio was the state.",[10,28,29,30,34],{},"The national broadcaster did not simply transmit music; it manufactured it. It auditioned musicians and graded them A, B or C, and the grade decided who was hired and who was heard. It employed scriptwriters whose job included reviewing song texts before broadcast and sending unsuitable lyrics back for revision. It invented and promoted a genre, ",[31,32,33],"em",{},"sarala gee",", to be the proper national music, and it rationed the genres it distrusted — group songs, pop, baila — to a few minutes of airtime a week.",[10,36,37],{},"The consequence was structural rather than dramatic. A song the station would not play was, for practical purposes, a song that did not exist. There was nowhere else for it to go.",[17,39,41],{"id":40},"a-plastic-box-with-two-spools","A plastic box with two spools",[10,43,44],{},"The compact cassette had been on the international market since the 1960s, but the moment it mattered in South Asia can be dated fairly closely. The Gramophone Company of India — HMV's regional arm, whose Calcutta plant had pressed Sinhala records for decades — began manufacturing cassettes in December 1976. Within a few years the same company would be turning out tens of millions a year, and its own veterans described the effect on the record business bluntly: the cassette \"restricted the growth of records.\"",[10,46,47],{},"In Sri Lanka the timing coincided with something larger. The economy was opened in 1977, and imported consumer electronics — players, recorders, blank tape — arrived in quantity. A cassette was portable, it survived heat and bad roads better than vinyl, it played in a bus and in a three-wheeler, and, crucially, anybody with two machines could make another one.",[10,49,50],{},"New Sri Lankan labels grew up around the format. The names on the sleeves of the period — Tharanga, Singlanka, Torana, Ransilu, Sarasavi, Supertone, Victory, Singha — belong to a domestic industry that pressing plants abroad had never allowed.",[17,52,54],{"id":53},"three-new-classes-of-participant","Three new classes of participant",[10,56,57],{},"The clearest analysis of what followed is a short Sri Lankan study: Vinusha Wijewickrama's paper on transformations in the Sinhala song creation process, presented at the Peradeniya University Research Sessions in 2012.",[10,59,60],{},"Its first argument is that the cassette did not merely change how songs were distributed; it changed who took part. The people involved in Sinhala song, the study says, now fell into three categories: those who created songs, those who produced and reproduced them, and the audience. The middle category is the new one. Reproduction — copying, duplicating, selling — became a role in the music economy that had not previously existed outside the record companies.",[10,62,63],{},"Its second argument is about causes. Sri Lankans took up cassette technology, the study holds, as a result of the political, economic and social changes of the 1970s. This was not a gadget arriving in a vacuum. It arrived in the decade of shortages and rationing, of the 1971 insurrection, of the 1977 rupture and the open economy.",[10,65,66],{},"Its third argument is the uncomfortable one. Among the changes the study identifies is \"the emergence of a group who were economically well-off who also wanted popularity as artists\" — that is, people rich enough to buy their own fame by financing their own cassettes. Alongside that it records rising expectations of economic stability among popular artists, and, in the study's own words, \"the search for the freedom of expression by artists through their songs.\"",[10,68,69],{},"Those two things arrived together, and they are the same phenomenon seen from opposite ends. Once a song no longer needed anyone's permission, it also no longer needed anyone's approval of its quality.",[17,71,73],{"id":72},"what-got-through","What got through",[10,75,76,77,80,81,84,85,88,89,92],{},"The freedom was not theoretical. Gunadasa Kapuge, pushed out of the national broadcaster's Colombo operation and eventually sent on compulsory leave in January 1990, put out cassette after cassette through the 1980s — ",[31,78,79],{},"Dampatin La Sanda"," in 1980, ",[31,82,83],{},"Seethala Sanda Eliye"," in 1981, ",[31,86,87],{},"Unmada Sithuwam"," in 1983 — and then took ",[31,90,91],{},"Kampana"," to the stage as a one-man show and played it close to a thousand times in two years. His argument with the state cost him his job; it did not cost him his audience.",[10,94,95,96,99],{},"Nanda Malini produced some twenty-five cassettes. Clarence Wijewardena, having spent the sixties fighting for record releases and airtime, spent the eighties writing for other singers, running a multi-track studio and issuing the country's first non-stop music cassette; the ",[31,97,98],{},"Sunday Times"," summed up his later career as the era \"when records gave way to cassettes.\"",[10,101,102,103,106,107,109],{},"The live counterpart was the solo concert series — Victor Rathnayake's ",[31,104,105],{},"SA",", Nanda Malini's long-running series, Kapuge's ",[31,108,91],{}," — which sold tickets and then sold the tape of the show. Between the cassette and the stage, an artist could build a career without ever satisfying a grading panel.",[17,111,113],{"id":112},"the-part-nobody-has-written-down","The part nobody has written down",[10,115,116],{},"There is a large hole in the middle of this history, and it should be named rather than papered over.",[10,118,119,120,123],{},"The same properties that freed the Sinhala song made it impossible to protect. A cassette that anybody can copy is a cassette that anybody can copy without paying. Sri Lanka's Code of Intellectual Property Act came in 1979 — Clarence Wijewardena was among the artists consulted on it — but the legal literature is clear that collection and enforcement never really worked. The one book-length study of the subject, Chamila Talagala's ",[31,121,122],{},"Performers' Rights in Sri Lanka: Singers' Melancholia",", concludes that the imported rights regime \"does not seem to reflect the established practices and relationships within Sri Lanka's contemporary music industry,\" and that performers' concerns cluster around two themes: belonging and remuneration.",[10,125,126],{},"Beyond that, almost nothing has been published. Who ran the duplicating operations, what a pirate cassette cost against a legitimate one, whether anyone was ever prosecuted, how the cassette shops and the bus-music trade worked — none of it has been documented in anything reachable in English. It is one of the most consequential undocumented episodes in modern Sri Lankan cultural history, and the people who lived it are still alive to be asked.",[17,128,130],{"id":129},"what-we-know-and-how-we-know-it","What we know, and how we know it",[10,132,133],{},"The three classes of participant, the 1970s political and economic causes, the artists rich enough to buy their fame and the phrase \"the search for the freedom of expression by artists through their songs\" all come from Vinusha Wijewickrama's 2012 Peradeniya paper, whose abstract is the only part of it available online. The December 1976 start of cassette manufacturing is from a hobbyist account of the Gramophone Company of India and describes that company's Indian plant, not a Sri Lankan one; no date for the beginning of cassette manufacture inside Sri Lanka has been established here. The cassette discographies of Kapuge, Nanda Malini and Wijewardena, and the labels named above, come from their Wikipedia articles and the sources cited there.",[10,135,136],{},"What is missing is the commercial record. There is no published account of cassette piracy or its enforcement in Sri Lanka, no study of the retail trade, and no figures for how many cassettes were sold or copied. Until that work is done, the claim made here — that the cassette ended the broadcaster's monopoly on what a Sinhala song was allowed to be — rests on a short conference paper and on the visible careers of the artists it freed.",{"title":138,"searchDepth":139,"depth":139,"links":140},"",2,[141,142,143,144,145,146],{"id":19,"depth":139,"text":20},{"id":40,"depth":139,"text":41},{"id":53,"depth":139,"text":54},{"id":72,"depth":139,"text":73},{"id":112,"depth":139,"text":113},{"id":129,"depth":139,"text":130},"technology","For fifty years a Sinhala song had to be approved before anyone could hear it. Then came a plastic box with two spools, and a song refused by the state could still be sold.","1970s-1990s","md",true,"\u002Fimages\u002Fstories\u002Fcassette-breaks-the-monopoly.webp","Shams948","CC0","https:\u002F\u002Fcommons.wikimedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FFile:Compact_Cassette_05.jpg",{},"\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fcassette-breaks-the-monopoly",1976,{"title":5,"description":148},[161,164,167,170,173,176],{"title":162,"url":163},"Vinusha Wijewickrama, 'Transformations in the Sinhala song creation process with the introduction of cassette recording technology' — Peradeniya University Research Sessions, 2012","https:\u002F\u002Fir.lib.pdn.ac.lk\u002Fhandle\u002F20.500.14444\u002F1899",{"title":165,"url":166},"'History of gramophone songs in Sri Lanka' — Jayasri Gramophone (hobbyist blog)","http:\u002F\u002Fjayasri-gramophone.blogspot.com\u002F2014\u002F07\u002Fhistory-of-gramophone-songs-in-sri-lanka.html",{"title":168,"url":169},"Clarence Wijewardena — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FClarence_Wijewardena",{"title":171,"url":172},"Gunadasa Kapuge — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FGunadasa_Kapuge",{"title":174,"url":175},"Sooriya Records — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FSooriya_Records",{"title":177,"url":178},"Chamila Talagala, Performers' Rights in Sri Lanka: Singers' Melancholia (Springer, 2019)","https:\u002F\u002Flink.springer.com\u002Fbook\u002F10.1007\u002F978-981-13-6668-0","en\u002Fstories\u002Fcassette-breaks-the-monopoly","u93ftEX7m99x_u23Y7nnKwixHkyrzC8b7eeFpBfDtlE",1787999337625]