Wow! Airtel's advertising jingle, composed by A R Rahman, is 25 years old! Mind you, this is a full-fledged musical tune, and not merely a callout like 'Paytm Karo' or Britannia's Ting-ting-di-ding. In my view, the most impactful metric to decide how successful this jingle has been is the fact that it is still used by many cars as the default reverse alarm! I still occasionally hear the Airtel advertising jingle blaring out of a car that is reversing and wonder how in the name of Goddess AngaaLaparameshwari did an advertising jingle make it to the automobile industry (completely unrelated sector in context)!! That is one of the most hilariously bizarre subplots in Indian automotive and advertising history 🙂 #advertising #jingle #marketing

Karuppu, to me, was a lot more about potential than execution. Balaji had an excellent set-up that brings (while also exaggerating) a really meaningful human angle in the beginning. It's mostly relatable and you want something to be done about the injustice you see. And when the 'rules' were set, it really made me sit up. Here was a script that doesn't take the easy way out and forces a 'superhero' to adhere to rules of the opponent. But there's exactly just one payoff to that angle, with the hero using one trick to level the playing field. After that, despite a inventive quirk using a 'boundary', all we see is repeated variations of the same use of superhero'dom. No more intelligence or thinking. The ending, clearly inspired by a 2022 film (no spoilers) comes on the back of many similar previous scenes of the same nature. It is well filmed, of course, but by that time, I had lost the patience and also the expectation that there would be some more thought infused in the narrative. There was so much potential in the early stretch and it is a pity that it didn't follow through.

This is an AI-generated video by agency WPP, celebrating the blazing arrival of Ilaiyaraaja with the Tamil film AnnakkiLi in 1976 - 50 years of Ilaiyaraaja's music. There is no doubt that AnnakkiLi was a musical trendsetter and Ilaiyaraaja a genius. But I have a fundamental disconnect with the narrative. The film's central image (a working-class crowd frantically queuing outside a music store to buy a vinyl LP) is consumerist, individualist mythology grafted onto a communal, scarcity-era cultural moment. It transplants a 2020s "hype drop" sensibility into 1976 Tamil Nadu, where very few people even owned a record player. The real story is actually far more remarkable. AnnakkiLi conquered Tamil Nadu with no music video, no streaming, no owned copy for most listeners... just the raw power of melody, transmitted communally through AIR, through thiruvizha loudspeakers, through cinema halls where people returned again and again, primarily to hear the songs. Ilaiyaraaja himself describes this in the film (as a voice-over): one radio turned up loud in a house, and every neighboring house tuning in. That is how music went 'viral' in 1976. The film contains its own better story, but ignores it. My second, deeper disconnect is with the AI-generated sepia and B&W "photographs" peppered through the video. If the film used only video, we'd easily read it as dramatization. But static, weathered imagery triggers a different notion. We're conditioned to treat old photographs as documentary evidence. Using AI-generated stills attempts to turn a romanticized myth into historical proof. It manufactures a false memory of that past... closer to visual gaslighting. The agency likely chose the "queue for the record" narrative because it's more relatable to a 2020s audience. In doing so, they swapped the richer, truer story for a lesser one. PS: There's also a factual error. The radio announcer opens with "You are listening to All India Radio, 101.4 MHz". But 101.4 MHz is FM Rainbow Chennai, launched February 1, 1993, 17 years after AnnakkiLi released (May 14, 1976). FM didn't exist in India in 1976. The announcer would have probably said "AkashvaaNi Madras" on Medium Wave. #music #AI #creativity

"Despite his songs playing on the radio or cassette, it was not like I was a Raaja sir fan then (n the early-2000s and I was not even in my teens). But, as fate would have it, I found Raaja sir again. Or rather rediscovered him in my late 20s. The more I listened to people, directors, writers I admire talk about him, the more I understood why he and his music mean so much to Tamil people. How the songs in the popular parlance are only scratching the surface of the magic he has produced and it would take a life-time to fully to study and absorb the sheer magnitude of what he has done for not just one or two, but four generations in five decades."

Thoroughly enjoyed this new ad for AVT tea, featuring Vijay Sethupathi and Rana Daggubati (agency: Turrino). It's a simple premise of the duo planning to have tea together and start exchanging notes on their favorite tea-drinking moments from their lives. Every one of their experience is divided by geography - Chennai vs. Hyderabad. Tamil vs. Telugu. But two things unite them. AVT tea, of course, is one of them, but it was the other unifying factor that charmed me effortlessly, considering the multilingual proficiency and state-agnostic (particular in these 2 states) popularity of the person. What/who is that? Watch the ad :)

2022 was my personal inflection point with regard to Spotify! In my long drives from Bengaluru to Coimbatore, my go-to music is Ilayaraja's songs across Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada films. I had painstakingly collected mp3s over the years of so many songs and I used to play them off a USB drive in my car. But in 2022, I created a mega playlist of Ilayaraja music on Spotify and it played flawlessly on the highway, even in stretches with spotty connectivity (the offline feature works well). So, this is really not a surprise, but it is still a remarkable achievement in India by Spotify because of how India is perceived when it comes to pricing software products - 'free' is assumed to be default, if not 'low price'. It also helped that there are no credible competitors left. Airtel's Wynk, Bytedance's Resso, and Hungama Music have shut down. Apple Music and Amazon Music do not compete as standalone music streaming businesses - they are both ecosystem plays within Amazon Prime and Apple. Gaana is a tragicomic story - it raised over $200 million in its lifetime, and was last valued at around $580 million, but was acquired by Radio Mirchi’s parent for a paltry Rs 25 lakhs in 2024! Still, this means Spotify had to really work hard to convert free users into paying subscribers by making paying for music a habit. While I do not use Spotify's personalized playlists (the reason why I make my own new music playlists on Milliblog), I can see how much they helped in creating a sticky habit among listeners. For comparison, YouTube Music excels at catalog scale and remixes but trails in playlist curation and social/habit-forming features and here, Spotify has done really well. So, it's a combination of global resources, hyper-local personalization, and disciplined execution that led Spotify crack the paywall in India where others largely didn’t. Spotify played a long game in a market trained to expect everything for free. Competitors either surrendered to that expectation, relied on ecosystem lock-in, or failed to build personalization depth. PS: That Ilayaraja mega playlist I was referring to in my post above - it has 256 songs and is called 'Travel Raja' :) In case you are interested: tinyurl.com/travelrajaspotif… #streaming #music #subscription