Market matters: interdependencies in the Indian media economy

Emergence of the Indian media economy

Technological remediation, rising incomes, regulatory changes and a shifting political terrain have all played a part in the emergence of the Indian media economy in the 21st century. This has been the era in which the media have gained official recognition as a substantive component of India’s economy. Consequently, the disparate arms of infrastructure, capital, regulations, commodities and consumer demand have become more firmly located within a larger dynamic. It would be going too far to suggest this is a seamless convergence and, for various reasons, it seems unlikely that India will ever have a uniform media market. Rather, what we are witnessing is the emergence of a larger ‘economy of markets’. In this context, any systematic analysis of the Indian media economy has to account for the considerable regionalisation, and sometimes intense localisation, that has always been a distinctive feature of the media in India. While the rise of media conglomerates has obvious significance, we also remain attentive to the continuing presence of state institutions as actors in this economy. Equally, the large-scale formalisation of media markets via organised sector enterprises and their acquisitions should not blind us to the continuation of a great deal of disorganised media commerce of all shades. In a society with acute disparities of wealth, literacy and means, the sheer diversity of products and the disparate purposes of mediation work against any singular business model. The rapid profusion of media channels, products and services over the past three decades reaches different segments of the population to a varying extent, and sometimes not at all (see Athique, Parthasarathi and Srinivas, 2018).

Nonetheless, our foundational argument is that it has become imperative to conceptualise an economic domain that is both sufficiently integrated and sufficiently particular to be considered as a distinct entity. Given an economic, as opposed to technological, reading, the signal achievement has been the ‘convergence’ of media processes into an integrated market system. One important distinction to note in this regard is that between the proposition of an Indian media economy (with its particular social, cultural and commercial logics) and a second proposition, namely the mediated economy of India (where processes of mediation increasingly convey operational processes, monetary exchanges and political action) (see Athique, 2018). This further proposition of a ‘mediated economy’ allows us to consider the various ways in which the media economy is becoming integral to the day-to-day operation of other economic sectors, the conduct of government and the public experience. This wider integration plays a central role in situating (and, in many respects, underwriting) India’s media economy. As the complexity of media systems increases, a mediated economy becomes substantially more dependent upon the parallel expansion of the media economy, and vice versa. This mutual connectivity with the wider economic system implies transfers of both value and capital that are not commonly encapsulated within the established accounting of media production. Yet, without these exchanges, the integral function and ultimate value of India’s media economy cannot be made apparent. Thus, for the purposes of analysis, this article frames the media economy as a constellation of markets occupied by various media businesses, integrating both ‘media markets’ in a conventional sense and ‘external’ markets where media systems operate as a carrier or platform.

Market concepts in media research

It has long been recognised that the goods and services, assets and values operative across media processes are necessarily different from the 19th century model of extraction, labour, manufacture and sale that continues to dominate our understanding of ‘industries’ (Albarran, 1996). To begin with, the particularities of mediation processes imply certain characteristics of ‘media markets’ which serve as points of distinction when compared with other markets. In our times, the increasing integration of media systems into political processes, commercial structures and the fabric of everyday life is what elevates ‘media business’ to the status of an economy. Clearly, in explicit comparison to a ‘media industries’ schema focused on value chains in particular formats, our larger notion of ‘media economy’ requires a gestalt approach to the constituent markets of the media economy. Consequently, our conceptualisation of markets must encompass these broader relationships through which various means, modes and outcomes of mediation are fashioned and adapted for the purpose of exchange and profit. Paradoxically, it is precisely this integration that presents substantial difficulties in defining the boundaries of media markets as well as the nature of the markets in question. In communications scholarship, the usage of markets as a term has reflected the evolution of media systems alongside economic history over the course of the 20th century. There are two key pairings: audience markets and consumer markets (which emphasise the point of sale) and national markets and investment markets (which emphasise institutional forms). These categorical definitions have been richly explored in empirical terms, although the market concept itself has received little interrogation, tending to assume the prevailing consensus in the external domain of economics at any given point in time (see, for instance, Karppinen and Moe, 2014).

These categorical definitions nonetheless provide useful pointers towards the operative markets considered in everyday media business. In the early decades, we have audience markets, inhabited by purchasers of media products, both in material formats and in public performance. In corresponding models of ‘media industries’ (such as commercial films, or recorded music), the product was content and the audience were the consumers (e.g. Mayer et al., 2009). This implied a ‘single product’ market in line with the ‘standard’ model of industrial production. With the growth of mass literacy, broadcasting and a pivotal role as carriers of advertising, however, the mass media became integral to the systematisation of guided consumption. As a consequence, media markets became synonymous with consumer markets, connecting a market for influence with the behavioural schemas formulated through market research. A corresponding market for advertisers, wherein the product is the audience itself, constituted a ‘dual product market’ that simultaneously addresses audience markets (for producers, differentiated by particular taste) and consumer markets (for advertisers, differentiated by purchasing power) (see Picard, 1989: 17–19). In this dual product market, the compulsion to compete at the firm level reflects the need to operate simultaneously in the market for audiences and the market for advertising. In this context, it is also highly significant that media products are not dumb goods and that media providers are judiciously invested in both markets. As such, both media businesses and products are always deeply involved in processes of their own advertisement.

This advertising economy provides a crucial linkage to interests in the wider economy, and thereby to inward investment from other sectors. When it comes to the counterpart role of media systems as carriers of social communication, there are equally crucial linkages to the operation of the state and technology markets. In the analogue era, the coterminous evolution of broadcasting and the United Nations system saw the state become a central actor in defining ‘national media markets’ in the second half of the 20th century. In both Keynesian liberal and socialist countries (in all their permutations), the state became a sovereign investor in media infrastructures and an arbiter of market access. The expansion of governance and the political process also compelled states to develop their own interests within these national markets. Thus, in the era of terrestrial TV, both technological and geopolitical imperatives dictated the crystallisation of a system of national media markets, each underwritten by a regime of institutions and regulations. For many years, this communication order was relatively autarchic, because there were relatively few international players capable of negotiating substantive access to other national markets. Given the limitations this placed upon financial markets, the rise of neoliberal market doctrines at the end of the century was determined to undermine the role of the state both within and across national markets. Consequently, the withdrawal of protections from state media holdings, the tilt towards free trade regimes, and the growth of the digital economy rapidly constituted an international media market dominated by a nexus of technology companies and finance capital (Athique, 2019a).

In India, the capital intensive nature of digital infrastructure provision and the multipliers of infinitely reproducible transactions inculcate both a need and a motivation for investments into an expanding media economy. Thus, in India’s media boom of the past decades, private commercial TV stations and age-old family owned newspapers listed on the bourses, thereby entering another market (that of financial products) where they became products of interest. This financialisation of media businesses thereby instigated a ‘triple product market’, where an expanding market for media ownership reorganised audiences, advertisers and producers under the imperatives of finance capital (Albarran, 1996). It is this ‘apex’ market that dominates everyday market discourses transmitted by the proliferation of media channels. The converged affordances of social communication and logistical capabilities constitute various forms of ‘bandwidth’ that motivate a ‘market for interests’ in the media economy (where the state’s role expands from gatekeeper to seller). Communications research has tended to be critical of both transnationalism and financialisation. The larger point, however, is that these multiple markets interact in complex ways, not least since each is used as a means to evaluate the other. This does not imply that these interdependent markets are synchronous in their operation or uniform in their logics. Rather, it is the layering of markets that serves to signify a single economy, or more strictly, a ‘single process’ providing goods and services that are mutually constituted (as per Sraffa, 1963).

Characteristics of India’s media markets

An idealised notion of ‘market’ still sits at the theoretical heart of modern economics, even if it can scarcely be applied to the economic activity presently associated with the hegemony of ‘the markets’ (essentially, the bourses). By this conception, a market is a neutral rules-based setting facilitating rational exchanges between a buyer and seller. In India, a variety of terms denote venues for buying and selling and for barter, as opposed to other venues housing non-remunerated exchanges. Thus, venues for market exchanges have been differentiated since late-medieval times by indigenous words like Mandi (largely for perishable products) and Haat (often including artisanal products). These utilitarian marketplaces are themselves distinct from the Bazaar, which historically housed a mixed and miscellaneous set of products and experiences within a proto-urban setting. In the wider metaphorical (though no less material) sense, the term Bazaar acquires a value-laden manner which signifies a baser, ‘popular’ and/or otherwise ‘non-elite’ site of both material and cultural consumption (see Banerjee, 1989). The Bazaar has also been used by historians as a counterpoint to the formalised trading spaces of the colonial metropolis (Ray, 1995). It is precisely in such spaces that primordial media markets emerged in India during the opening decades of the 20th century (Bhaumik, 2011; Jain, 2007). Thus, for five decades after independence in 1947, a critical distinction remained between ‘organised’ and ‘disorganised’ domains of media production, distribution and consumption (Athique, 2012).

The essence of what Vaidyanathan (2014) catchphrases as ‘India Uninc’. is probably too complex to capture by any simple measure. But in practical terms, the unorganised sector can be taken as an aggregation of small scale enterprises, non-contractual labour, reciprocal obligations, and cash payments. Under the ‘mixed economy’ regime until 1991, the ‘organised sector’ was made up of state preserves in broadcasting and telecommunications, and the larger circulating newspapers and publishers that were privately-owned. The organised sector, in temper, was shaped, and often held, by the institutions of state. The ‘unorganised’ sector was made up of innumerable small producers, service providers and traders reaching deep into the unregulated informal economy. Substantial portions of film, music and the non-english language press operated in this laissez reaching back to the Bazaar. In structural terms, the emergence of the Indian media economy over the past 30 years is a consequence of deregulation in the organised sector and of organised capital interests ‘formalising’ previously unorganised sectors of media business. Conversely, the ‘liberalisation’ era can also been as a dialogic process where the informal logics of the Bazaar have come to infuse the organised sector. This convergence is by no means a completed process, given that the unorganised sector of the media economy remains substantive. In part, this reflects the deeply disparate spending capacity of potential media consumers, which puts large swathes of the population beyond the interests of organised capital. An obvious consequence of this is the deeply uneven provision of media infrastructure, notably between urban and rural locations and between Eastern and Western regions.

The symbolic registers and communicative functions of media content determine that media markets in India operate within a unique cultural geography. From the outset, the linguistic topography of India shaped economic and commercial activities in the market for media products. Thus, in everyday business, language is taken to be the defining criteria for demarcating media markets. In any given ‘territory’ within the Indian media economy, the majority of competing media products tend to be in the same language. Competition is framed between media products that are not only substitutable (such as identical content genres in the same language) but are equally available within that territory. The need to provide a suite of complementary and competitive products in each linguistic territory both explicates and necessitates the commonly noted abundance of production in all formats. Of course, we can also identify instances where media products traverse regional market territories. English print is the obvious example, but other languages seeding markets across state boundaries are Urdu and Bhojpuri, the latter particularly prolific in films, music, performers, and audiences (see Kumar, 2016; Tripathy, 2012). Across this multi-lingual market system, a common commercial infrastructure and lack of formal barriers allows content producers and broadcasters to make conscious decisions to replicate or adapt products across language markets. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of territorially bound linguistic markets becoming porous remains uneven across different language markets. Tamil and Telugu films are regularly and widely dubbed for/by TV channels in Hindi, but reverse cases are rare.

The salience of linguistic and territorial markets converges with the role of ‘extra-economic’ forces in shaping India’s variegated media markets. Organised religion and formal politics are two such forces. Since India has a federally constituted polity, there are important confluences between linguistic media markets and state level political actors. In South India particularly, state support for linguistic media and the prominent role of regional actors in electoral politics has been a key nexus in regional politics since the 1960s (see Srinivas, 2013). Across India, there are increasing number of legislators (or would-be legislators) who either directly own news outlets, have surreptitiously invested in media enterprises (especially cable) or hold stakes in ostensibly non-profit ventures like community radio (see Parthasarathi and Srinivas, 2019; Agrawal and Bose, 2016; Shaw, 2014). In many regions, the majority of media providers have direct links to political interests. These providers tend to become both platforms for influence and loss leaders underwritten by political markets. Thus, in India, we are compelled to account for the systematic presence of political interests imparting external logics to the functioning of media markets. So alongside cultural market segments, we also implicitly recognise this cohabitation with political market segments, where media platforms operationalise constituencies among the public (see Chakravartty and Roy, 2013). These aspects of India’s market geography reflect the embedded characteristics (as per Polanyi, 1944) of both media products and audience, along with their functional role in defining the boundary of their own markets (as per Gellner, 1999).

In parallel, mediated expressions of religiosity have similarly spawned denominational media markets in India (see Jain, 2007; Thomas, 2009). These markets have a history dating back to the primordial media bazaar of printed words and images during the early 20th century (see Mukul, 2015). Nonetheless, the velocity and vibrancy by which such markets have expanded over the past three decades is largely due to the spatial and technological multipliers furnished by the media economy. With low entry barriers and falling rents for transponders, many religious and spiritual leaders ventured into the cable-TV business. Their programming has included not just traditional prayers and sermons but also fashioned new ‘lifestyle’ formats (including theological talk shows, bhakti performances and yoga instruction). Such religious broadcasters cross-promote a whole host of commercial ventures pursued by their proprietors in other economic domains. All this has been largely ignored in the conventional analysis of the media industries, being positioned merely as a content ‘genre’ or an ‘extra-market’ phenomenon. Nonetheless, both electoral and denominational interests often come together to create distinctive niches within India’s audience markets. Both formations interact in important ways with structures of caste and kinship networks within all major religions, thereby shaping distinct actors and constituencies within territorial and linguistic media markets. This dynamic further exemplifies how media markets operate within embedded social structures in order to extract, transact and realise value (Athique, 2018).

In the more conventionally accounted content business, media production is characterised by high initial costs and rapid economies of scale (Doyle, 2002). This has direct bearings on pricing which, after release, become significantly independent of costs. Consequently, it is ‘market share’ that becomes the lifeblood of a media company, invariably determined by the scale of consumption or ‘footprint’ rather than by production efficiencies. Since the pursuit of market share is rarely hindered by bottlenecks in the scale of production, rapid expansion and over-competition are perennial characteristics of the media business in India. Exuberant production, however, requires sufficient distribution capacity which has historically been deficient in India. In part, this has to do with the scarcity of capital sources capable of bearing large-scale infrastructural costs. There has always been a very large number of players with access to small volumes of largely informal capital, but very few medium-sized firms with access to formal capital. At the top are a handful of business houses that have expansive capital resources and tend to dominate most of the organised sectors of the economy. This national characteristic tends to be replicated within regional markets. Capital distribution shapes media markets in India because it determines the capacity to bear distribution costs. In the 1990s, easier access to formal capital sources saw the expansion of mid-level players in the media economy. However subsequently, the infrastructure requirements of the digitisation process has favoured the big business houses, compelling a consolidation of the media economy around what we might call the ‘usual actors’ (see Parthasarathi et al., 2016).

An economy of markets

Thus far, we have seen how the ‘India’ and ‘Media’ components of our subject imply distinctive market characteristics in both formalist and cultural aspects. At this point, it becomes timely to concentrate our attention on the third word, that is, by demonstrating our proposition that this is an ‘economy of markets’. We argue that the dynamics of media markets must be assessed in terms of their conscious interdependence, rather than simply aggregated as an unwitting congregation. In practical terms, therefore, we seek to conceptualise the market structures of the Indian media economy through a scale of three levels: (1) the micrological level at which media marketplaces operate (comprising an array of market venues, consumers and retailers), (2) the mesological level at which media institutions operate (comprising of firms and their suppliers, regulatory bodies and industry/labour associations), 3) the macrological level at which media assets are acquired and disbursed by apex interests (comprising of capital investors, financial providers and the state in both domestic and international forms). We can usefully shorthand these market levels as multi-product marketplaces (micro), markets of operation (meso) and markets for interests (meta). As heuristic levels, they point at three realms of market relationships, each identified by a set of participant actors and dominant values, yet substantially dependent in their operations upon the dynamics of markets in the adjacent levels. Tidy as this schema appears, the particularities and deficiencies of Indian media markets at each level have important implications for the others, with the consequence that this ‘economy of markets’ is a somewhat messy cohabitation.

Media economy at the micro-level: multi-product marketplaces

It is at the micro level that individuals (variously as users, audience, consumers, citizens or workers) most readily experience the materialisation of the media economy. In shopping malls and on pavements, in the workplace and the home, we engage with media products in numerous forms as goods and services, durables and consumables, tangibles and intangibles. The settings for these transactions are what we most readily recognise as the ‘marketplaces’ of the media. In other words, the micrological level entails the present-day Mandi (for utilitarian transactions such as call time or recharge) and the present day Bazaar (for sensory experiences such as entertainment). In a single street in metropolitan India, we readily encounter a myriad of media products and services within an intensely localised marketplace for experiences, capabilities, skills, information and pleasure. It is significant, therefore, that the tendency towards combinations of media products with other forms of retail business is as highly apparent here as it at other levels of the media economy. Through this congregation of marketplaces, we are brought into contact with the plethora of ancillary and subsidiary markets of media products and services (e.g. top-up coupons for mobile phones, kabaadi-wala (itinerant buyers of recyclable waste, including digital waste) and artisans repairing, refurbishing, and reselling devices). These largely informal offerings have been critical in expanding the media market by enabling lower incomes to legally afford devices and content and/or patching recycled devices into newer networks (see Rai, 2019).

Alongside the consumer-base, the actors in this micrological marketplace of media include a range of traders constituting the retail toe of media businesses. When it comes to media labour at this level, it is most intuitive to think of local vendors of media products and individual providers servicing the public within specific locales. For example, those producing media for in situ consumption such as marriage videos, photography studios and colour printing facilities. These are ubiquitous trades, since a distinctive feature of India’s media economy is that the vast shopfront of the retail sector continues to be overwhelmingly ‘disorganised’ in nature. Until the 2000’s, thousands of ‘stand alone’ cinema halls operated in the absence of theatre chains (Athique and Hill, 2010). Intensely localised cable networks operated in place of national or even regional providers (Mishra, 1999). Scarcely any media producers (in either hardware of software) maintained retail outlets of their own, with the entire point-of-sale business refracted through millions of small traders. In some contexts, there were specialists concentrated in particular bazaar areas (as with Palika Bazaar in New Delhi) and, in other contexts, media products were traded in family owned kirana stores alongside soaps and dry groceries (Deka, 2017, Sundaram, 2011). It is only during this decade that organised businesses have begun to make visible inroads into this eclectic shopfront ecology. Urban renewal and digitalisation policies have cleared both space and bandwidth for retail outlets tied to conglomerates (Athique and Hill, 2010).

Thus, while the micrological level of India’s media markets remains synonymous with tangible-product sellers, the patchwork of hyper-local shops and independent/freelance traders are now accompanied by agents for large national players and, to a lesser extent, franchisees of global firms. The distinction between unorganised and organised retail infrastructures being acutely marked by spending power, class, literacy and taste. An equally significant aspect of media deregulation and the subsequent segmentation of audiences has been the belated transformation of the hitherto private sphere into a new set of shopfront experiences. Within a single home, the endless flows of TV ‘lifestyles’, advertisements and domestic commodities stream a microcosm of the media economy into family life (Lewis et al., 2016). Increasingly, comparable virtual marketplaces are following suit via mobile devices. What is highly evident across all these marketplaces (be they located or mobile, private or public) is the extent to which the media economy becomes rapidly embedded within the rituals, schedules and sociabilites of everyday life. As a consequence, the processes of valuation in play tend to operate beyond the textbook functions of price setting and distribution efficiency. In almost every case, the act of valuation incorporates considerations of taste, sociability and gratification, where peer values are as important as individual utility. Payment itself takes varied forms, since products are purchased in cash but also bartered (both via P2P and street-side) within variable modes of exchange. As a consequence, we are reminded that an exclusive focus on monetary pricing ignores other forms of value that remain prominent even in digital markets (see Bolin, 2011).

At this level we also see most clearly the incredible range of non-standardised pricing in India’s media marketplaces, a direct consequence of the highly, and increasingly, uneven purchasing power in general as well as hyper-competition in most retail markets. One consequence of the narrow band of affluence suitable for ‘full suite’ digital services is well-oiled practices of piracy, not just of content but also of services enabling openness of hardware, primarily unlocking mobile phones and decrypting devices. Certainly, the intervention of digital payment systems and consolidation of media distribution chains challenges the local family businesses dominating the retail trade, as was intended (Athique, 2019b). Yet, across most of the country’s shopfronts, the long-tailed nature of retail persists due to uneven economic and infrastructural growth (which both reflects and reinforces low-levels of capital-capacity among retailers and purchasing power among consumers). Localised and stratified means and tastes also mitigate any ‘levelling’ of regularised access to digital technologies and content offerings outside of the affluent segments (Parthasarathi et al., 2013). Thus, acute differences in access, services, hardware and content are visible between suburbs and urban-districts, as well as between regions Nonetheless, given the inherent advantages of zero-cost reproduction, the broad product range of the media economy retains the capacity to reach a large swathe of the population, albeit in a piecemeal and piece-rate fashion. In a partially institutionalised retail sector, this is where the media economy engages the vast majority within an experiential, as opposed to abstract, market experience.

Media economy at the Meso-level: markets of operation

At the meso-level, the market forms of the media economy become institutionalised through the functional operations and structural organisation of different elements of media business. These elements have been variously classified as market sectors (such as broadcasting or advertising), procedural segments (such as hardware production, software production or content distribution) or in terms of constituent actors (such as proprietors, producers, advertisers, workers and regulators). Thus, descriptions of media markets at this level tend to emphasise a set of mechanical and commercial solidarities categorically differentiated but functionally integrated through various levels of formalisation within communication processes. The key institutional actors include media companies (whether involved in a single business or several), the relevant regulatory and adjudicatory bodies (whose role tends to be concentrated within specific and disjointed aspects of the market as whole) and various trade bodies and unions (which tend to be organised around production sectors and/or segments). Analysis at this market level often reveals the relationships (both complementary and competitive, synergistic and dysfunctional) that facilitate the organisation of production, strategisation of consumption, formation of regulation and pursuit of accumulation across specific inputs, formats or products. Critically, all of these institutional process operate in dialogue, although rarely in synchronicity. Market share is absolutely critical, thereby setting the stage for aggressive competition and consolidation. As we have noted previously, the economics of the meso-level are characterised by economies of scale and, with widening digitalisation, increasingly by network effects and positive subsidisation from other networked value chains.

A distinctive feature of the Indian media economy is that this meso-level is situated on a resolutely regional and territorial basis. As a consequence, the meso-level provides the primary stage for the interplay between media markets and attendant (largely domestic) ‘markets for loyalty’ (see Price, 1994). The phenomenon of politicians as owners and shareholders of media enterprises is most commonly seen at this level. This is hardly surprising, given the role news-making and attention-seeking occupies within the wider mediatisation of electoral politics. Nonetheless, these relationships often extend into the broader commercial interests of political actors, including entertainment media and service provision (Srinivas, 2013, Shaw, 2014). In the other direction, the patronage of political actors by dominant regional media operators has been fairly explicit (as with SUN TV network in Tamil Nadu or Odisha TV in Odisha). Meso-level institutions dominate regional markets, where there tends to be a high correspondence with the market for political loyalties (in news) and cultural affinities (in entertainment). Given the cohabitation and cross-subsidisation of the two, electorally bipolar states in India tend to operate duopolies in media production segments, while those with a wider spectrum of political interests and more polyglot populations tend to display more dispersed market shares. Clearly, this dynamic impacts upon matters of policy and on regulatory bodies, thereby skewing the dynamics of media markets at the level where the majority of media firms operate.

Being the domain where media markets operate at an industrial scale, valuation at the meso-scale is formally accounted via profitability (implying the primacy of price and efficiency). Nonetheless, under such terms, the vast majority of media businesses, especially regional businesses, are loss-making enterprises (Shaw, 2014, Srinivas, 2018). When it comes to exercising market power on a commercial basis, advertising companies thereby become a determining actor, being the biggest buyers of time and space in a market of media providers (Albarran and Arrese, 2003). On the supply side, broadcasters deploy time, their most potent intangible asset, to raise revenues with advertisers. For online platforms in a resolutely ‘free content’ sector, it is the aggregated of attention via click trails that commodifies and enumerates the capacity of the medium as a commercial operation (Athique, 2017). In both formats, most of India’s media outlets are dependent on a small number of persistent advertisers for a large proportion of their revenues. For instance, 49% of the advertising revenue of Global Broadcast News during the first year of the launch of its flagship news channel, CNN-IBN (now CNN-News 18), came from its top 10 advertisers (GBN, 2007). Closer scrutiny of the terms of transactions between producers and advertisers tells us more: news channels lock in advertisers with incentives based on advance bookings, and utilising greater volumes, higher frequencies of advertising, and other incentives for loyalty in this domain.

When conceived horizontally rather than vertically, the meso-level of the Indian media economy is also characterised by synergistic combinations of formal and non-formal practices. For example, the role of kinship and social relations have been shown to be determine the day to day business practices of film producers in Hindi cinema (Lorenzen and Taeube, 2010). This duality between formal processes and informal networks can be seen in operation across wage structures and work processes, production and distribution chains and the various mechanisms of governance. The role and presence of unions in the mesological market as actors (i.e. as stakeholders capable of influencing institutional change) has progressively dwindled since the early 1980s. The new information service businesses that emerged during the 1990s, such as call centres, software companies and sundry IT-enabled services, are notable for the complete absence of unions (Remesh, 2004). Where unions do remain (in legacy sectors such as cinema and newspapers) their agency is at best limited to narrow roles (wage setting, etc.). Networks of kinship and association also shape workers institutions at the lowest rungs of the production chain (Chitrapu, 2018). The same can be said for the various trade bodies representing the collective interests of sectors and segments at the firm level, with these also being routinely organised on a distinctively regional basis (Punathambekar, 2018). The spatial concentration of media industries into particular clusters (such as Mumbai, Hyderabad or NOIDA) also provides for interlocution with attendant micro-markets (for labour, education and for ancillary suppliers supporting production processes).

The emergence of a more integrated media economy has seen significant changes in the composition and balance of industrial actors. All of the component sectors have expanded significantly in terms of capital resources, production and consumption (Ganti, 2012, Mehta, 2015, Punathambekar, 2013). Nonetheless, this initially rapid expansion and over-saturation has invariably led to consolidation and concentration. This process has been compounded by a lack of effective cross-ownership regulations and therefore by investment inflows encouraging incessant vertical and horizontal expansions. Accordingly, the formalisation and digitalisation of production chains has seen existing operators in unorganised sectors either aggregate or displaced by larger concerns. Stand-alone single-screen theatres have declined in number, being replaced by multiplex chains serving the top third of the market. The regional and local network of film distributors that serviced the old cinemas has been almost entirely replaced by two companies providing digital projection and distribution platforms (UFO Moviez and Real Image). When it comes to advertising itself, a long-tailed segment until the late 1990s, the entry of global majors (such as WPP and GroupM) drove expansion and consolidation at the national level. With digitisation, new businesses have emerged, notably the big mobile telecoms providers that consolidated through a series of acquisitions in the 2000s, but also Direct-to-Home distributors in the TV business, mobile money transmitters and e-commerce platforms (Parthasarathi and Srinivas, 2019). These changes have disrupted the role of regulatory bodies operating at this level, with digitisation compelling shifts in institutional responsibilities, lengthy time-lags and the ‘considered silence’ towards the constitution of new market norms (Parthasarathi, 2018).

Media economy at the meta-level: the market for interests

At the meta-level, media markets are constituted around actors taking and trading interests over and above the day-to-day operations of media production and distribution. Most obviously, these media markets transact financial stakes in media concerns (via holding companies and shares), media bandwidth (both backbone and spectrum) and certain forms of intellectual property (such as the trade in patents). At this level, therefore, various components of the market of operations take on a product form (notably in capital markets that transact ownership, currencies and debt). The money market inevitably cohabits with the interests of state, since this is also the domain of ‘national market’. In this setting, the state exercises its sovereign power in determining the international terms of media trade: with other states representing their commercial interests (such as Singapore), with international financial institutions (such as Softbank) and with supranational bodies and instruments (such as the WTO). The meta-level is also the domain where holding companies derived from capital accumulated in other sectors of the economy have been acquiring a host of media businesses operating at the meso-level. Thus, the ‘entry’ of Reliance Industries Limited (India’s largest conglomerate) ‘from’ textiles and petrochemicals business ‘into’ the media economy via acquisitions in telecom and broadcasting was transacted at this level (see Mukherjee, 2019). This apart, certain actors engage with the media economy almost exclusively in the meta-market, such as institutional investors, media rights companies, data companies, ratings agencies, auditors and banks.

The controversy regarding the Vodaphone acquisition of Hutchisson in 2007 via their respective Antilles and Mauritius subsidiaries was centred upon norms in this ‘market for interests’ (Hill and Athique, 2018). However large Vodaphone’s presence consequently became within the Indian mobile sector, what was really in question was the money transactions in the meta-market. Over the past twenty years, it has become commonplace for sources of capital ‘external’ to the media industries to become actors in the ‘market for interests’ in the media economy. Conversely, media capital rarely invests in other sectors, reflecting the contradictions between the high visibility of India’s ‘media industries’ and their actual spending power. where media companies enter the meta-market, they generally do so in order to expand or acquire holdings in other media businesses operating at the meso-level. For example, Essel Group operates holding companies at the meta-level that manage its interests in the meso-level (businesses in broadcasting such as ZEE TV, theme parks, mall management, a hotel bookings platform). Thus, Essel Group operates in the market for interests (as indeed does a small investor in the public share market) but it is not a substantive actor at this level. A notable characteristic of India’s media meta-market is that the regulatory burden of declaration is much weaker here than it is at the meso-scale. While media companies are required to declare their ownership, accounts and interests to various regulators, the holding companies active in the meta-market for interests are permitted to maintain effectively opaque portfolios of shell companies, off-shore subsidiaries and blinded investments via promissory notes, private treaties and other instruments (ibid).

There are relatively few capital interests capable of a sustained presence in the market for interests. Invariably, these are conglomerates operating in at least three different production chains in the meso-level and combining major holdings in other areas of the economy. Even among these, only three family conglomerates (Ambani, Birla and Tata) have accumulated substantive media and information technology interests in more than one of the major regional markets. Significantly, these are not ‘corporations’ as typified by dominant players in Europe and North America. Like most players in the economy of India, these conglomerates are a web of closely held family enterprises (akin to, but more concentrated than Korea’s Chaebol). Thus, the market of interests is where an oligopoly of family-held industrial enterprises, once external to the media economy, has gradually enveloped a raft of legacy and emergent media businesses. With the capacity to traverse legal and commercial silos intended to define ‘single-chain’ media businesses, these criss-crossing flows and exchanges across the meta-market are channelled through cultural, financial and political processes as much as technological processes. It is equally critical that these interests are closely networked with their international counterparts, and thereby in a position to broker expansion into overseas markets as well as transacting domestic market access and technology transfers though relationships with transnational corporations. This capacity allows these actors to forge business instruments and commercial mechanisms which side-step and/or determine regulatory norms in the Indian media economy.

Beyond its role as the sovereign arbiter of the national market, the state also has its own interests in this meta-market. Notably, its self-interest in ensuring foreign investment flows, technology transfers and private investments in digital infrastructure gives rise to numerous instances where the state is variously a partner, buyer and seller within the meta-market transactions of the media economy. This doesn’t mean that the state is equivalent to a business interest, since it simultaneously constitutes institutions that undertake its sovereign functions within the meta-market (e.g. Ministries of Information and Broadcasting, and of Telecommunications, Securities and Exchange Board of India, Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India, Supreme Court, Reserve Bank of India). These actors are saddled with the delicate task of arbitrating the interests of a host of domestic and global enterprises, including other organs of the state that are parties to various large-scale monetary transactions. The potential jeopardies of this multiple role in the meta-market became highly apparent in the mismanaged auction of 2G mobile spectrum licences which badly damaged the second administration of Manmohan Singh. In the present context of ‘Digital India’ the administration of Narendra Modi is firmly enmeshed in the logistical procurement inherent in this vision. Consequently, our earlier attention to the significance of the ‘mediated economy’ is cognisant of the growing interdependence of the Government of India in regards to access, affordances and opportunities derived from information technologies (Thomas, 2019). In this context, the state is itself a transactional player within an era of ‘public-private partnerships’ centred upon ‘communicative capitalism’ (see Parayil, 2005).

Generally speaking, the meta-level is where surplus value is harvested from or stored in media businesses by a set of external interests. A number of horizontal actors within the market for interests facilitate trade in holdings of this surplus. Investments in infrastructures are intended to develop new sources of surplus value. In this setting, conventional economic wisdom privileges the imperative to harness returns greater than investments (financial value). Nonetheless, even in these markets there are a host of important non-financial value claims. Such ‘intangible’ values include quantifiable ones like ideas and innovation and brand recognition, as well as entirely subjective gains like influence and status. In a culture where social status has important links to the visibility of business success, it would be foolish to assume that the bottom line is always the determining factor in market exchanges. The Indian Premier League is an obvious example of this ostentatious impulse (see Srinivas and Vivek, 2009). Those in the business of valuation in the meta-market face considerable challenges, given the intangible nature of media assets. There is mostly an eye-popping differential between the modest book price (assets) and the extravagant share valuations (capitalisation) of ‘media’ and ‘technology’ companies. It appears that valuation of media companies in the meta-market is frequently determined by the money available, rather than any rational assessment of their ledgers of profit-and-loss in the meso-market (a phenomenon also typical of silicon valley companies). In a complementary fashion, the dominant actors in the market for interests invariably have asset holdings allowing them to under-write losses in the media economy for considerable periods of time and for a number of reasons, including establishing market share, developing infrastructure or realising value in other socio-economic domains.

Media markets and master social process

Our scalar analysis of three market levels has attempted to illustrate the extent of integration and complexity that is inherent to our larger notion of an ‘Indian media economy’. At all market levels, we can identify critical interlocutions with ‘external’ actors, economies and processes. Numerous actors either play a role or exert an influence upon each of these market layers, with opportunities and constraints for market power at each level. Reflecting our assertion that the growth of the media economy and the increasingly mediated nature of the Indian economy are conjoined processes, our analysis also seeks to explicate the conundrum of loss bearing media markets by indicating the ‘externalities’ where value is often being realised and/or costs offset (see Srinivas, 2018). In sketching the developments of the past decade in particular, we have identified a continuing impetus towards product differentiation at the micro level, counter-posed by an impetus towards consolidation driven by the meta-market. This illustrates something of the competing interests that act upon media businesses both horizontally and vertically. Consequently, the relationship between market levels can be either harmonious or disjunctive depending upon the vantage point of different settings and actors.

The settings, actors and valuation processes that shape transactions within each of these market levels clearly demonstrate that social, cultural, institutional forces operate alongside conventional ‘economistic’ processes. Thus, we argue for a richly contextualised understanding of media markets, as opposed to the imposition of abstract market models and/or imprecise and overlapping usage of the term (see Frankel, 2015). A socially situated approach to market structures usefully obliterates the conceit that markets can be understood as neutral systems for optimising prices and guaranteeing distribution efficiencies. In practice, pricing in both the micro and meta scales of the Indian media economy is more clearly determined by the money available (and, hence by ‘what the market will bear’). Equally, the functioning of these markets is not driven by the pursuit of distribution efficiencies, since the Indian media economy continues to be characterised by deficiencies on both counts. Infrastructural deficiencies are themselves an important consideration in the strategy of actors in India, reflecting increasing infrastructure demands for media economies across the world (see Parks and Starosielski, 2015). The distinctiveness of the Indian case usefully illustrates the interaction between the layering of media markets and their profusion across linguistic, geographic and socio-economic domains. We have presented India’s media economy somewhat in the particular and, accordingly, this article has also canvassed some broad-bush characteristics of ‘Indian capitalism’.

Nonetheless, the analytical purchase of relational accounts of media markets may well be applicable to the emergence of media economies elsewhere in the world (see, for example, Larkin, 2008). Thus, more broadly, a critical understanding of the ‘multiple markets’ problem has become central to understanding contemporary forms of media economy (see Frankel, 2015). In media and communications research, we often contend with an idealised marketplace at the micro-level that legitimates the power of ‘the markets’ at the meta-level, while most of our empirical analysis remains confined to industry studies in the meso-level. In practice, the sophisticated ‘economy of markets’ derived from media systems requires us to go beyond production-chain analysis and develop a more holistic markets-based approach that reflects the complex role of communication as a ‘master social process’ (Singh, 2010). Such a need is, if anything, more evident in light of the increasing scale of market integrations and mediations envisioned in an era of platform economies (see Punathambekar and Mohan, 2019). Thus, through the terminology of Haat, Mandi and Bazaar, it seems timely to invoke historical precedents for the cohabitation of multiple markets within the local context and the greater whole.