Credit where it’s due(unless you’re a singer)
The titles of Tamil music videos carry names of actors, music composers and even movie directors. However, the singers are buried in the description box.
By Aishwarya Viswanathan
Music in India, for the most part, is film music. Earlier this year, a film song made history by bagging the country’s first Oscar for ‘Best Original Song'. Global recognition aside, these Oscar and Grammy-winning music composers, singers and lyricists are also worshipped by their regional audience. One such Oscar-winning music composer produced a track that I became briefly obsessed with in the summer of 2019. Playing it for the 1000th time one day, I noticed the singer's name was missing from the title. The title read: name of the movie, name of the song, music director, and film director. The singer went into the description box along with the lyricist and a host of other credits.
That’s odd. I would imagine a singer’s name should occupy title space for a song.
This led me to my analysis of the hierarchy of credits in a sample of ~230 titles of Tamil music videos. Using the YouTube API, I collected music video data from six featured playlists of a popular record label that is one of the largest producers of Tamil film music.
Film music is inherently collaborative. All film music involves multiple artists including movie directors and actors. In the tamil film industry, music directors in particular have been celebrated through the years.
An analysis of the sample also reflects this popularity, as titles credit music directors almost as much as actors.
It’s worth noting, that the names of singers appear only 9 times in the entire sample.
A closer look reveals that among the 9 mentions of singers, 6 are female and 3 are male, a puzzling observation given that male privilege exists. This is because the number only captures the names of those who are primarily recognised as singers.
In the sample, the top five actors and music directors mentioned in the titles were identified. A comparison of their entire discography revealed that male actors and music directors are increasingly donning the role of singers.
Whether it’s in Hindi, Tamil or any of the other ~26 Indian languages that movies are produced in — a song is as integral to these movies as its plot. However, the singers of these songs seem to remain out of the spotlight. Further, the singing ambitions of actors and music directors threaten to drive existing singers to the shadows.
Here’s that Oscar-winning best original song, as it’s listed on the Academy’s official website. It gives us the title of the song, title of the movie, followed by names of the music composer and lyricist
Two singers sang this song, but you’d have to hunt for their names in a description box somewhere.