Dispossession by digital consolidation: Early notes on the crisis of the media and entertainment sector in Mumbai, India

The ongoing wave of consolidation and digital transformation in the Mumbai-based media and entertainment sector, the heart of Hindi cultural production, has brought about an unparalleled alignment of interests between media and big tech. As a result, the sector has begun to assume a bifurcated structure, comprising a limited set of major incumbents and a substantial population of smaller entities, with a gradual erosion of the culturally significant middle segment. Creative work has become more casualised and compensation lower even as the sector’s overall revenues expand. Drawing on interactions with creative workers in the sector, this article seeks to map the broad contours of the digital disruption – market concentration, big tech governance of the creative sector, the resultant crisis of production as reflected in the emerging micro-drama space, and creative workers’ articulation of the issues – and foreground the social and cultural costs of rapid and largely unchecked consolidation and digitisation.