Since its arrival, movie-based music has a firm grip over indian popular music. I am not very sure about the popular music of pre-movie era but some of the ingredients undoubtedly were nautanki, mujra, bhajans, kawwaliis, etc. Today all of this is subsumed within movie-based music. The unfortunate part of it is assembly line production of lyrics, music and singers (don't most of them sing alike ?). I am amazed at the number of distinct songs produced on a single theme (which are mostly on love, seperation or reunion). Surprisingly they occasionally come up with good likeable scores.
As an aside, I am always impressed by the western chart busters. Even though they also have a assembly line of Britney/Vengaboys and their ilk, they deal with a much wider range of emotions and themes than Indian music. The frequency with which they come up with new genres is also very amazing. The Rock movement of 70-80s and Jazz instantly come to my mind. But Rap of 90s and Hip Hop of today are also western innovations. But I am getting astray ... will talk about music genre some other time. On Hindi film music ... these days, we do have some songs which are varied in their themes like Rang de Basanti. Am not too confindent whether this is a trend but I hope so.
In fact, if I analyze my own personal prefenences ... am also influenced by the same dictum so much so that I almost completely ignore non film based music as do all the radio and television channels, in spite of the fact that non-movie music is also assembly-line produced by very much the same guys. As such, there is no reason for such a behaviour, and I can't really give any solid reason for non-movie music not registering in my mind .... it must have something to do with the society I grew up in. This is not true of non-indian music, the appreciation of which is not influenced by my upbringing, and so movies are not any criterion for my registering it.
Here I am talking primarily of Hindi music. And I am sure such a phenomenon holds for other indian languages also.
