The Malayalam music is a Dravidian language that is mostly spoken in the territories of Puducherry and Lakshadweep and is the official language in the Indian state of Kerala. The Malayalam language is also spoken in many other states, mostly in Tamil Nadu in the Coimbatore and Kanyakumari districts. Because of the language’s widespread throughout the various states, it has over 37 million who speak it and is considered to be in the top 20 most spoken languages in the world.
Malayalam music first started gaining popularity in the 9th century with the spread of Kerala’s amazingly rich culture. Kerala first showed its development in music with Carnatic Music. Another interesting thing to mention is that the Malayalam language had developed musical poetry a long time before prose was even considered as a part of a language. Thanks to Kerala’s long history of love towards music, the culture has spread out to many different countries and the music culture started to develop in various genres. The most popular music genres of Malayalam music is Carnatic classical music and music in films.
Malayalam music has become a worldwide phenomenon because of its involvement in Indian films. The term film music in India often means playback singing. This means that the singing is usually pre-recorded by a playback singer which will then be used in the movie and often lip-synced by more popular actors. This form of Malayalam music is currently the most famous in India. Malayalam music was largely influenced by Tamil and Hindi film soundtracks and followed their same steps to the road to success. If you are interested in Malayalam music, its origin and its thousands of artists and film soundtracks, we recommend that you check out mallumusic‘s collection of mp3s that are available for download.
After the “birth” of Malayalam film music in the 1940s with the movie Nirmala which was the first film that introduced Malayalam playback singing. There were several songs sung by various different artists which proved to be a great way to capture the audience’s attention. With the growing popularity of this film music in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, the big breakthrough of Malayalam music was in the 60s. This era of playback singing was referred to as the Golden Age of Malayalam film music. There were various singers that spread their music such as Kamukara Purushothaman, A. M. Raja, P. Susheela, S. Janaki and a lot more.
In the 80s, 90s and the new millennia, Malayalam music has continued to gain popularity and to spread to states outside of Kerala. Both union territories Lakshadweep and Puducherry have shown a great interest in the music and have quickly become one of the few places where it has become most popular. Another state where the music is most popular is also Tamil Nadu and especially in the Coimbatore, Nilgiris and Kanyakumari districts. Dakshina Kannada and Kodagu districts have also shown huge amounts of interest in Malayalam music. However, it has branched out far from just India, there is also a lot of following in many Gulf countries.
