Do all Playback Singers fake it on stage?

Have you ever wondered why the ubiquitous Music shops that sold records, cassettes and CDs have all disappeared? Has music become so irrelevant to our lives that it is no longer missed? The answer must be ‘yes’ because there are no music stores around and many of my friends cannot remember the last time when they went out and bought a tape or a CD. I would say that data storage technology in the form of the pen drive and now on cloud killed off the cassette and CD.

The Internet has popularized the notion that music should be free for the listener. Years ago the Government used to even make us pay an annual fee for listening to the radio. Some may remember the printed license books, without which it was illegal to play the radio. That would sound crazy to the modern day youngster. Pay for listening to music on the radio! Tell anyone that and he would wonder if you had a hole in your head?

Youngsters today don’t pay to listen to music and in any case it is available for free on the Internet. When no one pays for the music it follows that musicians will not earn any money either. That in turn means that no youngsters would want to learn to play a musical instrument. A synthesizer can, faithfully replicate any musical note from any instrument so where would that leave the violin or the flute or the saxophone? I guess we will one day sell tickets to let visitors marvel at the violin or the saxophone. Maybe they will only be seen in a museum or be used only for research.

As many singers would testify these days, even live performances are not ‘live’. Most of the time ‘performers’ are mimicking or triggering pre-programmed electronic instruments. Singers often just hold the microphone to their mouth and let the pre-recorded version play. If I remember rightly it was a singer called Betty Boo who first let the cat out of the bag. Betty Boo was a hot female pop star at the turn of the 1990s in the U.K. Her debut album, ‘Boomania’, went platinum, and she won the 1991 Brit Award for Best British Breakthrough Act. But things took a turn for the very worst while on tour in Australia the following year, when she dropped her microphone on stage without missing a note. 

Around the same time Fab Morvan won, what might well be the most controversial Grammy Award ever given out. His group Milli Vanilli was given the Best New Artist award. Months later, the label admitted that Morvan and partner Rob Pilatus weren't the ones who sang on hit songs like 'Blame It On the Rain' and 'Girl You Know It's True’. Their Grammy was taken back and the media and music industry chewed them up and spat them out just as fast as they built them up. Now it is commonplace occurrence.

Listen to the Indian singer Ujjayinee Roy talk to me about lip synching in this shocking revelation on camera on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so0wd8EB3lo.