The audio cassette changed Punjabi music completely in the 1980s. Recording became cheap, distribution left the state broadcaster and the big labels, and anybody with a studio and a duplicator could put out a record.
That is when the modern Punjabi music industry started: singer-led, regionally distributed, and outside the Bombay system. The same technology did the same thing to devotional recording, and gurbani kirtan cassettes reached households that had no other access to it.
The video cassette followed, then VCDs, then satellite television with dedicated Punjabi music channels from the 1990s, then YouTube.
Each shift lowered the cost of entry further and moved the centre of gravity further from institutions. The current stage is a singer in Brampton uploading a track that is playing in a tractor in Barnala the same week.
The technology also killed the live circuit that the mela and akhara system had supported, in which a singer's living came from performing at fairs across a district through the year.
The audio cassette from the late 1970s put Punjabi music outside the reach of the record companies and the radio, and the akhara singers went straight to it.
The VCD in the 1990s did the same for video, and Punjabi films, religious material and music videos circulated in the villages without any distributor.
What followed was the same again on video platforms. The pattern in Punjabi music is consistent: a cheap format appears and the industry reorganises around it within about three years.