Popular Music

Music is part of our everyday lives, whether its from film music, music in shopping centres, poluphonic ringtones on your mobile phone, MP3 players, ipods, video games, we are actually surrounded by music all day. The music industry and the media in general constantly improves and changes in order to achieve new goals such as to maintain and develop audiences. Marketing is another element that needs to work towards improvement as music artists, especially in the recent years have realised that they must move from 'band to brand' in order to survive cause thats what audiences tend to go for.

Development of pop music

Music and technology have always been closely linked. I found out that historically, music was all live performance by the musicians or singers. I also found out in my research that as silent films took off there'd be a pianist playing live in the cinema to create mood and atmosphere for the audience. With the invention of the mass-produced record came pop music, the most significant thing about this was the invention of the 'teenager'. The 'teenager' was a cultural label created to define a particular kind of adolescent rebellion. the identity of the teenager was defined first by the fact that they listened to pop music and secondly by the clothes they wore to show that they belonged to this music culture. To me this sounds like a stereotypical explanataion.
Subcultural groups developed as pop music became more popular. Each group were subdivided by style of music and also style of dress. Hence the pitched battles between Mods and Rockers in the 1960s. Today the 'music scene' is considerably broader and there are countless amounts of ways of recieving and accessing music from various different sources.

New technologies and pop music

Technological development continues to influence the ways in which music is recieved and therefore affects the cultural structures around this consumption, e.g.
Technological developments have enabled far more artists to reach a wider audience. Whereas once, recording studios were not as developed as today, now artists and many other people have top quality recordinbg studois to work in even in their homes. Easy and quick access allows artists to produce their own music. In many cases they are also able to ditribute it without needing recording companies at all.

A paticular web page called Napster raised many debartes about the morality of sharing music on the internet for others to download. When Napster was first operating it was the first network that allowed people to download files for free. Napster was soon stopped as they were accused by the record comapnies who said that Napster was losing them money, insisting that it was depriving them of audiences who might buy the music. I understand  and agree with the record companies because it does make sense and its true that a large amount of audiences won't buy the music mainly because it costs and its much easier to just download music off the internet and the fact that it was free was an advantage.

As a result of realising the popularity of downloading music from the internet, many of the record companies now have this facility and some artists allow some of their music to be downloaded for free as they think this will gain them more audiences.