Increasing fragmentation and niche-ification leads to a myriad of individual self-serving scenes, an array of different discrete narratives... this is why the space between mainstream and underground has got squeezed so hard. The Internet and associated technologies only make it easier to exist in an independent underground... the excitement of the hinterland area can be observed in two eras...
Pre-punk the underground was tiny, and infrastructure was not terribly sophisticated, therefore there was only one music industry, the equivalent of one channel, if you like... everything which wasn't ultra-underground was fed into this one channel...
Post-punk and DIY as a widely disseminated concept the independent infrastructure becomes much more sophisticated, but at the same time the nature of the media means that the number of channels becomes 2 or maybe 3 or 4... the narrative of the hinterland contained in the independent media-record label nexus...
But now because of the ease with which music can be created and distributed, and the impossibility of any media outlet covering even a fraction of the total output with any authority there is fragmentation, and 10,000 channels. The disadvantage is the absence of noise-- those signals that you don't already know you want to receive... this was the implicit story behind much of the hand-wringing over the death of Top Of The Pops, the death of a narrow-band era, in which whilst most of the output was banal, but that the bit which wasn't was exposed to as many people as the MOR nonsense-- there was simply no other outlet for them to be watching.
Pre-punk the underground was tiny, and infrastructure was not terribly sophisticated, therefore there was only one music industry, the equivalent of one channel, if you like... everything which wasn't ultra-underground was fed into this one channel...
Post-punk and DIY as a widely disseminated concept the independent infrastructure becomes much more sophisticated, but at the same time the nature of the media means that the number of channels becomes 2 or maybe 3 or 4... the narrative of the hinterland contained in the independent media-record label nexus...
But now because of the ease with which music can be created and distributed, and the impossibility of any media outlet covering even a fraction of the total output with any authority there is fragmentation, and 10,000 channels. The disadvantage is the absence of noise-- those signals that you don't already know you want to receive... this was the implicit story behind much of the hand-wringing over the death of Top Of The Pops, the death of a narrow-band era, in which whilst most of the output was banal, but that the bit which wasn't was exposed to as many people as the MOR nonsense-- there was simply no other outlet for them to be watching.
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