"Every Home Is Wired": 1 -- The Net in Relation to Music Subcultures

"Every Home Is Wired":
1 -- The Net in Relation to Music Subcultures


Globalisation?
The music (and more generally, the media) industry today is controlled by a limited number of players whose oligopolistic business approach Burnett likens to that of "the 'seven sisters' of the oil industry" (141); as the phonogram industry's 'seven sisters' he lists Sony, Warner, PolyGram, Bertelsmann (BMG), EMI, MCA, and Virgin.² It is obvious that even for organisational reasons alone such a transnational industry would be very strongly in favour of a globalisation of markets, in order to limit the amount of local taste specificities it needs to cater for. In reality, however, such globalisation has proved far more difficult to achieve than expected: the local, we find, is not as easily extinguished by globalisation as has been assumed, and the undeniable technical globalisation of the world's media can even strengthen the culturally local, as it now finds audiences outside its traditional limited area.	Bit 8
The concept most under threat from globalisation, instead (as well as, traditionally, from the local), is that of the national. Already a problematic construct in many internally diverse nations, the national loses its meaning as culture both leapfrogs national boundaries and restricts itself to smaller, apparently better-defined areas. The media have been instrumental in this process, and once they are globalised, the process is irreversible, as Anthony Smith states: "it is not capitalism and its transnational corporations which have eroded the power of nation-states, but the possibilities of constructing much larger institutional units on the basis of vast telecommunications systems and computerised networks of information. In this situation, any attempt to limit such networks to national boundaries is doomed to failure" (175). Finally, the demise of the national as a concept possibly standing in the way of globalisation is added to by the breakdown of other ideologies which could have exercised a restrictive influence: "for example, Marxism, the official ideology of state communist societies, or a form of socialist ideology in the West, has collapsed, and alternative religions compete with more established or state-recognised ones" (Longhurst 113).	Bit 9

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