"Every Home Is Wired": 2 -- The Progressive Rock Subculture and the Net

"Every Home Is Wired":
2 -- The Progressive Rock Subculture and the Net

It emerges quite clearly, once again, that the type of label for which DGM serves as an example operates tactically in a marketplace dominated by the strategies of this 'exploitative' and 'unethical' industry. At the same time, however, it is also possible that such tactical raids on established business practices can eventually hope to change these practices just as much as the need for profitability has toned down the most radical approaches of independent labels -- particularly in an environment where increased audience segmentation has already forced the major labels to alter their oligopolistic strategies. This is even more so because these labels have a strong and direct connection with the fans: as Lee writes, a "label's fans [are] in a sense its ideological recruits, the people through whom the label not only refine[s] its ideology of independence but also from whom it [draws] its most concrete support" (28). The effects of this are amplified by the use of new media like the Internet, with all their benefits of global, fast, multi-participant interaction in specialty communities.²⁰	Bit 37
This again brings home the point that the new vitality of the Prog genre is centrally connected to the weakening influence of the dominant music media networks of radio and TV on public taste in the age of segmentation, and to the formation of new and the resurrection of older taste communities through the virtual localisation effected by media like the Net. This justifies the "belief that if a style of music ... was vital and meaningful when it first appeared, there [is] no reason it cannot remain vital and meaningful even when the set of cultural conditions which originally gave rise to it are [sic] no longer in force" (Macan 197).²¹	Bit 38

It emerges quite clearly, once again, that the type of label for which DGM serves as an example operates tactically in a marketplace dominated by the strategies of this 'exploitative' and 'unethical' industry. At the same time, however, it is also possible that such tactical raids on established business practices can eventually hope to change these practices just as much as the need for profitability has toned down the most radical approaches of independent labels -- particularly in an environment where increased audience segmentation has already forced the major labels to alter their oligopolistic strategies. This is even more so because these labels have a strong and direct connection with the fans: as Lee writes, a "label's fans [are] in a sense its ideological recruits, the people through whom the label not only refine[s] its ideology of independence but also from whom it [draws] its most concrete support" (28). The effects of this are amplified by the use of new media like the Internet, with all their benefits of global, fast, multi-participant interaction in specialty communities.²⁰

Bit 37

This again brings home the point that the new vitality of the Prog genre is centrally connected to the weakening influence of the dominant music media networks of radio and TV on public taste in the age of segmentation, and to the formation of new and the resurrection of older taste communities through the virtual localisation effected by media like the Net. This justifies the "belief that if a style of music ... was vital and meaningful when it first appeared, there [is] no reason it cannot remain vital and meaningful even when the set of cultural conditions which originally gave rise to it are [sic] no longer in force" (Macan 197).²¹

Bit 38

Section 2 -- Go on to Bite:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30