Pop music and the development of technology

The development of technology has devalued music as to be succesful in the music industry today you need to be a 'brand' rather than a 'band' because of how our culture of consumerism has developed. Pop music used to just be live perfromances and the artists music was valued for the audience simply enjoying the music, pop music is culturally defined as teenagers were defined by the music they listen to, this is where subcultural groups developed; differentiated by style of music and dress. MODS V ROCKERS
The development of the music industry means theres more artists to reach a wider audience however the ditsribution and production of music has also developed from it being essential to distribute music through a recording studio technology now allows us to produce our own music from home and distribute it to the nation through forms of web 2.0 such as Youtube and MySpace, for example Lily Allen became famous within the music industry through MySpace and arctic monkeys also became successful through Myspace, which made distribution of music easier, this was however damaging the industries income and people were not going to the record studios and were still being successful in producing and distributing good quality music.
The development of technology also meant that the music industry were loosing out because of file sharing on sites such as 'Napster' meaning people could P2P file share illegally for free, which meant that the artists weren't gaining back the money they spent on producing the music because so many people were illegally downloading and file sharing.
The music industry has now made artists become more commercial using a specific image and brand to promote themselves to make them more appealing to their target audience and because of the competition between existing and new artists to be successful, the audience want more than just music because of our culture
 By Laura Thorpe