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London's Radio Pirates Changed Music. Then Came the Internet. (nytimes.com)
Earlier this month, The New York Times ran a story which looks at the ways a network of illegal radio stations changed British music, and wonders where young people are going to make culture now, now that the internet is killing off the pirate radio. An excerpt from the story: Ofcom, the British communications regulator, estimated there are now just 50 pirate stations in London, down from about 100 a decade ago, and hundreds in the 1990s, when stations were constantly starting up and shutting down. Ofcom considers this good news, because illegal broadcasters could interfere with radio frequencies used by emergency services and air traffic control, a spokesman said.
But pirate radio stations also offered public services, of a different sort: They gave immigrant communities programming in their native languages, ran charity drives and created the first radio specifically for black Britons. Pirate radio was also the site of some of Britain's most important musical innovations, introducing pop to the airwaves in the 1960s and incubating the major underground British music trends of recent decades, up to and including dubstep and grime: Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Skepta all launched their careers on the pirates.
But pirate radio stations also offered public services, of a different sort: They gave immigrant communities programming in their native languages, ran charity drives and created the first radio specifically for black Britons. Pirate radio was also the site of some of Britain's most important musical innovations, introducing pop to the airwaves in the 1960s and incubating the major underground British music trends of recent decades, up to and including dubstep and grime: Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Skepta all launched their careers on the pirates.
...or maybe this is more complex?
Rather than being the promised burgeoning of the "long tail", the web has become a giant (western)world-wide game of winner takes all.
Go to a council estate in London/Manchester in the 1990s and you would find local culturally relevant microcosms of expression. Those expressions would hold and find resonances in thousands of people in the local area. Some of them take root in a wider sense and give rise to "stars", but it is that expression of a local identity that was the value.
Go to youtube now and you will find 40e6 videos with 10 views, and 10 videos with 40e6 views, posted per day. That isn't a long tail, that is a delta function.
Winner takes all. Diversity wiped out, homogeneity rules. The web is the enabler of that, for better and (more likely) worse.