"When Everyone Is DIY-ing, the Act of Putting Out Your Own Music or Magazine Loses Much of Its Ethical and Political Charge"

"Digiculture is the Anti-Spectacle: now we're all doing it for ourselves, incessantly.  The passing of the Analogue System makes it possible to see the benefits of the Mono-Mainstream (TV networks, major labels, government-run public broadcasting).  This apparatus created mass experiences, mobilizations of energy and desire.  But it also brought into being undergrounds, subcultures that grew in the darkness, outside mediation.  In time, these would break through into the mainstream, via certain libidinally charged thresholds (in UK terms, the weekly music press, Top of the Pops, Radio One).  They would change pop and be changed by it.  It was hard to break through, but if those barricades could be surmounted, things would then get propelled into mainstream consciousness and couldn't be ignored.  This antagonistic symbiosis of underground and overground resulted in a dialectical process of renewal and recuperation that kept music moving."

In a 2011 The Wire article, Simon Reynolds assesses the impact of the internet on pop music.