Politics, Profit and Rock'n'roll get Wired

"The relationship between popular music and corporate business interests is depressingly familiar to successive generations of young people who have used music as the focus for their sense of identity and community, only to see their culture hi-jacked and packaged to serve the profit-motive of record companies. Sixties survivors might couch their complaint in the language of Critical Theory, citing Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic Of Enlightenment or Marcuse's One Dimensional Man, Punks might use the Clash's (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais to bemoan the men in suits 'turning rebellion into money', but the sentiment is essentially the same.

In cyberspace the old story has a new twist as record companies and a community growing up around the transfer of CD-quality music sound files - specifically Mpeg Audio Layer 3 (MP3) - square up to each other over the impact of new technology on the cultural icon of popular music." -- from Andy Oldfield, Politics, Profit and Rock'n'roll get Wired, frAme, Issue 2, 1999

"After giving up a promising career as a coal miner to take a social sciences first degree, Andy Oldfield earned an MA at the University of Lancaster in 1983, studying anthropology, psychology and sociology of religion. Since then he has worked as an itinerant writer and editor. His first fiction sale was a crypto-cyberpunk story to Practical Computing in the mid 80s. His last cyberpunk story appeared in Interzone in the mid 90s. In the interim period he was nominated for a World Fantasy award. Lately he has been fantasising about viable markets for neo cyber-hippie fiction. He is currently pursuing a second MA (in Writing at Nottingham Trent University), editing trAced and writing information technology news and features for The Independent newspaper based in London." -- from frAme, Issue 2, 1999