Review of 'Uncut' Magazine

Uncut is one of those magazines that offers its readers a bit of everything, (when it comes to music and films of course) in a fairly simple but at the same time not in a patronising way. Each issue of this quite awesome  magazine includes all the things you would hope for. there is a wide variety of information most of which would be expected in the normal run of the mill film and music magazine. its got all the essential stuff you need with a little bit of wit smushed in there too. in fact in my opinion the words used by Josh Ritter when he calls the album 'So runs the world away' "dense stuff alright" completely goes against my opinion of this fabulous magazine. 'Uncut' is one of the many magazines that is aimed at men in their 20-30's and delivers its very thorough information perfectly. 

Does the emergence of the digital download signal the end for the music industry?

Digital downloading is by far the most popular form of gaining new music, whether its through legitimate programmes such as iTunes or the non legitimate ones like 'Limewire' and 'Napster' etc. With the ever increasing ease to uploading music onto the internet for others so download and copy for free, music companies are saying that it is destroying the industry and causing them to lose out on a vast amount of profits. However, although this is a solid argument, there is a very strong counter argument also. People that download a certain artists work wouldn't necessarily have bought the album int he first place and by downloading if for free it means that more people will listen to artist that might not have otherwise. this will expose them to a wider range of music and they will then be more likely to buy other albums by that artist in the future or go to a concert of theirs. this then in turn will prove to benefit the artist in the long run.
Although downloading does at first glance seem a great problem for the music industry, it will not be its downfall, if anything will in time increase profits etc. in the industry.

Can popular music achieve genuine political change?

Frith and Straw said that "Pop Becomes the expression of its political and social context" which would support the opinion that pop music is intertwined with politics. There have been cases where artists have tried to make some kind of a change with their music, such as Bob Marley with 'Get Up, Stand Up'(1973), which was widely sold,  where Marley talks of how people have to stand up for them selves and never give up, had an impact on people and their thinking. The other, more obvious example of how music can in fact influence politics was seen in ‘Band-Aid’ and ‘Live Aid’ where they raised over £50million for the children of Africa. Although there was a lot of criticism of this event, the fact remains that it got peoples attention and managed to make more money then the government could have hoped to for the cause. This alone is a perfect example of how popular music can achieve genuine political change.