ABSTRACT
For many years, the study of the relationships between the media and their audiences have dealt with the ‘effects’ that media is supposed to inflict upon a seemingly unwitting, passive and distracted audience: that is, ‘us’. It seems that the media has not only informed us, but actually shaped our beliefs and attitudes. The weekly UK popular music ‘inky’ print media, together with other more specialised and often short-lived folk magazines (some of which were edited by or featured articles from Karl Dallas) provided the traditional music listener-researcher with a diachronic route map, thereby serving testament to common interests and concerns. The era was one of shifting ideas, new technologies, and different ideological standpoints and (despite his aforementioned disapproval of both BBC and radio luxembourg outputs), Stephen Barnard does state that, ‘a change could be detected across the whole of British broadcasting in the 1950s, and especially after the advent of ITV’.
