The Pop-Pickers Have Picked Decentralised Media: The Fall of Top of the Pops and the Rise of the Second Media Age

The BBC has recently announced that Top of the Pops, the long-running weeklypopular music programme, will broadcast its final episode in the summer of 2006.This brief ‘rapid response’ article considers how the conclusion of Top of thePops’ 42 year history may be understood as representative or indicative ofbroader transformations in musical appropriation. As such it considers the fallof Top of the Pops in relation to the rise of what Mark Poster has described asa ‘second media age’ (Poster, 1996). This second media age is defined by theemergence of decentralised and multidimensional media structures that usurp thebroadcast models of the first media age. This article argues that thedecommissioning of Top of the Pops, and the ongoing expansion of ‘socialnetworking’ sites such as MySpace and Bebo, illustrates the movement from afirst to a second media age. In light of these transformations I suggest herethat there is a pressing need to develop new research initiatives and strategiesthat critically examine these new digitalised forms of musicalappropriation.