Newspaper Reports and News Articles

For the first time since the birth of punk, rock, emo and scene music, fans of the genres are spending more on attending concerts and festivals than they are on recorded music. The Glastonbury festival for example, something which was assumed to be just as successful as Download or Reading and Leeds, has been proven as being viewed a 'once in a lifetime' opportunity for concert goers, and so many are spending a lot to go to it. People in Britain spent an estimated £1.9 billion on going to festivals last year, and a measly £1.5 billion on recorded music in the form of CD's.
The number of festivals and the line up for festivals plays a big part in this dramatic change to the youth culture. In the year 2000 for example, there were only 12 music festivals to go to, and in 2009 an estimated 664 were played at and loved.

The band Green Day's best selling album American Idiot is set to appear on Broadway, shocking fans across the world. Michael Mayer and co have adapted the album and accompanying book (written by front man Billie Joe Armstrong) to come up with a brilliantly album-orientated musical that will be played in St James Theatre in April. Casting has not yet begun, but one can be sure the attendants to the show will be of the punk rock culture, and aged somewhere between 12 and 19.

Researchers at a Scottish University have recently carried out studies on music, the results of which show that playing rock music while studying may be of benefit to teenagers preparing for GCSE and A Level examinations. The researchers believe that the sound of guitar-based rock such as Red Hot Chilli Peppers, AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix improves concentration and boosts memory. In order to get their results, the researchers carried out a simple test on sixteen volunteers. Firstly, they played each of the volunteers a classical song and asked them to carry out a simple memory test. Then they did the same with rock music, static noise, and finally silence. The results showed that while classical music was better for cognitive tasks, the rock fans listening to the rock music carried out the memory task with a lot less brain power than they did when doing the test in silence. This may be bad news for long suffering parents of scene and emo adolescents, however.

bbc.co.uk -
Every year 80,000 punk rock fans gather at Donnington Park to see the Download festival. 200 was no exception. As of every year, the crowd eighty thousand well tattooed, well pierced, happy individuals filed into Donnington Park to see bands such as Faith No More, Slipknot, Limp Bizkit and the Prodigy, and they were not disappointed. Heavy metal music and rock music never go out of fashion, that is the beauty of festivals such as Download.
Hollywood Undead, the rapcore band, open the show and set the bar for the rest of the acts to live up to. Slipknot follow them well, wearing their telltale masks and doing a medley of Linkin Park songs. Emo-pop band The Blackout enthralled the emo fans the next day, followed by Korn and Limp Bizkit. Enter Shikari ended the day on a high. At the end of the festival it is agreed by all that 2009 has been one of the best years for Download.