Music and Youth culture

Most of my sources are actually books that contain a section about my specific topic. I am going to orient this discussion around youth culture since the late 1990's onward to the present day and how it is effected by pop music mostly from a technical standpoint.

Thankfully, I have 4 books all on the subject.

For the sake of time (and sanity) I will only look at one book and one internet source.

First is Pop Music, Pop Culture. By Chris Rojek, which is the most recent as it was published in 2011.
He Starts with distinguishing Pop versus Popular music saying that Pop implies a short life and is a dismissive term as well as being a completely different genre in how it is organized; rock, rap, and techno can be Pop, but Pop is not built of a musical Genre but as a collection of Genres.

He uses very technical terms and, as a musicologist (those exist?), analyses the counter arguments in the opening alone to a superb degree citing several definitions of "pop". He also goes on to say and I quote "for those under-30 demographic, the normal ways of producing and consuming music are microchip-based." The book itself is splint into chapters pertaining to The Field of pop music, theoretical perspectives and the mode of production(which is what I mainly want to focus on).

Second is an article from Slate on the subject of popular music growing in a simple, predictable and perhaps boring way over the past 60 or so years. The analysis is rather plane and to the point saying that, according to a study done by the Spanish National Research Council where they used a computer to analyze nearly half a million songs, they found a clear evolution or devolution, in musical quality. They say that the music has  become "blander and louder" than it used to be, which is strong at creating imagery that could be misleading. 

At first glance I thought I could use the analysis in my study to introduce my topic and show off the dynamics of this generation. now after close analysis, I can say that it has only some flaws near the introduction, after which it becomes rather technical and in depth. The fact that the website was once owned by Microsoft would support its credibility. The article also linked to a yYoutube channel, The Loudness War , discussing the actual change of the depth of the sound mixing (which was a point in the article that volume was being vamped up) that has resulted over the years which actually provides some interesting insight into the pop music that is effecting pop culture. (Plus there is a whole college level audio tech tutorial that is almost 40 videos long that I am geeking out over)