Popular music and youth culture The theme I chose was popular music and youth culture. The focus of my project began to develop after I observed that the range of musical genres represented through media formats such as multi-channel TV and radio is becoming increasingly diverse. I've also noticed that pop music itself is becoming more diverse and that youth culture seems to be fragmenting into smaller, more niche groups. From these observations I developed the specific focus for my project: do new media technologies lead to the diversification of popular music genre and has there been an impact on contemporary youth culture?'I started with a visit to local libraries, where I searched for books by media academics containing theories about the music industry, new media technologies, and youth culture. I have found it helpful to browse the contents pages of these books for relevant sections. I found that media textbooks and teaching guides were particularly helpful as they briefly covered many important theories and referenced many academic books and articles that I could then read to gain further understanding. When I do research in the future, I will immediately start consulting textbooks. I searched the web for relevant academic articles and soon discovered that the problem was not a lack of information but rather how to select what was actually useful. I realized that simply typing “popular music and youth culture” would yield millions of mostly irrelevant results. I did two things to find information on the web; I first refined my search phrases by constantly identifying what produced relevant pages and continuously modifying my searches to produce increasingly relevant results.