The general premise was that marketers are always looking to make money from and via youth subcultures, and that it’s up to the members of that subculture to spend their funds within their community, rather than paying it up or out.

In my niche market (nontraditional weddings) I see people doing this by doing most of their wedding shopping via sites like etsy.com. There seems to be a general trend toward “Well, if I have to consume … I can at least buy indie…”

The difference is that most people have never heard of them, and probably for good reason.

Their primary characteristics are impossible to package up and sell (racism*, drug use) and the music is impossible to tone down for a mainstream audience (180bpm+ speed-fuelled techno, rapping about rape/murder, etc).

Any youth culture which is based around a vague, individualist, mostly harmless teenage rebellion and which can be toned down to be acceptable to sell in Walmart is a marketer’s wet dream and will be quickly packaged up for sale to the masses.

In an age in which hordes of marketers count it as their full-time job to watch trends for the Next Big Thing, the subcultures which don’t get commodified are not commodified for a good reason.

* I know skinheads weren’t originally associated with racism, but by the time the culture got big enough to commodify it was – the racists got to ‘em before the marketers.