The politically charged music of the 1960s has been diffused during the past thirty years in a variety of ways. On the one hand, there has been a process of globalization by which American music has entered into, and in large measure served to define, a worldwide culture industry. From the end of the 1960s, rock music has come to exert an enormous influence over international popular culture, and, in economic and financial terms, has become one of the major commercial activities in the world. Rock music has stimulated developments in technology – from synthesizers to CDs, from electric guitars to the Internet – as well as in other leisure and consumer industries, and it has become a crucial ingredient in many other areas of culture, from film and theater to art and advertising.

As a result of these multifarious processes of diffusion, the music has, of course, been continuously depoliticized: the trajectory that was already visible in the sixties, from political folk music to harmless rock music, and from songwriting “movement intellectuals” to individualized rock artists, has become a kind of norm.