Music markets in Czechoslovakia of the 1970s and 1980s

Since the communist party seized power in 1948, new culture, the so called socialist realism, was expected to be a form of culture common and imperative to all people in Czechoslovakia. But instead of achieving hegemony, western cultural products such as rock music gained popularity among the people. One of the conditions, which contributed to popularity of western music, was a somewhat ambivalent reception and treatment of this subject. On the one hand, western music was often criticised and publicly condemned. On the other hand, small amount of undistorted information could be found on the pages of the official press - music magazines etc. Possibilities of acquiring records of western rock bands were scarce, for some even impossible. These facts contributed to the emergence of unofficial music markets