Music Industry Revision - Glossary of Terms

Archetype: an often- repeated character type or representation which is instantly recognisable to an audience

Attitudes, beliefs and values:  terms commonly used when discussing the audience for media products and the factors influencing the reception of media messages.

·         Attitudes are the positions people adopt in relation to a particular issue, e.g.  Being for or against foxhunting.

·         Beliefs are deeply held views, e.g.  A belief in the principle of human equality or a belief in God.

·         Values represent the moral or ideological structure within which beliefs and attitudes are formed, e.g.  Belief in Christianity or Islam.

·         All these factors affect the reception of media texts.  Research also focuses on the ways in which media content influences the formation, representation and reproduction of attitudes, beliefs and values.

Audience: key concept the groups or individuals targeted by producers as the intended consumers of media texts.  Owing to the wide availability of media texts, the actual viewers, readers or listeners may not be those originally targeted.

·         Audience studies are usually structured in terms of gender, age and social and cultural background, and are concerned with the circumstances in which media texts, are consumed and the nature and the consequences of this consumption.

·         The identification of an audience is a vital ingredient for the successful production and marketing of and media text.

·         Considerations of audience motivation and behaviour are at key focus of attention in both active and passive audience theories.

 

Composition: the arrangement fee of visual elements within the frame, for clarity, balance or aesthetic judgement.

Connotation: a meaning attributable to an image beyond the obvious denotational level.

·         Such meanings may be metaphorical, symbolic or culturally generated and will vary line with the cultural background and attitudes, beliefs and values of the individual viewing the material.

·         e.g.  An image of a red rose has connotations of New Labour, or England, or on a Valentine card can represent hot-blooded passion.

 

Conventions: the expected ingredients in a particular type of media text.

 

Convergence: the coming together of new media Technologies.

·         e.g.  Television is now digital and interactive, with the potential for 1000 channels and with technology available to download and store programmes; television can also be used for banking and shopping; Internet web cams allow for visual interaction between users; music can be downloaded and burnt onto CDs and mobile phones can take and send pictures and access the Internet.

Demographics: information concerning the social status, class, gender and age of the population. 

·         Audience profiles use demographic information, the best-known system being the ABC1 scale.

Gender: psychological and cultural aspects of behaviour associated with masculinity and femininity, acquired through social socialization, in accordance with the expectations of a particular society.

·         Representations of gender increasingly challenged traditional concepts of masculinity and femininity.

·         Girl power, launched as a marketing device for the Spice Girls in the early 1990s, created new role models have a certain young women, rejecting the traditional passive female role.

·         Traditional masculine trades of violent aggression, sexual promiscuity and high levels of alcohol consumption are increasingly represented without gender distinction, and female representations in film made challenge or subverted traditional femininity and female roles e.g.Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Quentin Tarantino 2003, 2004) and Tomb Raider (Simon West, 2001)

·         Masculinity is represented increasingly as soft or ambivalent.  Men can outcry, show affection for babies and talk about their feelings openly, or characteristics traditionally associated with femininity.  Males are also shown as uncertain about their gender identity, e.g.  Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

Gendered Consumption:  the way that gender affects our consumption of media texts.

·         Ann Gray suggested (1992) that women prefer open-ended narratives, such as soap operas, whereas men preferred closed narratives with a clear resolution, for example, police dramas.  The concept of (women’s fiction) (Christine Geraghty, 1991) involves identifying characteristics and media texts that appeal to women.

·         e.g.  Soap operas attracting large female audiences have strong female leads, deal with personal relationships in the domestic sphere and contain an element of escapism.

Genre: key concept a category of media products classed as being similar in form and type.

·         Film, magazine, newspaper and television are all media genres.  Types of film, magazine, newspaper and television programme are also genres.  Westerns and musicals are filmed genres, lifestyle magazines are a magazine genre, tabloids and broadsheets a newspaper genres, situation comedies, crime dramas and soap operas a television genres.

·         Genres operate alongside narrative constructions in line with the audience expectations, for example, magazines of a particular genre are expected to contain a specific kind of narrative discourse.

·         Genres can be further divided into subgenres.

Genre Theory: an explanation of the role played by genre in differentiating media texts and aligning audiences.

·         Genre theorists consider the relationship between audiences, media texts and media producers and the ways in which genres, particularly in film, can be used by producers to target specific audience groups, with predictable expectations of audience numbers and responses.

·         e.g.  In explaining their appeal to audiences, Richard Dyer (1973) argues that the genres a pleasurable because they offer escapist fantasies into fictional worlds which remove the boredom and pressures of reality.  He sees these worlds as utopian, offering the audience abundance, energy, excitement, spontaneity and community-none of which are present in their everyday lives.

Hybrid: a cross between one film genre and another.

·         E.g. From Dusk till Dawn (Robert Rodriguez, 1996) starts as a crime drama and becomes a vampire movie.

Icon: a sign resembling the thing in represents.

·         An icon can also be an image representative of an ideology or religion.  Icons were originally religious paintings of Christ and the Virgin Mary and treated as sacred objects.

·         E.g.  A photograph.

·         TIP of a public figure who, having achieved the ultimate in a particular field, has become the focus of mass adoration is also called on icon, e.g.  Pop icons such as Kylie Minogue or Madonna.

Ideology: key concept of a set of attitudes, beliefs and values held in common by a group of people and culturally reproduced within that community to sustain its particular way of life.

·         Ideologies can be described as dominant, subservience, or opposition all depending on their status within a society.

·         E.g.  Capitalism, Communism, Christianity and Islam.

·         TIP Ideology is present in all media texts.  You can explore it by assessing the attitudes, beliefs and values within the text and the assumptions made about what the viewer or reader thinks and feels.

 

Incidental music: the use of music to punctuate for a specific events or action, or to provide a sound background.

 

Independent: a media organisation or activity that is not connected to a major company.

Institution: key concept any of the organisations responsible for the production, marketing, distribution or regulation of media texts.

·         Institutions are business and social structures that produce media texts and regulates and structure media activities.  If they are collectives within which individuals are encouraged to work toward a common goal and to develop working practices based on assumptions about the aims and ethos of the institution.  Institutions assumed shared values of all employees and have a status and power relationships with other institutions and the wider public.

·         E.g.  BBC, Sky, CNN, British Board of Film Classification.

 

Interactive: media texts which of audiences the opportunity to choose, respond or shape the text in some way.

Intertextuality: the practice of deliberately including references to one text in the narrative of another, either as homage to the text referred to or as a device intended to engage the interest of the audience by appealing to their prior knowledge and experience of media texts.

·         Intertextuality can generate levels of meaning for the viewer and anchors a current text within texts of similar or related genre.

·         For example, Kill Bill Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003) makes many references to Westerns, gangster and Japanese Samurai films.

 

Key Concept: any of the core concepts on which a media studies programme focuses, specifically audience, genre, ideology, institutions, language, narrative and representation.

·         These key concepts provide a systematic structure for the study of the media and media products and provide terms of reference in any media assignment or project.  Any analysis of the media topic should be related to the key concepts where appropriate.

 

Language key concepts: the particular codes used within different media to convey messages to audiences.

·         This includes the content, theme and purpose of a print-based text, its layout and design, the use of written language and of photography and illustration.

·         With the moving image, language involves iconography, mise en scene, use of lighting, colour, editing and montage techniques.

·         Visual language involves selection and construction from paradigms to produce syntagm’s e.g.  a poster, photograph or film. 

Media access: describes the degree of ease with which citizens can be seen and/or heard in the media, respond to the media and be provided with a dialogue with institutions, and the opportunities evident for people to produce media texts themselves and for them to be distributed.

Media language: an umbrella term that describes the ways in which audiences read media texts through understanding formal and conventional structures (for example, the grammar of film editing).  Media literacy describes our ability to read and write in this extended sense of language.

Media Studies 2.0: a response to web 2.0, proposed by Gauntlet (2007) , in which the role of online user-generated content and sharing is seen as fundamental to how we understand media audiences. 

Mediation: the means by which, through the use of representation, a media organisation and its employees stand between an event and the public’s perception of that event.

·         Mediation involves the process of constructing, interpreting and editing material in accordance with the requirements of the chosen medium of communication.

·         TIP It is useful to remember the term indicates other media change events by reporting and representing them.

 

Mode of Address: in narrative studies, the way in which media texts talk to an audience.

·         In audiovisual texts, this can be in the form of a voiceover where an unseen narrator addresses the audience.  The narrator could be one of the texts characters and provide insight into what occurs on screen us. 

·         In film noir, the private detective’s voice often provides a running commentary on the action, from his perspective.

·         TIP fans of the cult movie Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) dispute which of the two versions of the film, one with lead character Deckard’s (Harrison Ford) off-screen narration and one without, is the most successful.

 

MP 3: Computer Software package which allows a user to convert a music CD track into a computer file and post it on the Internet for downloading by others.

·         The implication of MP3 and other similar software, for example, Windows Media Audio (WMA), is that music can be downloaded free of charge.

·         Websites such as Napster were created solely for the purpose of allowing free music downloads that came up against copyright law.  Legal action by music publishing companies against Napster, which created the file sharing system in 1999, forced the company to close in 2001. It re-launched in 2003 as a legal service charging for music.

·         The development poses a problem for the artist and the music industry as copyright law is being broken Anthony them makes any money from the practice.

 

MTV (Music Television): worldwide music television channel founded in the USA in 1981 and owned by Viacom.

·         MTV operates in 136 territories, reaching over 300 million households, and has various versions such as MTV Europe, MTV Mandarin, MTV India, MTV Nordic and MTV Australia.  The company claims that it is sensitive to worldwide cultural and musical diversity.  In spite of this claim, critics argue that its prime concern is to deliver use the audiences to advertisers and that it promotes essentially Western consumer values.

 

Multi media: the text created in a variety of media.

 

Narrative: key concept the storyline and structure of a media text.

·         Narratives all stories helped to shape and explain all aspects of our lives from earliest infancy.  They are part of the ways in which we make sense of the world and provide reassurance in the face of the dangers and contradictions of everyday experience.

·         Narratives are structured within genres, which provide frameworks of expectation, predictability and outcome.

Niche Marketing: the targeting of a small but significant group of consumers with a media product directed specifically at their interests.

• E.g.  Living France magazine is directed at people who have a specific interest in the French way of life, in holidaying in France and who may have a second home there.

Ofcom: the public body responsible for regulating the television, radio and telecommunications media in Britain.

• Ofcom replaced the Independent Television Commission, the Broadcasting Standards Council, the Radio Authority and the Radio Communications Agency under the terms of the 2003 Communications Act.
• Ofcom’s remit does not currently include the BBC.
• Complaints to Ofcom about media content tend to be about offence caused by language, sexual portrayal and violence, where the regulator is particularly concerned to monitor the 9.00 PM watershed, and also religious offence, accuracy and impartiality.  The regulator publishers regular Ofcom Broadcast Bulletins with details of complaints, the responses of broadcasters and conclusions.

Parody: the imitation of one media text by another for comic effect.

·         E.g.  Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974) parodies all the iconographic, narrative and character features of the Western genre; scary movie (Keenan Ivory Wayans, 2000) parodies the horror genre. 

 

Pleasure: a motivating factor in the consumption of media texts.

• Pleasure has often been ignored by researchers seeking to explain the motivation of audiences that is reflected in the uses and gratification theory and is an increasing feature of the appeal media products have in a hedonistic, self-gratifying and consumption-orientated Pop Culture: text which are consumed by a wide range of people, as opposed to a smaller group that is seen as an elite; they tend to be described as ‘popular’ and this implies a lesser cultural status or value.

Pop Music: technically, any music that reflects popular culture but usually applied to the development of rock and roll from the 1950s to its present widely diverse variations.

Primary Research: research undertaken through direct interview with a source or by direct access to original, unmediated documents or images. 

Reception Theory: an active audience theory which sees the audience as being actively engaged in the interpretation of media texts rather than as passive consumers.

• Audiences decodes media texts in ways that relate to the social and cultural circumstances and individual experience.  Reception theory uses qualitative and ethnographic methods such as group interviews and participant observation.
• In Morley’s 1980 Nationwide study (Nationwide was an evening news programme) he found that an audience’s response to media texts was influenced by family, class and educational factors.  He showed the different groups interpreted the same texts in different ways depending on their background and level of involvement with the subject matter.  For example, a group of management trainees saw the programmes items on trade unions as being biased towards the unions, whereas a group of workers saw the same items as being anti-union. 
• Morley’s approach is important because it combines semiological and sociological approaches.  Semiological study involves the idea of directed preferred readings of media texts, while sociological study is concerned with how age, sex, race, class, gender, sexuality and disability may determine the reading of a text.
• The approach is also known as audience studies or new audience research and in the 1990s was associated with the work of David Buckingham.  His research concludes that even by the age of seven children have become skilled readers of media texts and a able to interpret, challenge and reject media messages, including advertising.
• TIP this research can be used to challenge effects theory models which argued that audiences, particularly children, are affected negatively by media content.

Representation: key concept of the process whereby the media construct versions of people, places and events in images, words or sound for transmission through media texts to an audience.

• Representations provide models of how we see gender, social groups, individuals and aspects of the world we all inhabit.  They are ideological in that they are constructed within a framework of values and beliefs.  Representations are therefore mediated for and reflect the value systems of their sources.  No representation is ever real, only a version of the real.
• The representations are part of cultural mythology and reflect deep-seated values and beliefs e.g.  Of such places as the north of England, Scotland and America.
• TIP representation is the key to many media debates and is usually described as being positive or negative, depending on the view of the group being represented.  Achieving positive representations (versions of themselves that they agree with and approve of) has been a goal of minority groups who have criticised the perceived negativity of media stereotypes, e.g.  homosexuals, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, disability groups and women. 

 

Scheduling: the strategic positioning of media texts within broadcasting time.  Digital television is increasingly disrupting this approach, since viewers can choose more easily than before when to watch. 

Stereotype: the social classification of a group of people by identifying common characteristics and universally applying them in an often oversimplified and generalised way, such that the classification represents value judgements and assumptions about the group concerned.

• E.g.  The ‘dumb’ blonde, the ‘mean’ Scotsman.

Target Audience: the intended audience for a media product.

• When producing a media text for mass consumption, identification of the target audience is essential so the media institutions can assess the likely response to the product and the investment risks involved.
• The BlockBuster movie titanic (James Cameron, 1997) was carefully crafted to appeal to a range of audiences, with its generic mixture of disaster movie, historical reconstruction, action movie and romance.  To this was added a hit single theme song by Celine Dion.  In spite of costing $200 million to produce, it grossed$1 billion at the box office, a record at the time.
• TIP the target audience is not always the actual audience for a text, e.g. children under the age of 15 watching a 15 or 18 rated film when their parents are at.

Terrestrial: analogue broadcasts from land-based transmitters as opposed to cable or satellite digital transmissions.

Upload: for transferring information or material from a computer to an online network.

Vertical Integration: the merger or takeover of companies operating at different stages of the production/distribution process.

• Total vertical integration gives a company control of a product from raw materials to distribution.
• E.g.  In media Industries, the takeover by newspaper owner of the distribution service and retail outlets such as newsagents would be vertical integration.