Music industry links

http://musicindustrysectionb.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.bpi.co.uk/

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2012/04/what-impact-has-mobile-had-on-the-music-industry-infographic.html

http://infographic.im/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Music_Evolution_lowres1.jpg

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/musicindustry

Assessment objectives - what you will be assessed on?

AO1 - Demonstrate knowledge & understanding of media concepts, contexts and critical debates, using terminology appropriately and with accurate and coherent written expression.

AO2 - Apply knowledge and understanding to show how meanings are created when analysing media products and evaluating their own practical work.

AO3 - Demonstrate the ability to plan and construct media products using appropriate technical and creative skills.

AO4- Demonstrate the ability to undertake and apply appopriate research.

EXAM in brief

Exam paper covers two areas:

Section A (50 marks) - Answer Qs on an unseen clip from a TV drama, linked to an aspect of representation in the sequence.
Sequence will be from a contemporary one-off drama or series or seral drama programme screened on British TV, including some sourced from other countries.

Section B (50 marks) -  Answer one compulsory question based upon a case study of a specific media industry (film)

MASLOW'S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

maslow's hierarchy of needs

Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs motivational model

Abraham Maslow developed the Hierarchy of Needs model in 1940-50s USA, and the Hierarchy of Needs theory remains valid today for understanding human motivation, management training, and personal development. Indeed, Maslow's ideas surrounding the Hierarchy of Needs concerning the responsibility of employers to provide a workplace environment that encourages and enables employees to fulfil their own unique potential (self-actualization) are today more relevant than ever. Abraham Maslow's book Motivation and Personality, published in 1954 (second edition 1970) introduced the Hierarchy of Needs, and Maslow extended his ideas in other work, notably his later book Toward A Psychology Of Being, a significant and relevant commentary, which has been revised in recent times by Richard Lowry, who is in his own right a leading academic in the field of motivational psychology.

Abraham Maslow was born in New York in 1908 and died in 1970, although various publications appear in Maslow's name in later years. Maslow's PhD in psychology in 1934 at the University of Wisconsin formed the basis of his motivational research, initially studying rhesus monkeys. Maslow later moved to New York's Brooklyn College.

The Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs five-stage model below (structure and terminology - not the precise pyramid diagram itself) is clearly and directly attributable to Maslow; later versions of the theory with added motivational stages are not so clearly attributable to Maslow. These extended models have instead been inferred by others from Maslow's work. Specifically Maslow refers to the needs Cognitive, Aesthetic and Transcendence (subsequently shown as distinct needs levels in some interpretations of his theory) as additional aspects of motivation, but not as distinct levels in the Hierarchy of Needs.

Where Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is shown with more than five levels these models have been extended through interpretation of Maslow's work by other people. These augmented models and diagrams are shown as the adapted seven and eight-stage Hierarchy of Needs pyramid diagrams and models below.

There have been very many interpretations of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in the form of pyramid diagrams. The diagrams on this page are my own interpretations and are not offered as Maslow's original work. Interestingly in Maslow's book Motivation and Personality, which first introduced the Hierarchy of Needs, there is not a pyramid to be seen.

Free Hierarchy of Needs diagrams in pdf and doc formats similar to the image below are available from this page.

click to enlarge

(N.B. The word Actualization/Actualisation can be spelt either way. Z is preferred in American English. S is preferred in UK English. Both forms are used in this page to enable keyword searching for either spelling via search engines.)

maslow's hierarchy of needs

Each of us is motivated by needs. Our most basic needs are inborn, having evolved over tens of thousands of years. Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs helps to explain how these needs motivate us all.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs states that we must satisfy each need in turn, starting with the first, which deals with the most obvious needs for survival itself.

Only when the lower order needs of physical and emotional well-being are satisfied are we concerned with the higher order needs of influence and personal development.

Conversely, if the things that satisfy our lower order needs are swept away, we are no longer concerned about the maintenance of our higher order needs.

Maslow's original Hierarchy of Needs model was developed between 1943-1954, and first widely published in Motivation and Personality in 1954. At this time the Hierarchy of Needs model comprised five needs. This original version remains for most people the definitive Hierarchy of Needs.

 

USES AND GRATIFICATION

Uses & Gratifications theory

During the 1960s, as the first generation to grow up with television became grown ups, it became increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices about what they did when consuming texts. Far from being a passive mass,
audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways.

 

In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society:

 

·                  surveillance

·                  correlation

·                  entertainment

·                  cultural transmission

 

Researchers Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes (ie uses and gratifications):

 

·         Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.

·         Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other
interaction, eg) substituting soap operas for family life

·         Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning
behaviour and values from texts

·         Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living eg)
weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains

 

 

Since then, the list of Uses and Gratifications has been extended, particularly as new media forms have come along (eg video games, the internet).

 

Q: What would you add?

 

REPRESENTATION

Representation

Understanding representation is all about understanding the choices that are made when it comes to portraying something or someone in a mass media text.

It's impossible to portray every aspect of an individual in a photograph, or even in a feature film, so certain features of their personality and appearance get highlighted, and are often enhanced, when it comes to constructing the representation that the audience will see. When representing a person, media texts often focus on their:

·         Age

·         Gender

·         Race/Ethnicity

·         Financial Status

·         Job

·         Culture/nationality

Signs and symbols are used as a kind of visual shorthand to represent these attributes. When we decode these signs we make assumptions about who the character is (usually by comparing them to similar characters we have encountered before), and this allows us to put them in a category and "read" them in context. For instance, when constructing characters for a TV or movie scene the producers might give an old man white hair and a walking stick, or provide a wealthy lawyer with a three piece suit to wear and a briefcase to carry. Whilst not all old men need a walking stick and not all lawyers carry briefcases, these are easy and quick ways of signifying information about the character.

Who? What? Why? Where?

When you're analysing representation, think about the following questions:

·         Who or what is being represented? Who is the preferred audience for this representation?

·         What are they doing? Is their activity presented as typical, or atypical? Are they conforming to genre expectations or other conventions?

·         Why are they present? What purpose do they serve? What are they communicating by their presence? What's the preferred reading?

·         Where are they? How are they framed? Are they represented as natural or artificial? What surrounds them? What is in the foreground and what is in the background?

 

Once you start to think carefully about different representations, you will find that the same representation means different things to different people. We all decode representations according to our own life experience, where we've lived, how old we are, and what other media texts we are familiar with, as well as a myriad psychological factors. Other elements such as political sympathies and social class can come into play. When producers construct a media representation, they often assume that the audience is one homogenous mass that will all decode the representation in the same way. However, people see even the most basic images in different ways. Look at the two famous optical illusions below. What do you see first?

 

 

KEY CONCEPTS

Key Concepts – AS MEDIA EXAM

 

  Media language, codes & conventions - Shot types and how & why they are used

  Audiences - How meaning is constructed for the audience

  Representation - The representation of different social groups and issues

  Narrative (Conflict) – Binary opposition & how conflict between social groups is represented

  Genre – definition & theories

GENRE

Genre 

Working definition: a way of categorising a particular media text according to its content and style.

Genre does not rely simply on what's in a media text but also on the way it is put together (constructed). This can be important, for example, when distinguishing between a horror movie and a thriller, which can deal with similar subject matter, and look the same — lots of action set at night — but belong to separate genres (a horror film takes the audience into a supernatural place, where a thriller sticks to reality).

A media text is said to belong to a genre, as it adopts the codes and conventions of other texts in that genre, and lives up to the same expectations. Texts from different mediums may belong to the same genre (e.g. a tv programme like Dr Who and a comicbook like The Incredible Hulk can both be categorised as Science Fiction.)

How do you tell which genre something belongs to?

Content

Are the characters wearing this kind of hat? Then it's probably a Western.

E.g. Westerns always have cowboys, whether they are set in the present day or the 1840s. Audiences have a set of expectations as to what a genre text will contain in terms of transportation, costume, character, setting, mise en scene, soundtrack, stars etc, and they look forward to seeing genre-specific examples of content when they experience the text.

 

Style

E.g. women's magazines always present an attractive model on the front cover. Media texts follow sets of conventions in the way that they are constructed. You see a contents page in a magazine before any feature articles. In movies, a romantic comedy always ends with a wedding. Often content and style are closely interlinked.

Does belonging to a genre mean that a text has to be exactly the same as other texts within that genre?

No — genres are described as dynamic, i.e. the boundaries are constantly changing. Individual texts can challenge conventions, and defy certain parts of the usual genre categorisation — for instance, recent movies such as Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Knocked Up (all from the same producer, Judd Apatow) have redefined the romantic comedy genre, making the humour cruder, and telling stories from a male character's, rather than a female's perspective. Genre texts would get very boring and predictable if they all followed exactly the same conventions — no audiences would want to consume new ones, they would just keep on revisiting old favourites.

 

Why is genre important for ...

Producers of media texts?

• Gives a pattern for construction, a template
• Genre pieces have an established audience who are easy to market to
• Certain personnel can develop their skills working within a particular genre (e.g. horror make up specialists)
• Stars can associate themselves with a particular genre e.g. Will Ferrell is known for a certain type of slapstick comedy, and his face on a poster instantly tells audiences what kind of movie they are likely to see if he is in it.
• Fans of a genre know the codes, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time

Distributors?

• Clear channels for marketing and distribution — easily targetable audience
• Concentration of distribution resources — no point in trying to get eg football matches to a non-sports audience
• Fans of a genre as a whole can easily be persuaded to buy other texts in the same genre eg dance music compilation CDs
• Provides a structure for retail outlets

 

NARRATIVE

Narrative

In Media Studies, it is important to tell the difference between narrative and story

Story = a sequence of events, known correctly as the plot

Narrative = the way those events are put together to be presented to an audience.

Therefore, when analysing a narrative we analyse the construction of the story ie the way it has been put together, not the story itself. You also need to consider what the story is about in its most basic terms, ie the theme (eg Love, war, winning).

All media texts have a narrative, whether they are a six hour TV mini-series or a one paragraph newspaper story or a glossy magazine photograph.

Analysing a narrative will involve the following:

Technical Codes

This refers to all the aspects of narrative construction that involve technical decision making. Therefore anything to do with camera angles and movement, lighting, sound, props. shot framing and composition, design and layout and editing. What do each of the choices made tell you about what is going on - for instance, is a character shot from a high or low angle and how does that make you, the audience, feel about them? How are sound effects used to help you make sense of what is going on?

Verbal Codes

The use of language - written and spoken - and signs contained in graphics. We learn a lot about a narrative from what we are told in this way, but the best narratives show rather than tell, leaving the audience to draw their own conclusions.

Symbolic Codes

These are the signs contained in the narrative that we decode as being significant and having meaning - for example a ragged coat worn by a character may mean that they are poor and possibly hungry. Think of them as clues that have to be followed, and different viewers/readers will follow clues in different ways.

Structure

Russian theorist, Tzvetan Todorov, suggests that all narratives follow a three part structure. They begin with equilibrium, where everything is balanced, progress as something comes along to disrupt that equilibrium, and finally reach a resolution, when equilibrium is restored.  Equilibrium – Disequilibrium – New Equilibrium

This simple formula can be applied to virtually all narratives - it is a more formal way of thinking about the beginning, middle and end, and it takes into account Aristotle's theory that all drama is conflict ie there is a disequilibrium at the heart of every narrative.

Narrative Conflict

Aristotle - 'all drama is conflict' (4th century BC)

 

20th century theorist Claude Levi-Strauss came up with a theory of Binary Opposition, meaning that all narratives had to be driven forward by conflict that was caused by a series of opposing forces. This theory is used to describe how each main force in a narrative has its equal and opposite.

 

Analysing a narrative means identifying these opposing forces, eg. Light/dark; good/evil; noise/silence; youth/age; right/wrong; poverty/wealth; strength/weakness and understanding how the conflict between them will drive the narrative on until, finally, some sort of balance or resolution is achieved.

 

Key terms - Narrative conflict, binary opposition

Names to know - Aristotle, Levi-Strauss

 

Drama = Conflict

Types of conflict in TV crime drama

CONFLICT

criminal vs victim

criminal vs wife, family

criminal vs police

criminal vs detective

criminal vs law (courts)

detective vs suspects

detective vs criminal

detective vs police

detective vs lawyer

detective vs partner, wife, family

 

AUDIENCE THEORY

Audience

Audience theory provides a starting point for many Media Studies tasks. Whether you are constructing a text or analysing one, you will need to consider the destination of that text (i.e. its target audience) and how that audience (or any other) will respond to that text.

Remember that a media text in itself has no meaning until it is read or decoded by an audience.

For GCSE, you learned how audience is described and measured. Now you need a working knowledge of the theories which attempt to explain how an audience receives, reads and responds to a text. Over the course of the past century or so, media analysts have developed several effects models, ie theoretical explanations of how humans ingest the information transmitted by media texts and how this might influence (or not) their behaviour. Effects theory is still a very hotly debated area of Media and Psychology research, as no one is able to come up with indisputable evidence that audiences will always react to media texts one way or another. The scientific debate is clouded by the politics of the situation: some audience theories are seen as a call for more censorship, others for less control. Whatever your personal stance on the subject, you must understand the following theories and how they may be used to deconstruct the relationship between audience and text.

1. The Hypodermic Needle Model

Dating from the 1920s, this theory was the first attempt to explain how mass audiences might react to mass media. It is a crude model (see picture!) and suggests that audiences passively receive the information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data. Don't forget that this theory was developed in an age when the mass media were still fairly new - radio and cinema were less than two decades old. Governments had just discovered the power of advertising to communicate a message, and produced propaganda to try and sway populaces to their way of thinking. This was particularly rampant in Europe during the First World War (look at some posters here) and its aftermath.

Basically, the Hypodermic Needle Model suggests that the information from a text passes into the mass consciouness of the audience unmediated, ie the experience, intelligence and opinion of an individual are not relevant to the reception of the text. This theory suggests that, as an audience, we are manipulated by the creators of media texts, and that our behaviour and thinking might be easily changed by media-makers. It assumes that the audience are passive and heterogenous. This theory is still quoted during moral panics by parents, politicians and pressure groups, and is used to explain why certain groups in society should not be exposed to certain media texts (comics in the 1950s, rap music in the 2000s), for fear that they will watch or read sexual or violent behaviour and will then act them out themselves.

2. Two-Step Flow

The Hypodermic model quickly proved too clumsy for media researchers seeking to more precisely explain the relationship between audience and text. As the mass media became an essential part of life in societies around the world and did NOT reduce populations to a mass of unthinking drones, a more sophisticated explanation was sought.

Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analysed the voters' decision-making processes during a 1940 presidential election campaign and published their results in a paper called The People's Choice. Their findings suggested that the information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated but is filtered through "opinion leaders" who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow. This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts. This is sometimes referred to as the limited effects paradigm.

·         The Two Step Flow Of Communication Theory - A short paper by Sarah Griswold

·         Two Step Flow Theory—Clear summary of Katz & Lazarsfield, with diagrams

·         Katz & Lazarsfeld: Two Step Flow - Mick Underwood

3. Uses & Gratifications

During the 1960s, as the first generation to grow up with television became grown ups, it became increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices about what they did when consuming texts. Far from being a passive mass, audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways. In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society:

·         surveillance

·         correlation

·         entertainment

·         cultural transmission

Researchers Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes (ie uses and gratifications):

·         Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.

·         Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, eg) substituting soap operas for family life

·         Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts

·         Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living eg) weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains

Since then, the list of Uses and Gratifications has been extended, particularly as new media forms have come along (eg video games, the internet)

·         Why Do People Watch Television? - an exploration of Uses & Gratifications by Daniel Chandler

·         Uses & Gratifications/Dependency Theory - E Rossi

 

4. Reception Theory

Extending the concept of an active audience still further, in the 1980s and 1990s a lot of work was done on the way individuals received and interpreted a text, and how their individual circumstances (gender, class, age, ethnicity) affected their reading.

This work was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience - the text is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the reader, and there may be major differences between two different readings of the same code. However, by using recognised codes and conventions, and by drawing upon audience expectations relating to aspects such as genre and use of stars, the producers can position the audience and thus create a certain amount of agreement on what the code means. This is known as a preferred reading.

 

·         Why Do People Watch Television? - an exploration of Uses & Gratifications by Daniel Chandler

·         Uses & Gratifications/Dependency Theory - E Rossi