Deadlines/Brief

Music videos are so 80s/90s, right? They belong with the era when MTV screened wall-to-wall vids instead of 'reality' TV? Try telling that to the millions who bought Gangnam Style; were they really simply loving the music? 1.6bn (and still climbing) have viewed the video on YT, not to mention the many re-makes (school eg, eg2), viral ads + celeb link-ups (even political protest in Seoul) - and it doesn't matter how legit it is, this nightmare for daydream Beliebers is making a lot of money, even from the parodies + dislikes. All this for a simple dance track that wouldn't have sounded out of place in 1990 ... but had a fun vid. This meme itself was soon displaced by the Harlem Shake. Music vids even cause diseases it seems!
This blog explores every aspect of this most postmodern of media formats, including other print-based promo tools used by the industry, its fast-changing nature, + how fans/audiences create/interact. Posts are primarily written with Media students/educators in mind. Please acknowledge the blog author if using any resources from this blog - Mr Dave Burrowes

Friday 1 April 2016

PIRACY, AUDIENCE How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt

There are a lot of highly enjoyable reads on music and the music industry. Austerlitz's history of the music video is a must-read; Simon Reynolds' Retromania puts together a strong argument on the changing nature of the audience for music, and Ralph Negus has done a fantastic overview of academic theory around music and audiences.

Whichever artist you're working on, you will be able to find books on them, their influences, their genre which help throw up ideas. As a result of so frequently name-checking Madonna when discussing Lady Gaga through the 2015 A2 Bad Romance production, I tracked down the hefty bio on her, a great read, and reinforcing the view that the likes of Gaga 'borrow' hugely from the Madonna playbook.

Witt's book, just out, I haven't read yet, but covers the span of two decades in which a bloated music industry exploited digital technology to charge fans to re-purchase music many already owned on vinyl or cassette. This hubris would come back to bite them as digital piracy took off, an early indicator that the traditional passive producer-audience relationship was unstable and set for disruption under what would become web 2.0...
Article/infographic link below the line


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