Radiohead: MS4 Music 'The King Of Limbs'

Sin City students response with Feedback.

Peaky Blinders: Season 1 Ep 2 - Key Scenes

Mad Men: Season 5 Ep 11 - 'The Other Woman' - Key Scenes

Lost: Season 1 Ep 2 - Key Scene

Very Good Sample Response A/B: Industry/Music

B4. Explore how your chosen texts use digital technology in their marketing.

My three texts for this section are Lady Gaga’s 2011 album ‘Born This Way’, Radiohead’s 2011 album ‘The King of Limbs' and Nirvana’s 1991 album ‘Nevermind’. Each of my artists took different approaches to marketing with and without the use of digital technology.

Gaga uses digital technology such as the internet to sell her albums as well as making a retail copy. Her 2011 album ‘Born This Way’ sold 440,000 copies within two days via download on the Amazon website for a price of only 99 cents. A consequence of this new digital system and method for obtaining music is that fans can illegally download/ leak the album before the intended release date. Oxford band ‘Radiohead’ found a way around this problem when self-releasing their 7th album ‘In Rainbows’ (2007).

Breaking free of major labels and embracing digital technology Radiohead set up a website where they released ‘In Rainbows’ allowing their fans/ everyone to pay what they wanted for a digital copy, which let the fans decide how much the music was worth to them. This proved highly profitable for the band themselves and set a new industry model whereby the artists gained more profit and more control.

Lady Gaga is also well known for using Twitter to communicate with her social networking, teenage fans on a regular basis, creating a parasocial relationship with them. Overall the singer/ songwriter has 41,482,584 followers on the social networking site as well as other followers on other sites such as Facebook and Google+. The connection she has with her fans via the use of social media allows her to cultivate and reinforce a personal relationship with her fans to preserve her popularity and mainstream pop status. Digital technology therefore allows wider access and increases potential sales in the modern digital market.

Gaga’s success and popularity increased as she became more globally known through the use of digital technology. She released 5 singles over an 8 month period all accompanied with a music video, which can be found on her own YouTube channel. Repeated views increase her market value and maintain a level of popularity. The high production values together with the glamorous and provocative appearance of Gaga herself also made her videos compulsive viewing for her fans (Little Monsters as she calls them) on YouTube. She gains millions of hits per video and this encourages countless fans to create viral copycat productions which have increased her online presence immensely.

A band who didn’t follow this modern, mainstream method of marketing was Radiohead, an indie/ alternative rock band from Oxford, UK. Their self-promotion and self-releases of albums ‘In Rainbows’ (2007) and ‘The King of Limbs’ (2011), via their website allowed the release(s) to occur globally and at the same time see an increase in sales due to their established fanbase, cultivated via their major label EMI. ‘The King of Limbs’ sold an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 copies through the website alone. The experiment they conducted with the release of album 7 ‘In Rainbows,’ limited the possibility of illegal recordings/ leaks being distributed allowing the band more control in their output. This unique form of marketing resulted in positive and negative press coverage as a result of bypassing and not conforming to the usual record industry models. For the band themselves it allows more freedom and more profit, they have stated that they earned more money from their self-released albums – something the industry have historically depended upon.

As the band already had an established fan base, they didn’t accompany their 2011 album ‘The King Of Limbs’ with a tour and only released a niche, low budget, DIY music video for one track ‘Lotus Flower’, solely targeting their pre-existing fan base. Both Gaga and Radiohead gained and have sustained their fan bases and promoted their work(s) through the use of digital technology.

A band that didn’t have access to digital marketing during their career were ‘grunge’/ rock three-piece Nirvana. For their 1991 album ‘Nevermind’ they were totally reliant upon marketing via their major record label Geffen. Coverage from music press such as ‘NME’ and ‘Rolling Stone’ magazines, helped promote the bands profile but ‘word of mouth’ was essential in spreading the message about the bands work pre-internet as well as TV appearances and live touring. Due to this it took the band 5 months to get to number 1 on the Billboard 200 charts, whereas both ‘The King of Limbs’ and ‘Born This Way’ went straight to the top of the charts in their first week proving the effective use of digital technology in the music industry in todays modern marketplace.

Digital technology was not available during these times but their popularity is now widely promoted via ITunes and other online sites such as Facebook as a form of nostalgia for both those that enjoyed their music at the time and new fans. The suicide of lead vocal Kurt Cobain and the rise in sales post-death poses the statement that ‘artists make more money/ get more recognition once they’re dead’. This can be proven due to release of albums such as ‘Nirvana’s Greatest Hits’ released via online stores for the 20th Anniversary of Cobain’s death, promoting their work further with the use of digital technology.

Digital technology is highly used in order to market and promote artists in the music industry today as it has an immediate impact on fans and allows fans to access and download their work(s) in high quality, reducing the costs of production and distribution for music labels. The use of digital technology also allows for new artists to become widely known through social networking sites.

'A' Grade Exam Response: Nirvana

How effectively were your three main texts marketed?

Nirvana had to rely upon upon their major record label Geffen to gain them mainstream popularity in the 1990's as the internet was in its infancy. Their 1991 release 'Nevermind' was released by Geffen at a time when to achieve widespread success in the music industry it was essential to be signed to a global label as they had the marketing and distribution capabilities to promote artists. At this time critical acclaim, through reviews, and 'word of mouth' enabled artists to become popular and established on the independent circuit, but this restricted worldwide success due to lack of revenue - this is why Nirvana chose to ditch their independent label Sub Pop and sign to the major label Geffen. 

Their use of a strong visual rebellious iconography; long-hair, ripped jeans and punk rock attitude had already created a hardcore audience which had allowed them to successfully market themselves to not only metal fans but also more alternative genres. This attitude can be clearly seen in the 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' music video. In the opening shot we instantly see the 'Converse All Star' baseball shoe a typical clothing signifier of teen rebellion. The videos mise-en-scene of a high school basketball court with teenagers 'moshing' in slow-motion was also highly evocative of Nirvana's cultural ideology and potential audience appeal.

Nirvana's DIY, punk attitude was already well-established from their time at Sub Pop, but maintaining this with the move to Geffen increased their marketing potential as they hadn't 'sold out' to their hardcore fans. On the UK promotional tour for 'Nevermind' Kurt Cobain, and the rest of the band, maintained their authentic attitude and image on several TV shows such as Jonathan Ross and Top Of The Pops. On the Jonathan Ross show in 1991 they were expected to play their new single 'In Bloom' but instead chose to play one of their heaviest metal genre songs 'Territorial Pissings'. This created  a buzz around them and people wanted to see them live and this also increased the sales of their album 'Nevermind'.  This would have been viewed as a highly effective marketing strategy in the early 90's before the progression to internet marketing as their popularity was increasing through reviews and 'word of mouth'. 

However, since the demise of Cobain and Nirvana the internet has now enabled their legacy to continue through iTunes and youtube and their music can still be marketed at a young rebellious audience. The ability to target audiences through iTunes with links to other artists has allowed marketing approaches to successfully reach appropriate audiences without the added costs of promotional and live touring. The internet has also allowed new audiences to discover Nirvana and buy their album 'Nevermind' as witnessed for the 20th Anniversary re-release via iTunes. This has now allowed the album to achieve over 26 million sales worldwide since its release in 1991.     

     

Sin City (2005): A Grade Response

Sin City (2005)

A2. How typical are your three main texts of their genre?

My three texts studied within this industry are ‘District 9’, ‘Sin City’ and ‘Fish Tank’. All three texts use certain genre conventions and stylistic features but they are all fairly typical of their respective genres.

Sin City can quite easily be established as postmodern due to it being a clear collaboration of a number of genres, creating hybridity within the text. The opening sequence, however, conveys genre conventions that can strongly be associated with the film noir genre. An establishing shot is used to, at first, frame an unknown ‘assassin’ (The Man) on a balcony in a cityscape, this mise-en-scene highlights the urban environment commonly employed in film noir films from the 1940’s. Further film noir conventions can then be seen with the inclusion of the ‘lady in red’ who displays the characteristic features of a major noir element, the femme-fatale – with red lips, cigarette in-hand and slinky dress. This character is also lit using low-key lighting, a commonly used technique in film noir to suggest deception or deceit. Audiences familiar with the genre would therefore make assumptions about her narrative role by relating her to similar characters seen in classic noir films of the 40’s, such as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Combo.  

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Sin City, though, then breaks away from the stereotypical femme-fatale character when ‘The Man’ shoots the ‘lady in red’. This plays with the normal narrative convention and provides genre difference to the text, making it untypical. This adds a shock for the viewer and could be regarded as a way to keep the genre fresh for the audience. Further film noir conventions though can be seen later in the film when the more established noir protagonists arrive in the form of the heroic ‘flawed’ males – Hartigan, Marv and Dwight. Each of these male characters is cynical, damaged and ‘hard-boiled’ like the original noir heroes from the 40’s features I mentioned earlier. Marv, for instance, states in a voice-over narration (another typical characteristic of the genre), that “Sometimes I even wonder why I’m on this earth” - therefore expressing a cynical viewpoint on his existence and his worth in the world. As with all the scenes throughout Sin City, Marv is regularly framed at a ‘dutch tilt’ angle and in stark high contrast black and white to not only represent his skewed view on the world but also his strong moral views of what is right or wrong.

The merging of genres in Sin City, to create a hybrid, clearly makes the film untypical of the original genre though. The continuous use of comic-book conventions, such as Marv’s ‘superhuman’ strength, establishes the fact that Sin City, although displaying many opposing conventions, is in itself a text which is both noir and comic-book; a comic-noir if you like. Evidence of this can be seen with the persistent use of comic-book framing and over-exaggerated actions. Hartigan’s shooting on the docks, by Bob (his cop-buddy), clearly shows signs of both noir and comic-book features when John is shot multiple times but still manages to save Nancy and express his feelings through a voice-over; again a noir convention. Another noir/comic-book hybrid, The Spirit, was released 3 years after Sin City that merged elements of each genre showing how genres adapt and change over time.

The Spirit (2008)

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Television: Strengthening Exam Responses

Exam Responses: Guidance 

• Developing more thorough responses to exam questions is a key skill that needs to be developed in preparation for the exam. 
• Below are sample paragraphs of A and D grade responses to a Television/Audience question from a previous paper. 
• These highlight the contrasts in content, detail and discussion that is required to get the highest grade possible. 
• Strengthening your exam skills and technique to create better responses is not difficult if you can recognise your weaknesses and change your approach to answering questions from a more critical perspective rather than largely descriptive. 

(Section B)
Explore the different ways in which your chosen texts attract their audiences. 

'D' grade response

My second text is Mad Men, this show is aired on a cable channel AMC in America. So it is not as mainstream as programmes shown on BBC or ITV channels and therefore more niche in target audience. The target audience is males and females but may be tipped slightly more aimed at males but they didn't want to eliminate the female population, people in their late 20s to a much older generation due to the complex script involved. Mad Men is a long running narrative that invests in characters so will attract viewers that are less passive and will invest more time and thought into the series. There is a scene of promiscuity in the text I have looked at that shows the audience they want to attract is an adult audience and also implies that it is a male audience they are targeting the show at also. The series is set in the 1960s so will attract predominantly viewers that understand this decade, it uses many conventions like colour connotations and mise-en-scene to show the genre and era of this show.

Comments

Lacks detail - has a tendency to generalise - lacks confident use of audience terminology - does not relate a scene in the text to how an audience will be attracted

'A' grade response

The opening episode to Mad Men Season 4, see’s an extended conversation between Don Draper and an interviewer take place, something that a younger audience – 16-25 – may find unappealing. The younger audience would not find the topic of conversation about Ad agencies interesting or engaging as it fails to relate to their own interests, therefore it would provide no gratification and have no use for them as viewers or their peers. A younger audience would be more used to fast paced editing and simple narratives concerning gossip and relationships, such as TOWIE or Made In Chelsea, as they can personally identify with such issues or aspire to their ideals.  It is therefore clear that the target audience for Mad Men is a middle class male demographic. The highbrow nature of the show lends itself to a middle class audience, as it is often reviewed in newspapers like 'The Guardian’. 

Comments

Includes detail - does not generalise - uses appropriate audience theory/terminology - relates theory directly to the text - is confident

Strong Exam Responses:

• Include detail 
• Don't generalise 
• Use Media language 
• Apply appropriate theory 
• Are written with confidence 
• See the interaction between text and audience as a complex relationship

MS4 - A Grade Exam Response: Text, Industry & Audience

Explore the different ways in which audiences and/or users respond to your chosen texts.

Television programmes will have a target demographic that the programme will be aimed for. It is how the programme appeals and captures the audiences’ attention, whilst fulfilling their needs that will determine if the programme will be a success.

In the American programme ‘Lost’ by ABC, the directors and producers have made sure that the show attracts the largest demographic possible by having a 14 strong and frequently speaking multicultural ensemble cast. What is interesting about ‘Lost’ is that its main protagonist is a white, middle-aged American doctor called Jack, as the ‘hero’ element in Propp’s character theory.  This theoretically appeals to the strongest demographic in the US, the white male being the more dominant. The main female protagonist is a strong white good looking American named Kate therefore appealing to the female gender. The first two-part episode called ‘Pilot’ was the highest costing first episode ever, costing around $10-14 million dollars and set up the range of characters that make up the ensemble cast. This means that the audience can relate to a member of the cast and fulfil the personal identifications aspect of the uses and gratifications theory.

Also the neutral location of a desert island strengthens the programmes wide demographic as it also appeals to the escapism aspect of entertainment in the uses and gratifications theory. As ‘Lost’ functions around strong enigma codes the audience will tend to stick with the series and become regular and committed viewers.

The programme uses enigma codes for example ‘where have they landed?’, ‘why did they crash?’.  This encourages the audience to carry on watching the series, as Cultivation theory suggests, through its six season life span and also generates discussion and debates on fandom sites such as ‘Lostpedia’, the lost website, forums and social networking such as ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’, by fans known as ‘Lostaways’ or ‘Losties’. This mix of media forms to promote and show TV programmes is an example of the way that convergence theory works. Lost was also the first series to be uploaded onto itunes.

‘The Wire’ itself is a crime genre set in Baltimore USA where the majority of its inhabitants are working/lower class black drug dealers in their teens or at school. I found ‘The Wire’ particularly difficult to watch due to me relating to no personal identity within the programme. I took a very oppositional reading and found myself watching passively as an 18-year-old English white student rather than a white middle-aged male which is ‘The Wire’s’ target demographic. ‘The Wire’ has now become a cult programme with box sets now available in stores such as HMV after being shown late into the night on BBC 2. The programme has developed a large cult following through ‘word of mouth’ and critical acclaim via its appeal and constant referencing by TV presenter Charlie Brooker on ‘Screenwipe’ and The Guardian.

Clearly hitting a more highbrow audience has led to many awards for its challenging narratives and non-stereotypical character constructions. Indeed many of the characters overturn familiar crime conventions by using non-actors who have really experienced the situations that the programme depicts. Its writers too have generally experienced these real-life situations which make the events much more authentic. In the episode that I watched (Season 4 Ep 1) very little actually happened, the dominant criminal character Omar, in the pre-credit sequence, was seen in bed with another male (a clear indication of challenging stereotypes in this genre). He left his house wearing pyjamas and went to local store to get breakfast cereal, therefore creating an enigma. The expectation was that he would encounter trouble or violence, a typical convention of the genre, but this didn’t occur. My response was disappointment, but the target audience would have appreciated this break with convention as more active viewers. 

Also on BBC, Louis Theroux’s Gonzo style documentaries on ‘The Worlds Most Hated Family’ encourages an active participation from the audience as the controversial topic provokes argument and debate. Theroux can be seen as good example of how the BBC remit is fulfilled as his programmes ‘educate, entertain and inform’. They are also extremely popular across the world, winning awards and establishing the BBC as a producer of high quality broadcasting.

Due to Louis Theroux’s style of journalism being subjective he encourages the British demographic to agree with his point of view, taking an oppositional view of his subject- The West Borough Baptist Church. Many viewers will watch Theroux’s interactive documentary style for entertainment, which is unusual due to classic documentaries primary purpose being to inform, another aspect of uses and gratifications theory. Theroux immerses himself in the environment of his subject and allows them reveal themselves; either negatively or positively. This creates tension within the audience and encourages expectation. In this episode Theroux followed the family on its regular and frequent demonstrations against, what they argue are, Un-American activities. The uncomfortable nature of this situation is highly watchable, which is part of the appeal, only later in the programme does Theroux challenge his subject matter. This is the standard format of his documentary style and is key to its popularity, he doesn’t have an agenda and lets things just happen.    

What I personally found that people watched ‘The Worlds Most Hated Family’ was to fulfil their social integration, as Uses and Gratification suggests, so that they could feel a part of a wider community both at college and on social networking sites, and it was successful at achieving this. Many of my peers had viewed the programme and it was a popular source of debate. My other chosen texts Lost and The Wire provide similar gratifications but to vastly different audiences. Lost is far more mainstream entertainment and The Wire can be regarded as highbrow viewing. All programmes though have found their individual target audiences and won critical acclaim as a result. 

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: District 9 (Representation/Genre)

Science fiction is creeping into more mainstream films: Guardian.co.uk Anne Billson

Science fiction isn't all 'talking squids in space'. And its creep into mainstream cinema is everywhere from Never Let Me Go to Midnight in Paris

It has already been observed that Mike Cahill's Another Earth and Lars Von Trier's Melancholia share the evocative image of another heavenly body in close proximity to Earth. The most significant thing about this coincidence is that neither film would normally be classified as science fiction. And it's not as if either director is distancing himself from the term, the way Margaret Atwood seems to be. She's made increasingly baroque contortions to explain that what she writes is "speculative fiction" and not SF.

There has long been a tendency for SF themes to bleed into the mainstream and non-SF genres. What is It's a Wonderful Life if not a story set in a parallel universe? And we've come to expect a touch of SF in our action films; as far back as the 1960s, James Bond and other spy movies flirted with technology so farfetched it tipped over into futuristic, and it's rare for a Hollywood thriller now to pay much heed to the laws of physics. But more and more high-concept, big-budget action flicks – Limitless, The Adjustment Bureau, In Time are just three recent examples – are coming out of the closet as unabashedly SF, even though not one of them features what Atwood refers to as "talking squids in outer space".

These films are aimed at audiences who probably wouldn't object to talking squids, but I've written before about the way chronological jiggling, time warps and parallel universes have infiltrated mainstream drama, romcoms and sitcoms. And "SF creep" into the mainstream and arthouse is on the rise, even if the term "science fiction" is only mentioned by critics disparagingly, as if the fact that the film under question refuses to classify itself as that makes it superior to the usual genre nonsense.

Take three other 2011 high-profile releases. Never Let Me Go was sold as Brit-lit (tagline: "Based on the best selling novel"), whereas it was really The Island for People Who Don't Like Explosions, with Keira Knightley instead of Scarlett Johansson. Hanna was sold as a junior Bourne Identity ("Adapt or die"), whereas it was essentially a junior Universal Soldier ("Robots run amok"). Midnight in Paris was basically a time travel yarn, but was sold as a Woody Allen film, which is permissible since he's a genre unto himself and has already flirted with SF in Sleeper, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex … and – in the most memorable bit of Stardust Memories – aliens. ("We enjoy your movies. Particularly the early, funny ones.")

It's tempting to dismiss such films as SF for People Who Don't Like Science Fiction, since mainstream pontifications on the genre still yield blinkered pronouncements from folk who wouldn't be caught dead at a Star Trek movie. Conversely, a lot of people who might have enjoyed Monsters were probably put off by it being marketed as a variation on District 9 ("After six years, they're no longer aliens. They're residents") when it was really the sort of thing that plays better at Sundance than at a fantasy festival – a low-budget relationship movie that happened to have tentacled aliens as walk-on extras.

But it's more likely a symptom of the way boundaries between traditional genres are dissolving. So maybe it's time to redefine genres, or even nominate new ones. Since barely a week goes by without another set of actors doing give-me-my-Oscar-now acting in overwrought drama triggered by a traffic accident (Another Earth, Margaret, Rabbit Hole etc) I propose "roadkill" as a new genre. Remakes, sequels and prequels can be lumped together under "recycling". Then there's the "girls in fetishwear" genre typified by Sucker Punch and Colombiana. This Year's Leslie Mann Movie would take care of all those bromances involving her husband, Judd Apatow. And we mustn't forget The Tom Cruise Running Very Fast film.

An example of the front page of the A2 Media exam