WEEK 2

This past week we covered chapter 2, The Industrialization of Culture Framework and Key Economic Concepts. Some key takeaways from this chapter were the general features of Culture framework and the various economic features that distinguish media industries. The chapter also discusses the variety of strategies media industries have developed in response to the peculiarities of media as commercial goods.

This weeks chapter was a little bit confusing and hard to grasp at first, but after discussing it in class it became a little bit clearer to understand. Overall, this chapter gave useful tools that help people understand the things that drive production across media industries.

My favorite thing that I learned this week was the strategies for revenue generation. I found it interesting to be able to apply these concepts to the real world. Price differentiation, or price discrimination, is getting people to pay the most you can for a product before lowering it. This is very relevant to movies and allowed me to think about why they release them in a certain way. I had always wondered why they don’t just put popular films on Netlifx right away and had known it wouldn’t be the most financially smart decision, but never knew what the cause of that was. After learning this concept in class, I was able to put two and two together, and realize that by putting popular movies in theaters first generates the most revenue for the specific film. This way, a movie with a lot of hype behind it will draw people to spend more money to see it, opposed to it being readily available and practically free to watch from the comfort of their homes.

I struggle a little bit with differentiating which term is which. Since I have them in my notes, however, I can easily refer back to them when they will be brought up again in class.

WEEK ONE

Chapter one from the previous week is about understanding media industries. Some main take-aways from this reading were understanding the factors that separate the products of a media industry VS there importance for society. This chapter also discusses the roles of individual agency and ideology within the media industries, and how this results in diverse, various products. This part of the chapter is what I found most interesting.

I always knew that different companies and different people would produce different projects for various reasons. But after reading this chapter, I developed a better understanding as to what actually goes on. Something I learned that reflects what a company produces is agency. Agency is the amount of control one has over something. Agency effects employees and their creative boundaries. The three principals of agency are circumscribed agency, ideological uncertainty, and the cultures of production.

The one that struck most interesting and valuable to me was the cultures of production. Cultures of production are the many conditions surrounding the production of content in an industry. The examples that were discussed in class were audience feedback, aesthetics, conventions or genre’s, professional organizations, and industry norms. All of these things play a role in what type of content a company produces. In my opinion, one of the most important thing that companies should abide by is audience feedback and reviews. An example I can think of is with the show American Horror Story. The show’s ratings began to drop after the first few seasons as consumers lost interest in the storylines. The producers at American Horror Story noticed this and presumably listened to consumer feedback. The new season, which came out last week, was supposedly a cross-over between the first and third season. By doing this, they’re listening to what consumers want to see and hopefully bringing back revenue that they lost during the decline of the series after the third season.