STRUCTURE OF POP MUSIC INDUSTRY - AND THE PLACE OF OUR POP VIDEO IN IT

Musical taste is a controversial topic due to conflicting views between fans, known to verge on ‘tribalism’; due to the peculiarities or characteristics that music contains, enforcing peoples sense of individualism. It can define and signify people’s lifestyle, influencing the way that you dress, speak and even act; a notion that has caused uproar towards acts such as Marilyn Manson and Eminem, who are often being blamed for violent acts committed by young people all over the western world. Because it is of popular belief that music and its trends sit at the epicentre of popular culture: it is our ambition to create a timeless star, one that surpasses changing fashions so that we can exploit it’s popularity to create and sell merchandise or in other words; create a product!
The dynamic tension between the organic (musicians that are in the game for the love of music only) and the synthetic who are, essentially; corporate puppets, underpins the success of the gargantuan media business. Our aim is to create a band that appears organic so they appeal to wide range of demographics, not only the ‘x-factor culture’. We want their personalities to shine through in the pop-promo. Synergetic connections with other media forms; which is already displayed through the music video, is also something to consider. This co-dependency with other types of media can be extremely productive but also risky due to the fact that this could possibly fragment the bands organic image and decrease popularity drastically. The pop-promo is only a single strand of a wider scale multimedia campaign! We plan to incorporate media technologies such as radio, newspapers/magazines, the internet and even advertisements in popular public areas such as shopping malls to captivate interest from as much of our target audience as possible. This is partly due to the structure of the music industry which is dominated by only three major conglomerates (Sony/BMG, Universal and EMI) who own a string of smaller companies known as subsidiaries. To compete with their internally funded multimedia launches; we must do the same, mainly to keep up with ‘modern day’ standards.

There are three types of company dominating the music industry are known as ‘Majors, Independents and Minis’. Because there are only three successful ‘Majors’, the industry is subsequently full of ‘Minis and Independents’. These companies often concentrate on a small number of artists within specialised niches in the industry. An example of one of these cases is “Assorted Records” who give unsigned talent a chance to ‘get out there’ and showcase their talents. A realistic notion is that our company is a Mini, but this doesn’t necessarily mean we can not turn a profit due to the increasingly popularity of niche acts subsumed with the fact that the industry is not a ‘hierarchy’ dominated by Majors but rather a “web of companies” who’s connection and synergetic relationship allow smaller companies to gain access to bigger markets; A factor that can make our position in the industry highly profitable.



Our music video has been created to serve a number of different functions: It promotes the single specifically and normally an album, hopefully giving audiences an insight into the organic nature of the band and conveying our carefully designed ‘rebel’ image. It also creates, adapts or feeds into a ‘star-image’, something we can play with in terms of the bands overall image and lastly: reinforces, adapts or undermines the meanings of the song to the most successful extent possible.

Current threats the pop video are highlighted by the fact that in many respects music videos are becoming defunct and irrelevant due to illegal downloading from the internet, manufactured programmes with live feeds, the ‘Vidvert’ or ‘I Video’ and the fact that music television is becoming more mainstream due to channels such as MTV. These factors undermine the suitable intentions of our pop video which is primarily; to make money. Though the notion highlighted above is worrying, this can present us with huge opportunities also such as the fact this makes our video more widely available. Though in the short term, this might render us helpless to video piracy, in the long term the video will be viewed by wider audience demographics!