Spongebob underwear, so you need not wonder
The interpretation of music and its influence if often done by theorist by analyzing texts. Specifically in the hermeneutic theory of deep textual scrutiny. Texts can be the actual song, the cover of the album which it was released on, or the myriad of merchandise that is associated with the artist’s influence. The purely solidarity analysis of specific texts is truly not a sufficient manner of understanding the increasingly intertextual impact of mass media. In the cross-over of artist’s promotion into the area of name-association-marketing, there is distinction in the two types of music industry. Nicholas Garnham discussed these in his paper On the Cultural Industries, first defining the descriptive term of culture industries as having the description of “characteristic common to the cultural process in all industrial societies, whether capitalist of socialist”. He had defined culture industries as the very institutions that “produces and disseminate symbols in the form of cultural goods and services, generally, although not exclusively, as commodities”. He later noted in his paper that Adorno (who originally coined the term) had made distinction that the very cultural industries which employed this industrial technology and modes of organization to produce cultural goods or services, in fact are themselves produced by largely traditional or preindustrial means, and those where the cultural form itself is industrial. The distinction of these two is greatly important since they have different relations of production and the types of economic organization. In Andrew Goodwins’s book Dancing in the Distraction Factory this concept is discussed; where selling “has employed vertically integrated economies of sale to improve profitability”.
High School Musical lunchbox featuring the teen pop stars Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens
The theorists of the Frankfurt School of Thought such as Adorno and Garnham were of the critical mode of analysis, thus they had a very forbearing view of the mass audience being compliant to the propagation of products. However a model of infastructure that was increasingly popularized in the 1970′s was the consumer being dictator over the corporation. This implies that the economy responds to our needs and therefore caters to us. Thus the music industry’s influence can be subject to a very intertextual analysis since we the consumer dictate what we want, and if industry wants to make money they must indulge this, however they are inherently manufacturing artists or in some cases simply promoting, and thus the industry at times is the power holder. I justify this point with the argument cultivated by Goodwin, since during the 1980′s there was such a rush in the development in music videos production which he argues was not due to audience pressures, but industry pressures. The reinventing that television underwent in the 1980s provided these pressures, as did the need for increasing marketability that made record companies confer to the television industry. This has led since to a normal trend of marketing products, specifically that has been exhibited in the promotion of music acts, that hasn’t been seen since the time of Beatlemania where there was a Beatle’s product of just about everything from wigs to tea sets in a time that had never mass marketed a band like that before. A similarity in this trend is the power of obsessively idolizing adolescence girls. The Jonas Brothers may not have the same inherently musically originality that can be appreciated by the intellectuals of this generation, but the are being promoted with the same fervor that one of the best bands of our time is, and this is the new norm.
Beatles Monopoly, for the fans of today, but the industry is still selling these products as strong as in the 60's
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