Entrepre…whaaaat?!

In today’s session we clarified the key aspects of an enterprise and of being entrepreneurial. The terms might sound the same but actually differentiate from each other. To be entrepreneurial its not needed to have an enterprise, but to open/start a successful enterprise its definitely needed to be entrepreneurial in my opinion. As I started my own enterprise about nine months ago, I managed to improve my personal entrepreneurial assets as I went along, which also resulted in clearly identifiable improvements within my enterprise in itself.

As the meanings of terms like enterprise, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial and entrepreneurship can be very confusing, I’m going to clarify those for you by keeping it short and simple.

• The word that is generally applied to businesses set up is enterprise and is also pretty often associated with some kind of organisation or project.

Examples of enterprises: Virgin, CrescoSMG, Beatfreeks, Unicef, UFC, Nike, Red, Long Island Records etc.

• The entrepreneur is the one that creates and operates the enterprise.

Examples of entrepreneurs: Richard Branson, Jamie Oliver, Walt Disney, Bill Gates, Alan Sugar etc.

• Entrepreneurship is the development/process from 0 to 100 of the enterprise.

This is the process that all successful enterprises you can possibly think of went through one day.

• Entrepreneurial are attitudes and characteristics that most of us have/used at some point in our ordinary everyday lives and are key aspects of an entrepreneur to a certain extend.

Examples of being entrepreneurial: organising, operating, taking risks, assuming, open-mindedness, resourcefulness etc.

I hope I gave you some of the answers you were looking for with this post and make sure you check out this blog regularly for any updates.

Reading Response WEEK EIGHT

In week eight of the Radio and Popular Music module, we were set one reading about technology in the media, and had to find another reading ourselves to involve it into our reading response. The readings and the lecture of this week, helped to discover and understand the concept of technology and consumption.

Technology plays a massive role in the world of media in our days. Always when a new development in the technology of media happened, it brought advantages and disadvantages with it. The developing technology can’t create something absolute new, but it creates greater access and choice for the audience. New technologies in the media these days are mostly multi-media, global, offer 24-hour database access and have their own community. (Baker, 2010: 122)

But not everyone in this world can enjoy the luxury of greater access and choice.

What media we engage with and in what way we do this, depends on many factors like the cultural and ethnic background for example. (Baker, 2010: 126) People who are living under poor conditions or marginalized from new technology an media, haven’t got the choice and the requirements to access new mediums. If it is possible to access this media in the countries, the individual consumers have to ask themselves if it is affordable for them. (Baker, 2010: 127)

Some of the radio and popular music practices continue through new developed media in the industry. This also means that the new technology makes the media from before look old. (Baker, 2010: 124) This can cause a loose of consumers and the loose of profit, for those mediums. This brings the reconfiguration of markets with it, which can also be very profitable for the new media leaders. When the Mp3 player went on the market, kids stopped listening to the radio. (Albarran, 2007: 92) Now we are flooded by a massive wave of new devices like tablets and new technology glasses etc. and the classical mp3 player isn’t used anymore,

It is still not easy for new media mediums to compete against the mainstream media. The mainstream media like traditional radio, television and printed media are still heavily used and are still leading the media section. (Baker, 2010: 128-129)

Another big advantage of new technology and the convergence is the deeper understanding of audiences and consumption. The development of new technology makes it easier to build a relationship between producer and consumer. (Baker, 2010: 122) The relationship between producer and consumer is very important in the media industry, to target the correct audience in a professional way. This is done by using collected information about the audience and individual consumers. (Baker, 2010: 123)

I want to add that I think that certain things in the media are going to change in close future. The big variety of media we get offered in our days is too much to keep the traditional radio alive. The traditional television is loosing consumers to alternative providers like Netflix and lovefilm. The variety of new forms of radio in the online world is even bigger and too big for the traditional radio in my opinion.

I would suggest to take further academic research in the possible “dying out process” and the future of the traditional media. This could help to prepare businesses and the society for such big changes.

Reference:

Albarran, A.B.A., 2007. “What Happened to our Audience?” Radio and New Technology Uses and Gratifications Among Young Adult Users. Journal of Radio & Audio Media, Volume 14, 92-101.

Baker, A. J, (2010). College Student net-radio audiences: A Transnational Perspective. Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media. 8 (2), pp.121-137

Reading Response WEEK SEVEN

In week seven of the Radio and Popular Music module, we were set one reading about audiences, and had to find another reading ourselves to involve it into our reading response. The readings and the lecture of this week, helped to discover and understand the structures behind audiences and their power.

Media is entertaining, informing etc. but to do so, all media needs to target audiences to be consumed. The production and distribution would be invalid without the consumption of audiences, what makes it useful to conceptualise audiences. The audience can be conceptualised as passive or active. The passive factors are simple and less variable. The passive audience gets injected with information, entertainment etc. and just takes it in, without having their own interpretation of the consumed media. Passive audience members are described as conformist, gullible, anomic, vulnerable, victims. (Biocca, 1988: 51)

The active audience is much more interesting and described as individualistic, impervious to influence, rational and selective. (Biocca, 1988: 51) Active audience members have many different individual interpretations and opinions about the media text they are consuming, depending on our class, culture, gender, age, environment, cultural milieu etc. (Hendy, 2000: 144) ‘As listeners, then, we are the co-producers of radio. We all create our own images in listening to the radio.’ (Hendy, 2000: 145)

The power of what is being produced is not only on the side of the producers, but also on the side of the audience. The audience has got a massive impact on what the media industry is producing. What means that if an audience stops listening to genre X, the production of genre X is going to shrink because there are less consumers/customers in genre X and it wouldn’t be worth it to produce. (Hendy, 2000: 144) We as the audience and consumers have the power to choose what media we want to engage with and in what way, which is called audience agency. The options of choice within audience agency are still limited. It is limited by what is actually available and what media or way of consumption we can afford, what means that we are structured into classes too. What we are classified as, this depends on our social, cultural and economic background.

Hendy mentioned in the set reading that ‘In the end, it is the station not the listener which has formed the market’. (Hendy, 2000: 146) I have to say that I disagree with that, because there won’t be any market without the listeners. The market is formed by the three phases of media in my opinion.

I would suggest to take further academic research in the process of passive audience members becoming active. This could be helpful for the media industry to develop new strategies to attract more passive audience members engaging actively with the media , which can again support a growing audience.

Reference:

Hendy, D, (2000). ‘Audiences’. In: (ed), Radio in the Global Age. 1st ed. UK: Polity Press. pp.(134-147).

Biocca, F.A.B., 1988. Opposing conceptions of the audience: The active and passive hemispheres of mass communication theory. Communication Yearbook 11. US: University of North Carolina. pp.(51-80).

Reading Response WEEK FIVE

In week five of the Radio and Popular Music module, we were set one reading about representation, and had to find another reading ourselves to involve it into our reading response. The readings and mainly the lecture of this week, helped to discover and understand the concept behind representation and the connection to discourse.

The representation of artists, labels, etc. influences their audience, the size of a fan base, their media product sells and their success. Which means that some artist prefer to stick to their stereotype image, instead of showing who is the reality person behind this picture of an artist.  This is not just influenced by the regulators and producers, but also from the audience. Many audiences of genres and artists want the artist or the genre stereotype and not the real life person behind it. This means that they have to stick to the stereotype I mentioned before, because if they wouldn’t do so, it would influence their business strategy, their records sales, concert ticket sales etc. This is where the discourse is getting a very important part of the representation of artists for example. Artists have to represent themselves in a structured and special way, to stick to their role model to sell their product. It is important that it’s planned what they say, who they are saying it to, how they say it and how it will be understood what they say by the audience and media. This “second identity” can also cause scandals and news about them in the tabloid press. For this kind of media it is hard to produce “shocking” news about an artist who hasn’t got a second identity. Wiz Khalifa for example uploads weekly video blogs from his tour, where he is himself and even vomiting in front of the camera without any headlines about it in the news media. When I was reading the set reading Rock and Sexuality, I didn’t share very often the opinions with Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie. This text sounded more like an advert for the rock genre to me, where tight trousers are one of the main elements to express masculinity, which wouldn’t suit to the masculine stereotype in our days. (Frith and McRobbie, 1990: 371-374)

At the end every single artist or media producer has to be clear which way he wants to go, if he wants to be himself or to be a media product, which do not has to be a bad decision. Sheila Whiteley said that if an artist or a specific group of people becomes part of a stereotype, then this is already a partial success.

I would suggest to take further academic research in the influence of discourse on the size of fan bases. Fan bases are different to audiences because they support their artists and buy their products. This could be important for future artists to decide which way they want to go for their career.

Reference:

Frith, S & McRobbie, A, (1990). ‘Rock & Sexuality’. In: Simon Frith & Andrew Goodwin (ed), On Record: Rock, Pop & the Written Word. 1st ed. UK: Pantheon Books. pp.(371-389).

Whiteley, S.W., 2000. Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity . 1st ed. London: Routledge.

Reading Response WEEK FOUR

In week four of the Radio and Popular Music module, we were set one reading about genre and the narrative structure behind it, and had to find another reading ourselves to involve it into our reading response.

The readings and the lecture of this week helped to understand that there is more behind genre than simple distinctions in the sound and BPM (beats per minute). “In basic terms genre refers to the types of popular music, so that a categorization of music into distinct categories like soul, Rock, House, Rap, Reggae, Trance, Nu Metal or what ever, is a process of genre identification.” (Wall, 2003: 179)

But in week four’s lecture of Radio & Popular Music we saw how hard it was to identify a genre of an artist or a song, when we were given pictures of artists and we had to place them into a genre.

Genres are developing and changing very quickly in our days, when I was like eight years old I was into hip-hop, because I was listening to the Paparazzi Album of Xzibit. Today people aren’t just listening to hip-hop, now there is Hip-Hop, Rap, Grime, Trap-Rap, Gangster-Rap, Rock-Rap and so on. I agree with Wall that there aren’t clear cuts in genres. (Wall, 2003: 180)

In my opinion it’s not possible to identify a genre by a technical process with codes or something similar. Genre is more than just music; genres are cultures, lifestyles, creativity, fusions and much more.

The situation we are in today, where we are still trying to identify popular music or the difference between genres, shows us that there is no correct method of doing this. (Borthwick and Moy, 2004: 1)

The whole idea of genre in popular music has got its advantages but also brings its disadvantages with it. You definitely came across genres before when you were looking for music that matches your taste. You simply type in the genre you like or choose it in categories and you find many tunes with a similar sound. The bad side of genre is the prejudices by the media or by outsiders. Reggae for example is very often known for their openness to and use of cannabis and people are judged as drug consumers just because of listening to a specific genre and style of music.

Genre in popular music isn’t a bad thing in my opinion, but people are trying to often and hard to identify genres instead of just enjoying and feeling the music.

I would suggest to take further academic research in artists who changed their genre and the genres itself. This could help to identify business moves of artists and could help artists to plan the next step of their career.

Reference:

Wall, T, (2003). ‘Genre’. In: (ed), Studying Popular Music Culture. 1st ed. UK: Hodder & Stoughton Educational. pp.(179-188).

Borthwick and Moy, S.B. & R.M., 2004. Popular Music Genres. 1st ed. New York: Routledge. pp.(1-4).

Reading Response WEEK THREE

In week three of the Radio and Popular Music module, we were set one reading about political economy, and had to find another reading ourselves to involve it into our reading response.

The readings and the lecture of this week, helped to discover and understand political economy and the moral aspect behind it. Political economy is a very broad topic, which includes such subtopics like the interplay between economics, politics and laws and the way of development of institutions in different systems such as social and economics. Vincent Mosco called the political economy ‘the study of the social relations, particularly the power relations that mutually constitute the production, distribution and consumption of resources [original emphasis]’, what is an excellent description for political economy in my opinion. (Wall, 2004: 27)

His description is very suitable because it automatically shows that many different sections need and influence each other like consumption and social relation for example. If the consumption of a product or an artist decreases, it will automatically influence the social relation between product/artist and the audience. To prevent this kind of scenario, it is essential to control the different sections like distribution for example. Last week we learned that regulations can help in such situations like this in form of a contract with a distribution company to bring the right amount in correct time periods to the audience.

All these aspects have to been worked in a professional manner while not breaking basic moral questions and the public good. (Wall, 2004: 27-28)

This is done for example, by not excluding any kind of people for and many more aspects. Now you might ask how do all these institutions, organisations and artists distinguish of each other. This starts already at the financial aspects, where we have to research, who owns the institution, what labels are behind artist or where do they get the financial support. Artists who are signed by major music labels like Sony or universal have mostly a better structure in their political economy, than an artist who is signed at independent labels like Indipendenza. It is much easier for a major label to control sections like production, contribution etc. because of their financial position to makes it automatically easier to develop systems, which satisfies the ideal of public good, and representation. The problem in the music industry is, that lyrics are written without any bad thoughts, but the media is just looking for discrimination and breaks of basic moral questions. (Attali, 1977: 7)

Political economy has been a very confusing topic for me personally because it is hard to explain or describe it in just one single sentence because there are many different points influencing the political economy.

I would suggest to take further academic research in the political economy of independent media organisations and artists in their beginnings. This could be helpful for upcoming artists to develop their own political economy strategy to reach a bigger audience.

Reference:

Attali, J.A., 1977. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. 1st ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Wall, T, (2004). The Political Economy of Internet Radio. Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media. 2 (1), pp.27-44

Reading Response WEEK TWO

In week two of the Radio and Popular Music module, we were set one reading about moral panic and regulation, and had to find another reading ourselves to involve it into our reading response.

The readings and the lecture of this week, helped to discover and understand moral panics and regulations from different points of view and aspects. Regulations are there to control industries, individuals and audiences, and also to regulate such things as harmful lyrics for example.

Moral panics are produced by the media to influence the mass audience by publishing media texts about subcultures, genres, origins, individuals etc. in a special way, which leads the mass audience to a specific way of thinking about the content of the published media text. This can first of all cause bad publicity for a group of people, an artist or a genre in the music industry, but the moral panic has also his good sides.

When parents are telling their kids not to do something for example, what is the first thing they want to do?! Right, the first things youths are going to do, is to try these forbidden things. This kind of process also happened and is still happening in the music industry. If a youth sees a CD with the sticker saying “Parental Advisory Explicit Content” next to a CD with bees and flowers on the cover, the youth will be more likely to listen to the one he isn’t aloud to.

The moral panic has also got the effect called domino, which causes a lot of attention and publicity for an artist for example, because as soon as the first media section produced a moral panic, most of the other media section will jump into the boat because of the huge amount of consumers. (Thornton, 1994: 182-183) This also shows that “bad publicity” doesn’t have to mean that it is also bad businesswise. Best example was Miley Cyrus in 2013 with her lightly clad videos and performance at the MMA’s. When she was all over the news and media, the moral panic was perfect and more than just several media platforms were badmouthing about her. But shortly afterwards she was No.1 in the charts, because everyone knew about her from the moral panic, which was “bad publicity” but great promotion.

The dark side of regulations is the absolute opposite of productive. Regulation and controls can also restrict creativity and freedom of an artist in the music industry. PMRC for example, started off by launching a war on rock and pop music lyrics in 1985. (McCormick, 1993: 679) The Parents Music Resource Center was trying to remove any possibly harmful lyrics from the market and regulations did even prohibit retailers to sell or even to display any kind of harmful media texts. (McCormick, 1993: 689-691)

The consumers should choose themselves what or what not to consume as an individual and the readings of this week, showed me that we as individuals were too often influenced by the mass media in history.

I would suggest to take further academic research into the developers who started the moral panics in the past. This could help to identify business moves and goals behind moral panics. Moral panics are very often helpful for artist’s sales, so it should be questioned if some artists started moral panics about themselves.

References

McCormick, (1993). ‘Protecting Children from Music Lyrics: Sound Recordings and “Harmful to Minors” Statutes, 23 Golden Gate U. L. Rev. pp.(679-699).

Thornton, (1994). ‘Moral Panic, The Media & British Rave Culture’. In: Andrew Ross & Tricia Rose (ed), Microphone Fiends, Youth Music & Youth Culture. 1st ed. London: Routledge. pp.(176-192).

Reading Response WEEK ONE

In week one of the Radio and Popular Music module, we were set two reading about the history and development of radio and the industrialisation of music.

The readings and the lecture of this week helped to understand that it took much more than a simple idea of a new kind of media, to let these two industries grow to these two massive media sections, we have today. Both industries benefited of each other to gain reputation and attention, and still do. This helped me personally to understand why Radio and Music were put together to one single module. Media Industries in general are working more or less hand in hand. Radio supported the music industry to get attention, to promote their records and to reach a bigger audience, which all helped to become a massive money making industry. (Frith, 1988: 19) On the other side, the radio benefited of the music to get a broader audience, more listeners and more customers for radios. (Shingler and Wieringa, 1998: 16-17) This shows the impact of money making on both separate industries. This isn’t the only point where radio and music were similar in their history.

The technological development is also a very important point, which was essential for both sides to become industries at all. (Frith, 1988: 16)

Competition is and has been also a big importance in the history of radio and music. Not only between big companies like BBC in the radio industry or like Decca in the music industry. The big radio companies had to compete against pirate radio stations and the big companies in the music industry had to defeat their position against new upcoming independent record labels. (Shingler and Wieringa, 1998: 14) The big names in the industries had to develop new concepts and strategies because of these “smaller” organizations. (Frith, 1988: 18)

The reading brought definitely some light into the dark of the history of these industries to understand the process of a new upcoming media format, but there where also some points I didn’t fully agree with. For example:”…the industrialization of music means a shift from active musical production to passive pop consumption, the decline of folk or community or subcultural traditions, and a general loss of musical skill.” (Frith, 1988: 11) I don’t think that there was a general loss of music skill at all. With music producers and artists like Ryan Leslie for example, we have some amazing and incredibly musical individuals in the music industry in our days. The standard and the expectations of the media consumers are just as high as it has never been before, so that the people don’t even see the forest because of the massive amount of trees.

The radio and music industry history are similar in several points and both industries had a long way with hurdles to become the big industries they are today.

I would suggest to take further academic research into the skills from current artists and artists from the past . This could be good for the industry we have at the moment, to get respect for their musical skills and creativity.

References:

Shingler, M & Wieringa, C, (1998). ‘Radio time-line: History at a glance’. In: Martin Shingler & Cindy Wieringa (ed), On Air: Methods & Meanings of Radio. 1st ed. London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. pp.(1-29).

Frith, S, (1988). ‘The industrialisation of Music’. In: (ed), Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. 1st ed. e.g. England: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Incorporated. pp.(11-23).