Reading Response #2

Unlike the print and news media that we covered in last week's readings, this weeks the industry that is entertainment has become the focus. What surprised me about the readings and videos that we've come to a point where hating the corporate aspect of media has become the product that the corporate media is selling to us. It has become popular to hate how a few major corporations control almost all of the music that we listen to. Starting with the Payola scandal in the 1950's, and only exacerbated by the perceived homogenization of culture, it has become popular for there to be two major products that are sold to us in music: pop culture and counter-culture, each has its own labels, artists and marketing strategies, but both are sold to us by businesses that have the capital to distribute and market music to the masses. Counter-culture, through not directly addressed within the book, is an ironic way for individuals to vent their anger and distrust for big, evil corporations that control the music industry. Counter-culture is the product that people spend money on in order to attack the idea of spending money on. People spend money on counter-culture in order to feel like individuals. Things that start out as counter-culture usually move into pop culture when they reach a point in popularity among the masses, especially amongst teenagers. The book uses artists like Eminem to explain a transition from counter-culture to pop culture in how he went from a cult favorite as a white rapper, to a marketing dream who can be marketed as popular in order to sell new products. This sort of this will continue to happen to artists who "sell out" because as long people are willing to spend money, corporations will be there to pick it up, because that's what they exist to do.

Artists "sell out" for the same reason that corporation sponsor them: to make more money. Rock and Roll started out as a piece of counter-culture that was seen to threaten the morals of America, and has now been integrated into pop culture. Rap and hip-hop is doing the same thing, because corporations have the means and the creativity to make more money with the music than artists do on their own. It seems strange to think that genres of music that were born because of the dislike for pop culture have been integrated into it so well. Not all artists follow the money, and some do extreme things to avoid being packaged by the corporate world, but as long there is money out there to make, someone will take it.