Cultural Industries

Read the Factsheet and complete the following questions/tasks:

1) What does the term 'Cultural Industries' actually refer to?

The creation, production, and distribution of products of a cultural or artistic nature, such as television and film production, publishing, music, as well as crafts and design.

2) What does Hesmondhalgh identify regarding the societies in which the cultural industries are highly profitable?

Societies with profitable cultural industries tend to be dominated by large companies, have minimal government regulation and significant inequality between rich and poor people.

3) Why do some media products offer ideologies that challenge capitalism or inequalities in society?

Companies need to continuously compete with each other to secure audience members through satisfying their desires for rebellious or profane content. There are also social expectations about what art and entertainment should do, such as challenging the values of society, which media products are expected to meet.

4) Look at page 2 of the factsheet. What are the problems that Hesmondhalgh identifies with regards to the cultural industries?

- Risky business

- Creativity versus commerce

- High production costs and low reproduction costs

- Semi-public goods; the need to create scarcity

5) Why are so many cultural industries a 'risky business' for the companies involved?

Audiences are impossible for companies to predict the behaviour of because they use cultural commodities in unpredictable and volatile ways, often for self expression. There is also limited autonomy given to creators in the hopes that they will create something unique. Companies also cannot completely control the publicity their products receive, and have to rely on other cultural industries to produce that publicity in the first place.

6) What is your opinion on the creativity v commerce debate? Should the media be all about profit or are media products a form of artistic expression that play an important role in society?

In a capitalist society, it is inevitable that a majority of media products are made in order to maximise profits for large media companies in the industry. However, this does not change my longstanding belief that media products are artwork in their own right and should set out to express artistic messages or at least any similar kind of sentiment. 

7) How do cultural industry companies minimise their risks and maximise their profits? (Clue: your work on Industries - Ownership and control will help here)

- Horizontal integration: buying up companies in the same sector to reduce the competition for audience and audience time.

- Vertical integration: buying up companies involved in different stages of the process of production and circulation. Companies might by ‘downstream’ such as when a company involved in making films buys a DVD distributor, of ‘upstream’ which is when a company involved in distribution and transmission buys a programmer-maker.

- Internationalism: buying and partnering other companies abroad allows companies to sell massive amounts of extra copies of a text they have already produced at low cost (marketing costs).

- Multisector and multimedia integration: buying into other related areas of cultural industry production to ensure cross-promotion.

-  Attempt to co-opt critics, others who publicise a text by socialising/ sending gifts/ press releases  

8) Do you agree that the way the cultural industries operate reflects the inequalities and injustices of wider society? Should the content creators, the creative minds behind media products, be better rewarded for their work?

The way the cultural industries distribute and organise texts audiences consume reflects inequalities and injustices evident in capitalist societies. For example, there are vast differences in terms of access to cultural industries in society, in terms of your level of wealth, gender or ethnicity. There are also inequalities in the ways professionals are treated, even those who succeed in their work are often treated badly. Many people in these industries struggle to earn a living. 

9) Listen and read the transcript to the opening 9 minutes of the Freakonomics podcast - No Hollywood Ending for the Visual-Effects Industry. Why has the visual effects industry suffered despite the huge budgets for most Hollywood movies?

Despite widespread success of Hollywood movies relying heavily on VFX and CGI, the visual effects industry has suffered due to increased globalization caused by horrible working conditions where overtime becomes necessary to meet deadlines and demands, meaning most of the VFX workforce has moved to places such as Canada and London, outside of Los Angeles. This is also caused by tax incentives meaning VFX work moves locations very fluidly according to where it will return the most profits. 

10) What is commodification?

Commodification is the transforming of objects and services into commodities, involving producing things not only for use, but also for exchange.

11) Do you agree with the argument that while there are a huge number of media texts created, they fail to reflect the diversity of people or opinion in wider society?

While there has been a push in recent years for the cultural industries to hire with inclusion and equality in mind, I believe that the majority of media texts created do not currently reflect the reality of our society as diverse and nuanced.

12) How does Hesmondhalgh suggest the cultural industries have changed? Identify the three most significant developments and explain why you think they are the most important.

- Digitalisation, the internet and mobile phones have multiplied the ways audience can gain access to cultural content. This has made small scale production much easier for millions of people.

- Cultural products can now be shared across national borders. This increased the adaptation, reinvention and hybridity of genres and products. It also enables cultures to reaffirm their values, reducing the cultural influence of the USA.

- Cultural texts have been radically transformed. Promotional and advertising material now infiltrates areas and products more so than before. There are more products across a wider range of genres, across a wider range of forms of cultural activity that ever before. Various forms of cultural authority are increasing questioned and satirised.

These are three of the changes the cultural industries have gone through that Hesmondhalgh discusses. They are the most important changes because of how they have impacted the relationships between audience and industry massively and have also changed which cultures, ideals and values are spread through the dissemination of media texts.