Bethany Klein

Dancing About Architecture: Popular Music Criticism and the Negotiation of Authority

This article addresses the impact of the culture divide on the establishment of critical authority through the examination of popular music critics. In-depth interviews with music critics illustrate how the popular culture critics experience might be distinguished from that of high culture critics. If criticism has the ability to elevate the status of the object it evaluates, this article argues that, in the case of popular criticism, the cultural object has the ability to lower the status of the critic. Lacking the formal training characteristic of higher critics, popular music critics must establish their cultural authority by consistently displaying their qualifications-proficiency as a writer, breadth of knowledge, and studied judgment regardless of personal preferences-through their work. Likewise, it analyzes how aspects of the roles, relationships, and resources managed by popular music critics can create obstacles to the establishment of cultural authority in the popular realm.

Framing the consumer Copyright regulation and the public

With illegal downloading at the centre of debates about the creative economy, various policy initiatives and regulatory attempts have tried (and largely failed) to control, persuade and punish users into adhering to copyright law. Rights holders, policymakers, intermediaries and users each circulate and maintain particular attitudes about appropriate uses of digital media. This article maps the failure of regulation to control user behaviour, considers various policy and academic research approaches to understanding users, and introduces an analytical framework that re-evaluates user resistance as expressions of legitimate justifications. A democratic copyright policymaking process must accommodate the modes of justification offered by users to allow copyright law to reconnect with the public interest goals at its foundation.

Entertaining ideas: social issues in entertainment television

The educational potential of entertainment television has been acknowledged, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, through research into entertainment-education strategies, intersections of politics and popular media, and the mediated public sphere. This article explores educational possibilities of entertainment programming through a consideration of British television programmes that challenge traditional and typical media framings of crimes against children, immigration and disability. Drawing on interviews with writers, directors and producers, it considers the delicate balance of roles and responsibilities generated by entertainment television content that offers unconventional perspectives on social issues. Programme makers may be hesitant to embrace the role of educator, but descriptions of their work suggest a critical pedagogic approach that encourages deliberation in the popular public sphere.

“These Two Are Speaking Welsh on Channel 4!”: Welsh Representations and Cultural Tensions on Big Brother 7

As the number and popularity of reality programs continue to grow, there has been an increasing focus in television studies on the representative and constitutive potential of unscripted dramas. Through its inclusion of two Welsh-speaking housemates and consideration of the use of the language on the program, Big Brother 7 provided an opportunity for viewers to deliberate on issues of identity, culture, and nationalism. This article examines the postings that appeared on internet message boards in response to this program, demonstrating the extent to which Big Brother 7 prompted discussions and debate about Welsh culture and language. Significantly, much of the discourse about Wales and the Welsh language was civil, rational, and deliberative, a theme that runs contrary to increasingly accepted wisdom about message board culture. This case also highlights the uses and limitations of popular reality programming for affirming identity and celebrating cultural differences.

In Perfect Harmony: Popular Music and Cola Advertising

In the realm of marketing, and particularly in television commercials, popular music is now pervasive. This article examines how music provides a shortcut to branding through interviews with advertising and music industry workers and an analysis of popular and trade press coverage of the relationships forged between popular musicians and the cola giants. Coke and Pepsi have attempted to dodge debates about the merging of music and commerce by positioning themselves as having a genuine connection to music culture. The implications of corporations such as Coca‐Cola and Pepsi being so deeply insinuated into music culture are considered.

Entertainment-education for the media-saturated: Audience perspectives on social issues in entertainment programming

The representation of social issues in entertainment television challenges the assumed and nominal function of such programming to simply entertain its audience. Drawing on focus groups with television viewers in the UK, this article explores the ways in which audiences engage with and use entertainment television in discussions of social issues that conventionally have been framed narrowly across news and entertainment media: crimes against children, immigration and disability. Entertainment television that includes alternative perspectives on these issues offers the possibility of broadening resources and encouraging deliberation, although assumptions about the role of entertainment television are reflected in audience scepticism about the appropriateness of using such programming as a basis for considering the social world.

Understanding copyright: intellectual property in the digital age

Chapter 1: Introduction: Understanding Copyright in the Digital Age Chapter 2: A Brief History of Copyright: Where We Are and How We Got Here Chapter 3: Copyright and the Creative Economy: How the Cultural Industries Exert Influence Chapter 4: Technologies and Corporations in the Middle: How Internet Intermediaries are Drawn into the Debate Chapter 5: Creative Workers and Copyright: How Current and Future Creators Benefit from Cultural Labour Chapter 6: Consumers, Criminals, Patrons, Pirates: How Users Connect to Copyright Chapter 7: Copyright Policy: How Policy Represents (or Fails to Represent) Different Groups Chapter 8: The Future of Copyright: How We Can Learn from the Debate

‘Isn’t it just a way to protect Walt Disney’s rights?’: Media user perspectives on copyright:

With digitization allowing for faster and easier sharing and copying of media, the behaviour and attitudes of everyday users of copyrighted material have become an increasing focus of policy, industry and academic attention. This article connects historical characterizations of copyright infringement and the role of the public interest in the development of copyright law and policy with the complex experience of modern, ordinary users of digital media. Users are proposed not as transgressors to be educated, regulated or scared straight, nor as a hazy and largely silent public, but as sources of legitimate perspectives that could contribute to conversations about media, creativity and regulation.

Discourse, justification and critique: towards a legitimate digital copyright regime?

Digitization and the internet have posed an acute economic challenge to rights holders in the cultural industries. Faced with a threat to their form of capital accumulation from copyright infringement, rights holders have used discourse strategically in order to try and legitimate and strengthen their position in the digital copyright debate with governments and media users. In so doing, they have appealed to general justificatory principles – about what is good, right, and just – that provide some scope for opposition and critique, as other groups contest their interpretation of these principles and the evidence used to support them. In this article, we address the relative lack of academic attention paid to the role of discourse in copyright debates by analysing user-directed marketing campaigns and submissions to UK government policy consultations. We show how legitimacy claims are justified and critiqued, and conclude that amid these debates rests some hope of achieving a more legitimate policy resolution to the copyright wars – or at least the possibility of beginning a more constructive dialogue.

Selling Out: Musicians, Autonomy, and Compromise in the Digital Age

Abstract Charges of “selling out” and debates about the boundaries of cultural autonomy have played a pivotal role in the development of popular music as a legitimate and “serious” art form. With promotional strategies and commercial business practices now practically inseparable from the core activities previously associated with music making, the relevance of such concepts and the values that underpin them are questioned by industry experts, musicians, and fans. In this article, we explore how popular music making and perspectives on selling out have been shaped by digitalization, promotionalism, and globalization.