How global was the appeal of your 3 main texts? - Exam question

All of my artists have varying global appeal due to their different marketing and distribution methods.

Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” album has a massive global appeal, predominantly because of the ways she interacts with her fans. Gaga has formed a parasocial relationship with her fans by means of using social media sites via the Internet. She has gained over 41.3million followers on Twitter and 65.3million likes on her official Facebook page. This means that she has direct access to interact with her fans at (what seems to them) a personal level, with her very public discussions of her support of gay rights and other causes, further adding to her appeal. This has resulted in her gaining a cult and a mainstream following of hardcore fans. It could be argued that Gaga has cultivated her fans using this parasocial interaction, rather than just gaining them from live shows and publicity.

The use of the worldwide internet causes digital sales of music to be immediate, this creates further global appeal; Born This Way topped the charts in 23 countries and set a world record on iTunes for selling over 1million digital copies in just 5 days. Overall, Gaga has sold 16.5million albums and 29.5million digital singles globally. Her digital fame is mainly the cause of selling far more digital copies of her music than physical copies.

Final piece idea 1

(this was meant go on my art blog but I dunno how to delete it lol)

Audience Homework - television Industry

1a) Matthew Weiner's Mad Men has been encoded for an active audience. As Mad Men is not a mainstream series showed on a popular mainstream channel, it is also aimed at more of a niche audience.

1b) Mad Men targets a more active audience through it's use of high quality cinematography. This high level cinematography would gratify it's more active audience members as they would question and analyse how the text is encoded and constructed as they watch it.

1c) An active audience notices and analyses the construction of a text. Mad Men is a highly constructed series, therefore the active audience would appreciate the gratifications this show gives.

1d) the scene when Don Draper and Peggy are discussing her resignation to join a competing company has an extremely high attention to detail, from the objects on Draper's desk to which books are on his book shelf. This is the high quality cinematography that an active audience would be gratified by.

2) JJ Abrams' Lost appeals to a passive audience by using a variety of conventions that enable he passive audience to decode the text without difficulty. However, it could be argued that a small number of Lost's narrative devices provide the gratifications for a more active audience. For example, the use of enigma codes make the audience question the narrative, causing them to become active.

3) Lost's characters all represent stereotypes with how they are presented and with their constructed personalities. This means that they can be quickly and easily decoded by the passive audience. For example, Shannon is introduced as a skinny, youthful blonde woman who is sunbathing, despite having just been in a plane crash. From just this small section of the text, the audience knows her personality because it fits with the well-known stereotype of a vein, young woman.

4) Mad Men's characters are difficult for the audience to decode. For example, Don Draper is a complex character with how he behaves and treats certain people, predominantly women. He treats his own wife like she is an object in his possession, but is kind and somewhat caring towards Peggy; even when she quits her job to join a competing company, he kisses her hand and wishes her farewell. This complex nature of the characters requires an active audience to decode and gain gratifications.

5) One convention encoded into Stephen Knight's Peaky Blinders to gratify a passive audience is the use of a narrative that is easy to follow...

(unfinished - struggling with the rest of these questions.)

Coursework photography - Folk Band Tour Poster