Adorno, Hebdige and Dyer

Theodore Adorno - (1903-1969)

A Marxist philosopher based in Germany in the mid 20th century. Whilst writing about popular music he argued that people were fed 'Culture Industry' in which they were manipulated into passivity, making them content in spite of how difficult the economy was. This created a false psychological needs that were easily satisfied by the products of capitalism. these needs replaced people's 'true needs' of freedom, full expression of human potential and creativity.
This is something that happens in the popular music industry, where majority of music is similar to each other, making it easy to satisfy their target audience.
However Adornos views are viewed as pessimistic by modern theorists.

Dick Hebdige - (Born 1951)

Hebdige opinion is that audiences are free to accept or decline that power of conglomerates by either ignoring them, or finding alternative products to them, forming 'subcultures'. This makes the companies change either their product or their marketing to provide for these subcultures, which again could either be accepted or declined by the audiences.

Richard Dyer - (Born 1945)

Dyers Star theory is that: a star is not a real person, but is an image that is is constructed by advertising, magazines and film.

History of Music Videos- Pete Fraser

• Music videos were originally created to advertise or showcase the artist.

• US music videos, produced by Harman-ee and cost around $8000 to make, used unnatural colours and fantasy sets to create an 'artificial-looking world', whilst France sexualised their videos to an almost pornographic extent, something that has continued to modern day music videos.

•  The introduction of television coverage of acts on shows such as 'Top of the Pops' (1960's) with live performances every week, led to the creation of 'short promo films' which we now call music videos, in order to save artists from performing whilst on tour.

• American band The Monkees introduced editing, such as jump cuts, as well as wacky comedy to music promos. They were also all selected because of the way they would look on TV, which is familiar to the modern day manufactured bands.

• In the 1970's, former The Monkees guitarist and keyboardist Michael Nesmith had the idea of creating a music video television programme