Media anaylsis paper Communications & Media Essay Paper

Music: A Media Analysis
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Music: A Media Analysis
I. Controversies & Development Trends
Typically, the music evokes certain emotions of far-reaching consequences psychologically, cognitively, socially, and culturally. For as far back as humans started making music, music has been a staple of human life for a multiplicity of entertainment, educational, medical, and sporting purposes. The evolution of music as a media genre, public and personal at once, reflects, in a sense, a journey of sensibilities, emotions, and perceptions music audiences have developed in engaging one or more forms of music experiences and expressions. Trends, controversies, and developments in music are, accordingly, a constant given of just as constantly changing inputs. That is, whilst showing unique patterns of change informed by innovations, age, and public reception and perception, music, as one oldest media genre, is an ever-changing genre: elusive to identify and manipulative in understanding. This makes understanding music a function of a diversity of factors, one or more of which must be identified clearly in order to make any sense of music history, development, and change.
Given the current state of globalized forms of production and consumption, music is a newfound "commodity" experienced by millions, often simultaneously. The emergence of music talent shows offers, for one, an ideal example of a wide (yet proven mistaken) assumption of a uniformed and harmonized way of music consumption. More specifically, Budzinski and Pannicke (2017) find that voting patterns of audiences watching and/or listening to Eurovision Song Contest show differential preferences for different singers and performers and are not unified, as is widely and mistakenly assumed. This outcome uncovers, if anything, complexities, and intricacies of music production and consumption. That is, whilst means of music production
and consumption is globalized (and hence harmonized), preferences for music appreciation remain, as shown by Budzinski and Pannicke, decidedly personal.
The change in music preferences is, for one, a central issue in music appreciation and evolution. Throughout music history, audience preferences have always been elusive and, as such, make any attempts to create or produce music pieces successfully for sustained periods unfeasible. The cross-sectional study of U.S. Top 40 songs over 1960-2010 span shows, for instance, a radical change in subjects in pop songs steering away from a classic staple of romantic and sexual relations to subjects as diverse as dancing, alcohol, and drugs, and status/wealth particularly in the 2000s, in addition to a narrower range of subjects on social/political issues, religion/God, race/ethnicity, personal identity, family, and friends (Christenson, De Haan-Rietdijk, Roberts &Ter Bogt, 2018). The evolution of music genres from pop to rap/hip-hop is, argue Christenson, De Haan-Rietdijk, Roberts, and Ter Bogt, one factor contributing to music changing subjects frequently over a span of decades. Thus, just as identifying music preferences is elusive in music, so are subjects – a yet second strong indication of music's enduring and ever-changing natur...