Flaws of the music industry

Why is it that when we turn on the radio or put on MTV, we hear the same type of music from the same group of artist? Today the music industries are very limited and are solely focused on making money. As a result, all society hears is the same music over and over again. Last week in our class discussion we talked about different flaws that are going on in the music industries today. For example, artist going bankrupt because of the label they are with, a limited amount of music we hear, and a limited amount of top artist.
Music labels only hire artist now that they know will make them money and don’t see the point of having a bunch of artist when they can make more money from just one artist. Even though the companies and labels are making all this money the artist who actually earn the money are going bankrupt. The reason being the artist has to pay for their own videos, concerts and airtime and receive about 1% of their album sales. This just shows how corrupt the music industry is. If the artist puts so much time and energy into their work why don’t they get to reap the benefits? It isn’t fair to the artist that the labels just sit back and do nothing and receive all the profit. I believe something needs to be done to change this. Artist need to start making their own independent labels to show these major labels, they need the artist, not that the artist needs them. In class we watched a video and it showed that some independent labels earned as much as the major labels did without ripping off their artist.
In addition, I think this issue is affecting us as a consumer. Today people don’t really go out and buy CDs anymore they just go on the internet and download music, but who can really blame the consumer. People don’t want to hear a whole album of the same type of song; they want to hear something different. So instead of getting the whole album they download the one song they like. I believe the artist and consumer can work together to get a change in the music industry. For example, the artist can make music the consumer wants to hear while on an independent label and the consumer can continue to support the artist even though it s no longer on this major record label. This is easier said than done. An artist can leave a label, but more than likely the label will go right out the next day and find a replacement. So this is another place the consumer comes in. The consumer can boycott these labels and maybe there will finally be a change in the music industries.

The Face of Crime

In this week’s discussion the big issue was what race we tend to indentify crime with and why. We focused on the reading Prime Suspects, which talked about how the public is affected by the crime it, sees on TV. In this article there were five different experiments to test what people could remember from the case they saw. The 1st group was shown a violent crime case which had a black perpetrator, the 2nd had a white perpetrator, in the next two there wasn’t a perpetrator and the last group wasn’t shown a violent crime at all. When asked what the groups remembered from their cases more than 70% reported seeing a black perpetrator even though only one group actually saw one. So what does this tell us about our society?
The local news tends to shift its focus more on the violent crimes that black individuals are involved with and as a result spurs an immediate stereotype of the black community amongst the television audience that not only associate the black person, but specifically the black man with the crime. In addition, I believe the problem stems back to our nation’s history and the old beliefs on what a black man was, his worth, his life, and how he should be treated. Our society has not fully evolved away from these beliefs and in association with the fact that individuals in society are not well informed, this is probably reason as to when one hears about a crime they immediately associate a black man with the crime. Due to this something needs to be done when it comes to the crime that the media exposes to its audience.
The news needs to censor the amount of crime it shows on the news and the amount of details it gives while showing a case. For example, the viewing public doesn’t need to see a surveillance tape on the crime and maybe it shouldn’t focus so much on the perpetrator’s race or it can focus on other races besides the black race. Since these stereotypes have been going on for so long they have also followed black people outside of crime issues because some may not be able to look past the “angry black man.”

False Ideological beliefs

In class on Wednesday we talked and watched a video about common ideological views in today’s society and how it affected people in our society. The video focused mostly on young women and what are some of the images women have to live up to, to attain the perfect life. I believe this video was specifically focused on women because the mass media concentrates more on women’s appearance rather than a man’s appearance. Some ideological images for women are: women have to be thin and beautiful, they have to be housewives that take care of their men, women must find a prince charming to be happy, and they should have the most glamorous wedding that is fit for a princess.

In Today’s society we turn on the television and see beautiful actresses and models in makeup commercials advertising for the newest product. When we open a magazine or look at a billboard on the side of the road we also see thin beautiful models selling products. All these advertisements are very hegemonic because they are causing women to believe this is what they need to look like to get somewhere in life. In addition these ideological views are now becoming the dominant image in our society for women, but what most women don’t know is that all these advertisements that they do see aren’t real and are exaggerated.

In my high school we watched a Dove commercial depicting s what women actually look like before the commercial is put out. The woman in this advertisement started off being a regular girl you would see walking down the street every day, but when the makeup and touching up was done she looked like a totally different person. As a result, women see these commercials and strive to be that ideal women when in fact they can never fully achieve this goal because they aren’t even real. The media just allows women to believe this is the normal and natural way for women to look and no matter how hard we try to get away from these hegemonic ideas we ultimately fall right back into them.