Defining the genre is very important in a text as it lets you know who the target audience is. Most genres are already decided before the text is constructed and the producer already has an idea of who the target audience is and what to create for them. The genre of a text if it is a movie or a music video will determine how is producers, distributors, and retailers go about the text. This year I worked with 2 others to create a music video for the band "Bring Me The Horizon". BMTH been describes as many different metal and rock genres. Now the genre is mostly seen as a Metalcore band but when the band first started in 2004 they where more Death Metal. Some of the other genres they have been associated with are alternative metal, alternative rock and post-hardcore.
Marketing will be effected by the genre of a text. Mittell talks about how genre is used by the industry to sell the product to the audience. Music can be very easily accessible on websites like Youtube and streaming services like Spotify this is a great way to reach the younger audience like teens and young adults as they find it easy to access and use. While for an older audience who prefer having a physical copy they can go to a store and buy a CD or in some cases a Vinyl a good example of a band that does both stream and sell Vinyl is "The Rolling Stones" as their target audience range from all ages. This depends on the genre of the music for example you would most likely not find a Dubstep Vinyl from some one like "Skrillex" as it would not be appropriate to the target audience instead it would be streamed on websites and apps. As the music video we created was of the genre Metalcore the audience would most likely stream the music and so we uploaded the music video to Youtube. We also used social media to interact with our audience all tho now a days that is used for all genres of music. We also created a Digipak so we could reach more of our audiences who prefer to have a physical copy, this has already been done by "Bring Me The Horizon" and other band of the same genre such as "Bullet for My Valentine".
Genre is constructed up of what can be seen or heard which is a point Chandler talks about. He talks about how some texts might not have all the characteristics of the genre it is in. He also talks about how genre doesn't have defining edges and instead blend and fade into one another and this is why there are sub genres and genres such as Rom-com. Rom-com for example is a mix of two genres Romance and Comedy. Last year for my project I created the opening scene for a Zombie Action movies. When you have two or more genres they often go hand in hand for example Rom-Com but in some cases you have one genre that doesn't usually fit it for example the movie "Warm Body's" which is a Zom-Rom-Com this is to reach a wider audience in the hope of making more money. This also effected how we created our music video as we wanted to have some a romance element but didn't want to make it look like an 80s pop song like A-ha's "Take on Me" where it was all about the girl. We took some inspiration from horror movies and you can see some intertextuality to the movie "The Blair Which Project".
Thanks to web 2.0 it allows the audience to interact with the producers of the band and create fan art or other fan produce texts, "Linkin Park" has had fan art created by their fans (Picture Bellow) and so has "BMTH". Before Web 2.0 the producer and advertise their product to the audience but now the audience equally helps to promote a text. There have been instances of fan made trailers for films and fan made posters. There are fan participation that are easy even for the less creative something simple as a GIF which is a small clip of pictures to create a looping video, this has been done by "BMTH" (GIF bellow). Something as easy as this promotes the text. David Gauntlett talks about web2.0 and how it turns the audience from passive to active. We took advantage of this by creating gifs and lyric video. It is also good to use social media and have them enter competition where they can win something and the winner is the one with the best fan art for example.
In the narrative of our music video we have to main characters the singer and his girlfriend, even though we only have 2 characters you can still link it in with Props character theory. His theory mostly revolves around movies but can be seen in our music video. The female character can be seen as both the princess and the villein in our narrative as she is the one who broke up with the male character. We didn't follow the stereotype of the Rock an Role singer who is to good for the girl but instead made the singer be angry at girl for braking his heart. Laura Mulvey could argue that male gaze is in our video as the female protagonist is wearing skinny jeans and high heels as well follows the stereotype of the hot girl for example in other songs like "We Don't Talk Anymore" by Charlie Puth. We chose her as it fits with the genre to have a female character in the narrative of the story like in the song "Numb" by Linkin Park.
Abercrombie talks about how boundaries of genre are shifting and becoming more permeable and this can be seen in the history of metal music videos. If you look at old metal music videos they didn't have a narrative which can still be the case today but most music videos now have a mix of narrative and performance not just performance. You can still have music videos today that just have narrative for example "Follow You" by "BMTH" or songs that are just performance but it is becoming more normal to have a mix of both but in the 90s it was mostly just performance in metal core videos with maybe some unrelated shots occasionally.
