What Representation do I want for my Artist and What impact do I want it to have on the audience?

   For my A2 production coursework I am going to use ‘The Real World’, a song from Owl city’s most recent studio album ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ to create my media text. To help me decide on my artist’s representation and the impact I want on my audience I referred to Owl City’s ‘Fireflies’ music video as it was his debut single from his second album. Owl City’s first album was independently released and did not make any of the charts, however, after the success of his second album and first professional music video, Owl City’s musical career had finally made a real start.

   In all media texts there will be examples of media language, genre, representations, a narrative, and of course, there will be an audience. Owl City’s ‘fireflies’ is in the electronic/synthpop music genre and the video represents the artist as a creative, young with a quirky personality and could be viewed as a ‘cool geek’. The music video narrative is centred on young adult (in early twenties) who is playing an electric organ in a room full of mostly retro toys that magically move by themselves, getting faster as the song crescendos and suddenly halt at the finish. Finally, the audience demographic for Owl City is a mixt of males and females (mostly females) in their late teens to early thirties.

   The active audience Encoding/Decoding Model can be applied to this media text but passive audience theories such as the hypodermic needle, Cultivation and Copycat theories cannot be applied to the text because of the innocent, abstract narrative which involves no imitable behaviour. The Encoding/Decoding Model is a model used in the Audience Reception Theory created by Stuart Hall, first seen in his first publication ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’ (1973). The model says the producers construct the text (encoding) and the audience will read, understand and interpret the text in their own, individual ways. An example of this would be the lyrics to ‘Fireflies’ as many of the audience decoded them to be about clinging to childhood, slowing down time because of stress or people’s individual thoughts and creativity but in fact, Adam Young wrote the song about his insomnia, nothing deeper than that.

   The passive audience theories cannot be applied to this text because there are no negative, violent denotations and there isn’t any behaviour to imitate because of the prolonged use of inanimate objects. The hypodermic needle theory can’t be applied to the music video because the video is abstract and therefore is polysemic which means the audience cannot be told what to think or feel.

   After looking at the music video and some audience theories, I have decided I want my artist to be slightly omniscient and not really a personality type. This enables the lyrics of the songs to be about other people and will in turn make the artist seem more ‘down to earth’ and attractive to an audience.