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Section A

• How would audience research methods be in studying young people and their engagement with music?
• 1. "The Authority of the People is the only authority in which Government has a right to exist in any country. (Paine 1969)
• 2. In traditional effects theory, the audience is influenced by media content in negative ways resulting in effects that are often regarded as problematic in terms of threatening social stability. Effects theory helps to explain moral panic responses to media content such as music, particularly in relation to the portrayal of sex, violence and deviant behaviour and its supposed effect on youth. Media effects theory tends to see the audience as passive and seeks to measure how exposure to particular aspects of the media content can influence the behaviour of the reader or viewer.

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• 3. One of the best well-known and most infamous incidents in rock n roll was the suicide of Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana who died April 5 1994. Grunge music, which centred in Seattle Washington in the early to mid-1990s, was a fusion of punk and heavy rock that touched the rebellious otherwise known as 'slacker' generation. Suicidal and depressed, he sings "I miss the comfort in being sad." in the song 'Frances Farmer will have her revenge on Seattle.' He soulfully expresses the pain of his life experiences.
• 4. It was Cobain's pain that spoke to Nirvana fans. "Suffering does not go away, but chronically repeats itself. As been noted, depression and suicide of American adolescent youth have steadily risen since 1990. (Strauss and Howe)
• 5. "There is now a growing critical mass of 'new effects research' which shows that complex processes of reception and consumption mediate, but do not necessarily undermine media power. Acknowledging that audiences can be 'active' does not mean that the media are ineffectual. Recognising the role of interpretation does not invalidate the concept of influence. (Kitzinger, 2002)

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• 6. The idea of audience is built into the production of any media text, including music. At the very least, the producer has thought about a specific target audience and how they might make sense of their content. Initially, music can be very expensive to produce therefore most productions do not begin unless the people who control the money have confidence that the appropriate audience exists. Audience research is used to see if there is a market, and audiences are classified and measured accordingly.
• 7. This can be done through demographics which audiences can be classified into groups using quantitative data about age, gender and socio-economic group. Or in psychographics which is a system for measuring consumers' beliefs, opinions and interests.
• 8. The use of a genre is a signification of a target audience. It provides a niche audience where people have the same taste and know what to expect when viewing this specific genre of music. Rock with the use of heavy guitar riffs and techno with the use of computer-generated synthesized beats. Genre offers a sense of expectation and pleasure, this is where the uses and gratifications theory is applicable. We become aware of trends in popular taste so we can understand why producers make more music of the same style. Audiences enjoy the mixture of repetition and variation, they take pleasure in familiarity as well as anticipating a new twist. Genre studies have shown that audiences can have specific expectations from music that they wish to be fulfilled, that they enjoy recognising familiar features and the recognition of the genre of music attracts audience. We recognise the function of the discourse through our knowledge of the patterns of genre built up by our experiences as media consumers.

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• 9. The assumption was that although Western art music was created at particular points in history, it was essentially beyond the influence of social and cultural forces. It was assumed to embody within itself universal 'otherwordly' values and truths immune to the impact of everyday life.
• 10. The stage was set for a major paradigm shift in the academic study of music, including classical music, was a social construct, and thus something that had to be understood both socially and culturally. social categories played an important role in the early days of the paradigm shift.
• 11. If music was a social construct, it followed that connections should exist between social groups and their music.

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• 12. The paradigm shift that began in the 1970s had as much to do with the question of musical meaning as it did with the foundational premise of social and cultural constitution. Susan McClary (1991) "I was drawn to music because it is the most compelling cultural form I know. I wanted evidence that the overwhelming responses I experience are not just my own, but rather are shared."
• 13. Chester saw important connections between music characteristics and social groups while "the internal co ordinates of musical forms are not mechanically determined by its social base" he said "to each social group correspond certain acceptable genres" (pp.318-319) The idea that the characteristics of functional tonality as the "language" of classical music embodied and gave expression to the temporal and spatial senses underlying and making possible industrial capitalism as a social form.
• 14. In 1978 Paul Willis argued that early rock n roll and progressive rock articulated the the social realities of biker boy subculture and hipper counterculture respectively.

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• 15. Despite Chester's observation that "musical practice has a relative autonomy" [1970] the impression lingered that music was a secondary symptom of social and cultural forces. Music, in other words, seemed to be produced b the "social base". Second, the work operated only at the level of social groups. Little attention was paid to the social and cultural identities of individuals. Third, the fit between music and social and cultural realities was too tight and convenient.
• 16. This problem was identified by WIlliam Straw (1991) when he drew a distinction between musical communities and musical scenes. At ne level, Straw's observations signalled real changes in musical and cultural life as captured in concepts such as "globalisation" and "postmodernism". The battle lines of the 1960s and 1970s had been replaced by