The study of media industries has become a thriving subfield of media studies. It already comprises a diverse intellectual history, a range of fascinating questions and topics, and many theoretical and methodological frameworks. Media Industry Studies provides the roadmap to this vibrant area of study. Blending a comprehensive overview of foundational literature with an examination of the varied scales and sites media industry studies have considered, the book explores connections among research questions, topics, and methodologies. It includes examples from many media industries – film, television, journalism, music, games – and incorporates emerging scholarship considering the industrial contexts of social and internet-distributed media. Offering an account of the intellectual traditions and approaches that have defined the subfield to date, Media Industry Studies is an indispensable resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars.

Media Industries: History, Theory and Method is among the first texts to explore the evolving field of media industry studies and offer an innovative blueprint for future study and analysis. capitalizes on the current social and cultural environment of unprecedented technical change, convergence, and globalization across a range of textual, institutional and theoretical perspectives brings together newly commissioned essays by leading scholars in film, media, communications and cultural studies includes case studies of film, television and digital media to vividly illustrate the dynamic transformations taking place across national, regional and international contexts

Bringing together 49 chapters from leading experts in media industries research, this major collection offers an authoritative overview of the current state of scholarship while setting out proposals for expanding, re-thinking and innovating the field. Media industries occupy a central place in modern societies, producing, circulating, and presenting the multitude of cultural forms and experiences we encounter in our daily lives. The chapters in this volume begin by outlining key conceptual and critical perspectives while also presenting original interventions to prompt new lines of inquiry. Other chapters then examine the impact of digitalization on the media industries, intersections formed between industries or across geographic territories, and the practices of doing media industries research and teaching. General ideas and arguments are illustrated through specific examples and case studies drawn from a range of media sectors, including advertising, publishing, comics, news, music, film, television, branded entertainment, live cinema experiences, social media, and music video. Making a vital and significant contribution to media research, this volume is essential reading for students and academics seeking to understand and evaluate the work of the media industries. Chapter 10 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

This guidebook, aimed at those interested in studying media industries, provides direction in ways best suited to collaborative dialogue between media scholars and media professionals. While the study of media industries is a focal point at many universities around the world – promising, as it might, rich dialogues between academia and industry – understandings of the actual methodologies for researching the media industries remain vague. What are the best methods for analysing the workings of media industries – and how does one navigate those methods in light of complex deterrents like copyright and policy, not to mention the difficulty of gaining access to the media industries? Responding to these questions, Industrial Approaches to Media offers practical, theoretical, and ethical principles for the field of media industry studies, providing its first full methodological exploration. It features key scholars such as Henry Jenkins, Michele Hilmes, Paul McDonald and Alisa Perren.

Creative production processes are central to all media industries, and there is a need for more detailed understandings of how these industries facilitate and understand their own creativity. This book offers a theoretical framework to consider how researchers can conduct studies of creativity in different media industries.

Within corporate media industries, adults produce children’s entertainment. Yet children, presumed to exist outside the professional adult world, make their own contributions to it—creating and posting unboxing videos, for example, that provide content for toy marketers. Many adults, meanwhile, avidly consume entertainment products nominally meant for children. Media industries reincorporate this market-disrupting participation into their strategies, even turning to adult consumers to pass fandom to the next generation. Derek Johnson presents an innovative perspective that looks beyond the simple category of “kids’ media” to consider how entertainment industry strategies invite producers and consumers alike to cross boundaries between adulthood and childhood, professional and amateur, new media and old. Revealing the social norms, reproductive ideals, and labor hierarchies on which such transformations depend, he identifies the lines of authority and power around which legacy media institutions like television, comics, and toys imagine their futures in a digital age. Johnson proposes that it is not strategies of media production, but of media reproduction, that are most essential in this context. To understand these critical intersections, he investigates transgenerational industry practice in television co-viewing, recruitment of adult comic readers as youth outreach ambassadors, media professionals’ identification with childhood, the branded management of adult fans of LEGO, and the labor of child YouTube video creators. These dynamic relationships may appear to disrupt generational and industry boundaries alike. However, by considering who media industries empower when generating the future in these reproductive terms and who they leave out, Johnson ultimately demonstrates how their strategies reinforce existing power structures. This book makes vital contributions to media studies in its fresh approach to the intersections of adulthood and childhood, its attention to the relationship between legacy and digital media industries, and its advancement of dialogue between media production and consumption researchers. It will interest scholars in media industry studies and across media studies more broadly, with particular appeal to those concerned about the current and future reach of media industries into our lives.

This new introductory textbook provides students with the tools they need to understand the way digital technologies have transformed the global media business of the 21st century. Focusing on three main approaches – media economics, critical political economy, and production studies – the authors provide an empirically rich analysis of ownership, organizational structures and culture, business strategies, markets, networks of strategic alliances, and state policies as they relate to global media. Examples throughout involve both traditional and digital media and are taken from different regions and countries to illustrate how the media business is influenced by interconnected historical, political, economic, and social factors. In addition to introducing today’s convergent world of global media, the book gives readers a greater understanding of their own potential roles within the global media industries.

Television, Social Media, and Fan Culture examines how fans use social media to engage with television programming, characters, and narrative as well as how television uses social media to engage fan cultures. The contributors review the history and impact of social media and television programming; analyze specific programs and the impact of related social media interactions; and scrutinize the past fan culture to anticipate how social media programming will develop in the future. The contributors explore a diverse array of television personalities, shows, media outlets, and fan activities in their analysis, including: Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Paula Deen; Community, Game of Thrones, Duck Dynasty, Toddlers and Tiaras, Talking Dead, Breaking Bad, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Army Wives, The Newsroom, Doctor Who, Twin Peaks, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; as well as ESPN’s TrueHoop Network and Yahoo’s Ball Don’t Lie; and cosplay.

This book is about the business of distribution, around which the international film business revolves. Considering sales agents and distributors as primary gatekeepers, the book examines the networks in which they operate, how they operate, how their practices have evolved, and the power and control they exert over the business of independent film distribution. Critically, it also considers how they are affected by the powerful influence of Netflix and Amazon in the online era. At a time of disruption and change to traditional business models and industry professions, Roderik Smits argues that gatekeepers remain equally – if not more – crucial to the distribution and circulation of films in international markets.

Point of Sale examines media retail as a vital component in the study of popular culture. It brings together fifteen essays by top media scholars that show how retail matters as a site of significance to culture industries as well as a crucial locus of meaning and participation for consumers.