Cultural Industries: Factsheet 168

1) The term 'Cultural Industries' refers to the creation, production and distribution of products of a cultural or artistic nature. Cultural industries include television and film production, publishing, music, as well as crafts and design. Cultural industries are seen as adding value to the society and individuals.

2) Hesmondhalgh regards these as core cultural industries. These are the industries that are centrally concerned with the industrial production and circulation texts:

• Broadcasting 
• Film industries
• Music industries 
• Print and electronic publishing
• Video and computer games
• Advertising, marketing or public relations
• Web design

They have their own dynamic, but these industries interact and interconnect with each other in complex ways. This is because they cooperate with each other for the same resources, such as

• A limited pool of disposable income
• A limited pool of advertising revenue
• A limited amount of consumption time
• Skilled creative and technical labour 

3) Some media products offer ideologies that challenge capitalism or inequalities in society because society nowadays is diverse, the population is a wide spread of different types of people with different types of culture. This allows the audiences attention to be on the side with the industry producing this product, additionally, this increases competition between other industries. Also, nowadays societies have expectations about media certain products.

4) The problems that Hesmondhalgh identifies with regard to cultural industries are:

• Risky business
• Creativity versus commerce
• High production costs and low reproduction costs
• Semi-public goods; the need to create scarcity 

5)  Risky business- The risk comes from the fact that audiences use cultural commodities in highly volatile and unpredictable ways- often in order to express the view that they are different from other people. There is no guarantee that their creative product will be a success, so they minimise this by using stars or sequels, or even by vertical integration.

6) In my opinion I believe that the purpose of a media product should be about profit to an extent. This is because if media products don't make movie it means that the producer are less able to produce another product. However, this entirely depends on how artistic the movie is. This is because if you have a better artistic movie, it is more likely to make more profit than the less artistic, purely because of the fact that audiences found it more pleasurable in many ways. Therefore, I thinks that in order for the media product to make profit, it absolutely needs some artistic expression, otherwise it won't make a vast amount of profit.

7) Cultural industries can minimise their risks and maximise their profits by:

• Vertical integration-Owning a range of businesses in the same production/distribution.
• Horizontal integration-Owning a range of media companies that are largely unrelated.
• Integration and Synergy-Series of media products derived from the same text or institution.
• Diversification- When a media company branches out into a different area of the industry.
• Cross-media regulation-When two companies merge.

8) In my opinion, I think that cultural industries do operate in a way that reflects the inequalities and injustices of wider society. This is because when movies are made most of the credit goes to the main actors/actresses, followed by the director. However, the people behind the scenes, doing the editing, camerawork, lights, script, and visual effects aren't known for doing this because they are not given as much credit to. Additionally, stars get paid way more than the others, like the producer. This is injustice as actors demand for a greater amount of pay and take advantage by their status and value.

9) The visual effects industry has suffered despite the huge budgets for most Hollywood movies because the company the man was working for- Rhythm and Hughes was going through bankruptcy/severe financial difficulties and many visual effects artists were protesting outside the Oscar's, saying that their industry was being "crushed". The state of the industry was bad and many workers were at risk of losing their job, even though the Box Office was high. A lot of people that were working on the visual effects in Life Of Pie had stopped working or moved to Canada.

10) Commodification involves the transforming of objects and services into commodities. It involves producing things not only for use, but also for exchange.

11) In my opinion, I agree that a huge number of media texts created, fail to reflect the diversity of people or opinion in wider society to an extent. This is because certain texts like Moonlight focus on the minority groups of people in society and is controversial- it shows a young black kid who is confused about his sexuality. However, some media texts such as Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings are action/sci-fi movies, generally seen just for pleasure. We can see that many of the movies made nowadays are based on what the audiences expect- pleasure.

12) Hesmondhalgh identifies that cultural industries have changed. They have become increasingly globalised as a result of digital media, new technology and inter-connectivity. As such, there is greater exchange of cultural goods and services across the countries and different cultures.

1. Digitalisation- the increase in technology, such as phones and laptops, allows audiences to gain access to cultural content.
2. The ownership and organisation of cultural industries is now much broader- the largest cultural companies now operate across a range of cultural industries, like TV and Film. These are conglomerates, which means that they have smaller companies producing cultural products as well.
3. Cultural texts have ben radically transformed. Promotional and advertising material now infiltrates areas and products more so than before. Wider range of genres, across a wider range of forms of cultural activity than before