Cultural Industries – David Hesmondhalgh

How can the success of a media product be judged?

Key terms

Conglomerate - a thing consisting of a number of different and distinct parts or items that are grouped together

Vertical integration - the combination in one firm of two or more stages of production normally operated by separate firms

Horizontal integration - the acquisition of a business operating at the same level of the value chain in a similar or different industry.

Cultural industries - films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.

Franchise - an authorisation granted by a government or company to an individual or group enabling them to carry out specified commercial activities, for example acting as an agent for a company's products

Cultural Industries - David Hesmondhalgh

Cultural industries follow the normal capitalist pattern of increasing concentration and integration – cultural production is owned and controlled by a few conglomerates who vertically integrate across a range of media to reduce risk.

Risk is particularly high in the cultural industries because of the difficulty in predicting success, high production costs, low reproduction costs and the fact that media products are ‘public goods’ – they are not destroyed on consumption but can be further reproduced. This means that the cultural industries rely on ‘big hits’ to cover the costs of failure. Hence industries rely on repetition through use of stars, genres, franchises, repeatable narratives and so on to sell formats to audiences, then industries and governments try to impose scarcity, especially through copyright laws.

The internet has created new powerful IT corporations, and has not transformed cultural production in a liberating and empowering way – digital technology has sped up work, commercialised leisure time and increased surveillance by government and companies.

Applying this to Minecraft:

Hesmondhalgh’s Cultural Industries theory is relevant to Minecraft because it explains why Microsoft acquired the game: they did this because…

The concerns that people might have over this acquisition are…