This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. This week’s contributor, Paul McDonald, was Professor of Cinema and Media Industries in our department from 2011-2015. 

A few weeks ago, the Get It Right from a Genuine Site anti-piracy campaign was launched in the UK. The campaign was run by Creative Content UK, a body formed the previous year to “boost consumer awareness of the wide array of legitimate online content services and help reduce online copyright infringement.” CCUK’s founding partners were the BPI (British Phonographic Industry), Hollywood’s trade body for international territories the Motion Picture Association (MPA), and the four main internet service providers in the UK: BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk and Virgin Media. Additional support for CCUK came from broadcasters (BBC and ITV), actors’ union Equity, the Film Distributors’ Association, the Independent Film and Television Alliance, the Musicians’ Union, Pact, the Premier League, the Publishers Association and UK Music.

CCUK is the newest arrival to the UK’s anti-piracy business and as such is representative of a trend now characterizing the modern media industries—the formation of inter- and intra-industry alliances to combat media piracy and protect copyrighted content. Over recent years, claims of escalating piracy have seemingly been accompanied by a concurrent escalation in the number of coalitions formed to combat it. Although not a new development, the formation of anti-piracy alliances has intensified over the last ten to fifteen years. As a way of grasping the implications of this trend, these developments might be described as the rise of Big Copyright, the emergence of new constellations of commercial-legal power in the media economy.

There are several reasons why this trend cannot simply be seen as a continuation of the oligopolistic tendencies of so-called Big Media by means of intellectual property. First, as a label for a concentrated cluster of private firms, Big Media has no formal collective identity other than perhaps memberships of trade associations for the film or music businesses. Big Copyright, on the other hand, materializes in a multitude of specific, named alliances that are the products of formalized agreements to collaborate. Second, Big Copyright brings together interests that spread far beyond the diversified holdings of even the largest, most diversified media and communication conglomerates. Big Media are part of Big Copyright, but the latter extends further, formed of unities among multiple copyright holders from across the business software, publishing, music, film, television and game industries, plus broadcasters, internet service providers, media retailers, marketing agencies, technology firms and in some cases police forces. These alliances have become power brokers in what Adrian Johns describes as the “intellectual property defence industry,” creating constellations of interests to aggregate social and political capital against piracy. While these groupings are led by the media industries, the raison d’être behind the creation of these alliances is to reach beyond the media sector by pressuring governments to act in the interests of rights holders, working with judicial and police authorities to enforce the protection of rights, and reaching out to the public by communicating lessons in good copyright citizenship. Finally, while Big Media largely means the major U.S. media firms, with the possible addition of Bertelsmann, Big Copyright is more internationally dispersed, comprising alliances formed around various national coalitions and including a few transnational members.

By way of illustration, I’ll briefly review here the alliances at the forefront of the content protection business in the UK. Formed in October 1982 through collaboration between the Motion Picture Export Association of America (MPEAA), the Society of Film Distributors, and the British Videogram Association (BVA), the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) was established in the early years of the home-video boom, when Britain was regarded by Hollywood as a hotbed of video piracy due to the low fines imposed for first offenses and lenient sentences for subsequent convictions. FACT is part of the MPA’s international network of national non-profit “content protection organizations” (CPOs), which now extends to over 30 countries, predominantly in Western Europe but also in parts of Eastern Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and North and South America. Through this network, FACT has equivalents in other major international markets for Hollywood film and television, including JIMCA (the Japan and International Motion Picture Copyright Association), Germany’s Gesellschaft zur Verfolgung von Urheberrechtsverletzungen (GVU, the Society for the Prosecution of Copyright Infringement), France’s Association de Lutte Contre la Piraterie Audiovisuelle (ALPA, the Association for the Fight Against Audiovisual Piracy) and the Asociación Protectora de Cine y Música México (APCM, the Mexican Association for the Protection of Movies and Music). CPOs localize the MPA’s global fight against piracy, providing on-the-ground points of contact for links with national governmental departments, law-enforcement agencies, and companies or trade bodies in the media sector. Although operating as a kind of outpost in Hollywood’s global fight against film and television piracy, FACT is now networked into the broader UK media economy. Alongside the MPA and the six major Hollywood corporations, FACT’s membership includes the main terrestrial broadcasters (BBC, ITV), satcaster (Sky) and cable provider (Virgin Media), plus film trade bodies (British Video Association, Film Distributors’ Association, and UK Cinema Association), and a leading sports rights holder (Premier League). As an industry body, FACT holds no statutory authority but instead functions primarily to aid anti-piracy efforts by collaborating with national law-enforcement and customs officials to investigate and prosecute alleged infringing activities. FACT operates partnerships with HM Revenue and Customs, Border Force, the National Crime Agency, Trading Standards offices, and fifteen regional police forces.

FACT therefore represents a point of mediation between the MPA CPOs and various national companies, bodies and agencies. For over three decades, FACT has remained at the forefront of anti-piracy efforts in the UK, but since the late 1990s, this network organization has seen developments with the formation of various new alliances. Operating as a kind of über-association, the Alliance for Intellectual Property exists to provide a single voice representing the collective interests of the copyright industries to the UK government. Formed in 1998, the Alliance aggregates the interests of two dozen “trade organisations, enforcement organisations and collecting societies from across the creative, branded and design industries.” Beyond its own business, the Alliance pays communications consultancy Luther Pendragon to provide administrative support to the All Party Parliamentary Intellectual Property Group (APPG), launched in 2003 as an interest group within UK government that, according to the Register of All-Party Parliamentary Groups, serves to “debate and highlight the value of intellectual property (IP) and the importance of its promotion and protection.”

Operating since 2004 with support from the UK film, TV and video industries, the Industry Trust for Intellectual Property Awareness describes itself as a “pro-copyright consumer education body.” Membership of the Trust extends to 44 entities, including all the major film/video distributors and cinema chains and their related trade bodies, plus marketing agencies (My Movies, Think Jam), pre-school entertainment company HIT, optical-disc manufacturer Sony DADC, digital-entertainment technology provider Rovi, home-entertainment metadata supplier West10, and leading online retailers (e.g. Amazon, eBay) and supermarkets (e.g. Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco). In addition, the Trust has 88 partners from across the UK’s film and television business, including FACT and the Alliance for IP. To promote awareness of the value of IP, the Industry Trust has run multiple campaigns, including the series of Moments Worth Paying For ads screened across cinemas, digital outdoor spaces and online media.

Following the model of the Center for Copyright Information in the US, CCUK was launched with two purposes. Get It Right from a Genuine Site is the first outcome of CCUK’s commitment to pro-copyright public awareness campaigning.

CCUK was also established to implement the Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme (VCAP), a system for rights owners to monitor transfers of infringing content over file-sharing networks, logging the IP addresses of infringers and notifying ISPs who send “escalating” warning letters to the relevant users. Issuing only a series of educative warnings means VCAP takes a lighter touch to deterrence than the enforcement of disconnections or financial penalties proposed by the 2010 Digital Economy Act. This has led to some questioning, however, particularly from the MPAA, over whether the program has any real teeth.

As the UK case shows, the landscape of anti-piracy alliance formation is confusing: not only has there been the proliferation of alliances, but many companies or organizations are also members of multiple alliances, and some alliances partner in other alliances. The formation of, but also the blurring between, alliances is particularly noticeable in how the presence of the Hollywood majors is unsurprisingly woven throughout these networks: the majors are individual members of FACT and the Industry Trust but are also collectively represented in these groupings and the Alliance for IP through the Film Distributors’ Association and the MPA.

As suggested earlier, Big Copyright grows out of nationally-configured coalitions of collective interests. So in the U.S., a similar array of alliances operates to those found in the UK. Representing trade associations across the copyright industries, the International Intellectual Property Alliance annually reports to the U.S. Trade Representative on the current state of IP regimes in foreign territories, with the aim of using the trading system to strengthen the international enforcement of rights. Copyright Alliance is a pan-media coalition that lobbies Congress for stronger copyright legislation, while CreativeFuture (originally Creative America) runs television, social-media and website campaigns on how piracy threatens jobs in film and television. Pulling back from the detail of these labyrinthine connections, at a level of abstract generalization we can see these coalitions serve a limited number of core functions in the fight against piracy: the political work of lobbying government for stronger legislative protections, the legal work of aiding statutory authorities to enforce rights, and the discursive work of public-awareness campaigning.

Frequently, analyses of the media industries focus on the organization of the conditions facilitating the production, dissemination and presentation of media content. Often this means concentrating on particular media firms. But the rise of Big Copyright demands we must now equally attend to how anti-piracy alliances are today very much part of the operational purposes of the modern media industries. By their very definition, these alliances are not companies but operate in the spaces between companies. For this reason, they may slip out of sight. This is not to say they are invisible or secretive, although knowledge of the precise workings is confined to industry stakeholders and is unavailable to the public. Rather they are just not an immediately noticeable component of the media business. With their proliferation, however, anti-piracy alliances have become a distinct category of player in the media industries. Thus, it is now vital we make these alliances visible for the roles they play in regulating the marketplace of rights and in shaping the cultural sphere.

Post by Jason Loviglio, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

I promised the Antenna editors an account of the Podcast Movement 2015 conference, held last month at the Omni Hilton in Fort Worth, Texas. But that was before I actually got there and realized what I had signed up for: It was a massive and elaborate event, composed of podcasters, would-be podcasters, and an army of sponsors with elaborate electronic kiosks, booths, and high-tech swag. The conference room stages had been decorated in a detailed brick and metal motif meant perhaps to evoke a trendy re-tooling of an earlier industrial moment, but which actually put me in mind of the brick ovens of Bertucci’s Pizza. A young woman I met at the conference, an aspiring educational podcaster, suggested a darker historical reference point for the ovens, which due to the spatial constraints of the stages did have a vaguely cramped, carceral appearance. I arrived on a Friday morning and rather than interrupt the pre-conference sessions that were already underway, I walked through the sun-blasted downtown, past stately Art Deco towers built with petroleum money, to a local café where I found air conditioning, the free city weekly, and a thin roast beef sandwich.

The opening plenary session of the conference took place later that first evening, a presentation of awards by the “Academy of Podcasting.” And while there is much to deride about any awards ceremony and perhaps little sport in doing so, it’s worth mentioning that this one lived up to its aspirational peers in several ways: the absurd, grueling duration of the ceremony; the execrable play-on, play-off music; and a loyal adherence to the conventions of the acceptance speech. (Yes, the winners actually said “I’d like to thank the Academy.”) The ratio of annual prizes to Hall-of-Fame inductees was about even, an interesting fact for an industry so young and for a conference only in its second year. The ceremony was as much about writing the history of podcasting as creating its future. I was struck most of all by the sheer scale of the podcasting universe represented: there were nine awards categories, including “Business,” “Food and Drink,” “Lifestyle and Health” and “Society and Culture,” the latter of which Roman Mars’ 99% Invisible won. Mars also won the “People’s Choice Award,” which the audience selected in real-time on their phones. Mars gave a keynote too; in that and in my conversation with him on the last day of the conference, he modestly and thoughtfully conveyed the sense that podcasting had been a refuge from the disappointments and challenges of public radio.

Roman Mars of 99% Invisible at Podcast Movement 2015.

The next two days’ sessions were replete with variations on similar nuggets of wisdom. Attendees were exhorted to “listen” many times, typically in sessions that permitted very little time for panelists to hear the questions and comments from the audience. Advice typically came in lists; it was all I could do not to write this up as “Seven Things I Learned at the Podcast Movement. Number 1: Listen!” Almost every session combined inspirational buncombe with a genuine desire on the part of the presenters to help the attendees, who paid nearly $500 for the conference registration, to figure out how to be successful. Two delightful exceptions to the formulaic, numbered bits of advice were Nikki Silva’s expertly produced presentation of The Kitchen Sisters‘ lost sound recordings, and Lea Thau, who led about 50 of us thru a storytelling workshop complete with Moth-like presentations at the end.

For most of the time, I felt as if I were at two conferences in one, a trope I tried out several times during the short Q&As, hoping it would catch on. One conference was filled with recognizable types: public radio veterans and those who aspired to make podcasts with the public radio sensibility, grouped loosely around the PRX’s “network” of podcasts, Radiotopia. These include Criminal, Strangers, 99% Invisible, and Fugitive Waves. The other, bigger conference was composed of entrepreneurial podcasters and their great hero, John Lee Dumas, a youthful entrepreneur whose membership organization Podcasters’ Paradise commanded the enthusiasm typically reserved for pyramid schemes, motivational speakers, and returned messiahs. Despite their zeal, members of Podcasters’ Paradise were easy to talk to and taught me a lot about how to think about the podcasting platform, industry, and community, which I heard many of them refer to as “this space.” I met one on the bus-ride to the Stockyards, a hulking retro-cattle industry entertainment district, who described the split in the conference between “Pro-casters” (professional broadcasters), almost exclusively from the public radio sector, for whom podcasting was merely another way to distribute and actual “Podcasters,” the scrappy amateurs with start-up ambition and moxie. Sure enough panelists in the Radiotopia sessions (Pro-casters all), avoided the term podcasting in favor of terms like “public media” to describe their platform-straddling work, and the word “shows” to talk about their own work.

John Lee Dumas of the “online community” Podcasters’ Paradise at Podcast Movement 2015.

And it was true that the members of Podcasters’ Paradise that I met were all amateurs to audio production. I learned at some point that the average number of downloads for podcasts was 158, a far cry from the tens of millions that Serial commanded. John Lee Dumas’ daily podcast Entrepreneur on Fire, however, was the lodestar towards which all the amateurs navigated. His hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly income (updated regularly on the front page of his website) represented far more meaningful numbers to the podcasters than any dreary audience averages. Dumas’ appeal lay more in his humble backstory and exuberant message. An Iraq War army veteran, law school dropout, and Wall Street washout turned podcasting millionaire, Dumas exudes the optimism and charm of someone who can’t quite believe how well things have turned out. For his podcast, Dumas interviews equally exuberant young entrepreneurs, many of whom echo his rags-to-riches narrative, keywords (“bootstrapping,” “journey”), and variations on the metaphor of “on fire” to signal inspiration. The sound design and vocal performances of Entrepreneur on Fire, like that of Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Money, another podcaster luminary, owe more to AM talk radio’s thin, digitally compressed sound than to the lush, artful sound of This American Life and Radiolab. Dumas’ interview style is rat-a-tat; there’s even a lightning round, which doesn’t sound much different from the rest of the program. It’s pretty much the exact opposite of the probing, allusive style made famous by Terry Gross on Fresh Air. If Dumas is “listening” to his guests, there’s no evidence of it. I will spare you a full accounting of Dumas’ message, which involves keywords whose first letters spell out the word “SUCCCCEESS.” Boiled down to its essence, Dumas exhorted his audience to “Invest, Learn, and Teach.” “Teach for Free,” Dumas advised. His free webinars on how to get started in podcasting are hugely popular loss leaders for Podcasters Paradise membership, which people pay $1,100 to join.

The “give it away” ethos and model seemed to be the golden thread running through the two parts of the conference. It was difficult to find a podcast of any kind that didn’t operate on the free distribution model, though some sold access to their full archives. Others tried fundraising in the public radio podcast model, simply asking listeners to “chip in a few bucks.” For the most part, the podcasting movement has been brought to you by corporate sponsors like Audible and MailChimp on the public media side and by subscriptions to additional services, books, “solutions,” CDs, and memberships on the business-oriented side. Some of the very popular business-oriented podcasts, like Entrepreneur on Fire, also include a spasm of super short ads from small business services like BrainTree and LegalZoom at the top of the podcast, at the “mid-roll,” and at the end. One vendor and conference sponsor, PodClear, offered high-quality internet voice service that podcasters could use to conduct long distance interviews more cheaply than ISDN lines and more reliably than phone lines or VOIP, a sign that public radio’s high-quality sound, rather than AM’s scratchy, populist immediacy, might be the emergent standard for the new medium.

Marc Maron at Podcast Movement 2015.

Marc Maron’s keynote (he was a late replacement for Glenn Beck) also represented a point of conjunction. Like Roman Mars, Maron’s work was universally known and admired. Like Dumas, he framed the success of his WTF podcast as a late reprieve from a life of failure and heartbreak. Broke, in the throes of a painful divorce, and a stalled career in comedy, he turned his garage into a studio, in part, he joked, because the ceiling was too low to hang himself from. Podcasting as a form of last-minute salvation was another uniting theme, giving the conference a tent-revival vibe. Even Lea Thau, the Peabody Award winning co-founder of The Moth, frames the success of her Radiotopia-backed Strangers show as salvation from a devastating career and personal reversals. Perhaps the purest articulation of the podcast-as-rebirth formula appeared on the back of a tee-shirt worn by one of the attendees that read “From Brain Tumor to 1 Million Monthly Downloads.” I had scoffed at the use of the word “Movement” in the conference title when I first heard of it, but now I understood a bit better the affective economy the conference was tapping into. Even Nikki Silva of The Kitchen Sisters described the conference as a “festival” that reminded her of the early, pre-NPR days of community radio in Santa Cruz.

Nikki Silva of The Kitchen Sisters at Podcast Movement 2015.

The gathering was big and the number and kind of podcasts represented was impressive. But I was surprised to hear speakers gushing about the conference’s “diversity.” It was, to all appearances, a very white Anglophone group, though there was at least some gender diversity, with women making up a bit less than half the gathering. The smallest session I attended, in a cramped, remote room hard by the restrooms, featured Carolina Guerrero of Radio Ambulante, the Spanish-language, pan-American podcast whose global audience grew fifty-fold in 2014 alone. Guerrero explained the meteoric growth in audience as a function of demographic changes, the show’s pan-American reach, and partnerships with BBC Mundo and radio stations in Latin America, as well as English-version appearances on Radiolab, Reply All, and This American Life. It was surprising that so little was said in the rest of the conference about the growth potential of Spanish-language programming.

By Sunday, the Stockholm Syndrome had set in and I began to identify with my captors, and to love my fellow conference-goers and the blank anywhere/nowhere of the conference hotel. Even the vendors, who lined the hallway of the meeting room level had become, if not friends, then at least familiar denizens of our temporary village. I collected lanyards, tee-shirts, and phone chargers in my tote bags and signed up for special offers. Conversations with familiar strangers became easier, as if in fulfillment of Lea Thau’s injunction that we be “Strangers No More.” People exchanged business cards with abandon, as if they genuinely hoped to stay in touch. Small confidences and bits of advice and email addresses were exchanged. We found it easier to pipe up during the sessions, despite the brief time allotted for Q&A. In a session on “Creativity and Storytelling,” the audience erupted 20-minutes in, protesting good naturedly the fact that the moderator had yet to address a question to the only woman panelist.

Serial‘s Sarah Koenig at Podcast Movement 2015.

The conference concluded Sunday afternoon with a final keynote, this one by Sarah Koenig of the podcasting’s game-changing hit, Serial. Like Serial, Koenig’s talk was exquisitely produced and disarmingly personal. After nearly a year, she still manages to seem genuinely staggered by the podcast’s runaway success. And yet somehow she knows exactly which sorts of behind-the-scenes tidbits about the reporting, production, and post-fame spin-control we’re desperate to hear. Perhaps most valuable was her candid presentation of an early draft of the first episode’s script, followed by the much-improved final version, a rare moment in the conference when the work of making good audio was shown more than merely celebrated or advertised. Koenig credited producer Julie Snyder with providing some of the most important improvements draft to draft, a valuable lesson about the importance of collaboration, another point often lost in the highly individualistic, “bootstraps” narratives and underfunded business model of the business podcasters. She also played bits of taped phone calls between herself and Adnan Syed, in which she gamely revealed her manipulations of Syed and his flirtations with her. Koenig projected the exact same uncertainty about Adnan Syed’s guilt that suffused the entire podcast without seeming the slightest bit less fascinated by the case. Koenig closed by taking questions, and yes, she really did seem to listen.

All photos from Podcast Movement. 

Post by Brian Fauteux, University of Alberta

This is the first post in our new series “The Podcast Review,” which offers critical appreciations of podcast series or episodes and other notable digital soundwork.

Podcasts about music come with a particular set of challenges. For one, it can be difficult for hosts to balance their own musical preferences against those of their listeners. Also, for more amateur productions, there is the tricky question of whether to acquire the rights to use songs in the podcast, to rely on brief clips that may fall within fair use (or its equivalent in other countries), or to just risk it and worry about consequences if they arise.

For these reasons and others, music podcasts, especially those that aren’t produced by a radio station or network like NPR or KEXP, often have a limited run. Staffan Ulmert of The Only Music Podcast explains that he and his co-host Louise Hammar had no idea why so many music podcasts barely make it to twenty episodes. He wonders if it’s because of licensing issues or if those involved in creating music podcasts start to resent each other around episode fifteen. Their new podcast, created just this year, provides an excellent perspective on how labels, artists, and listeners are discovering music today and how various facets of the music industries work.

The Only Music Podcast is produced in Gothenburg, Sweden, and is available via iTunes or from the podcast’s website, which organizes its episodes into a visually striking grid of images that are demarcated by a topic. The episode titled “Girls!“, for instance, is marked by a photo of Björk’s face surrounded by a black background. Episodes are released every two weeks and the goal of the podcast is “to avoid being too nerdy” and to ensure it appeals to listeners beyond those who “consume music and music news 24/7.” Staffan is a music producer who has released sample-based music under the moniker Mojib and is also the founder of Has it Leaked. Louise co-runs Telegram Studios, one of Sweden’s biggest indie labels; she has also managed a number of international artists.

Each episode is broken down into three distinct sections: News, “what we’ve been listening to,” and a distinct topic such as remixes. Two episodes have deviated from this format due to summer holidays: One, a list of guilty pleasure songs, and the other, a list of cover songs the hosts enjoy. Featured news topics are related to the music industries, such as the release of Tidal and its lack of transparency in terms of what they pay artists, recent album leaks (Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta”), and the popularity of surprise album releases in the United States. When introducing listeners to Tula, Louise does so by explaining the creative process behind the group’s music and offers some insight into why she thinks it resonates with listeners. She is able to provide this context since Tula works with her label, Telegram. During a discussion of Jamie xx’s “Loud Places” from Episode 3, we learn about the samples used on the track and the process of mixing and remixing. Louise then takes us through the history of remixing by rocksteady, reggae, and dub artists.

The final section of each podcast installment is particularly appealing for music fans, since it deals with compelling and familiar issues in the music industry, but with a refreshing perspective that isn’t filtered through the United States or the U.K. On Episode 5, “Girls!” (April 28, 2015), the discussion of women in the music industry centers on the year 1996 when Sweden was “bombarded with U.K. rock bands” and the “laddish” culture that accompanied it. The hosts discuss how there were many women artists on the charts that year (Mariah Carey, Toni Braxton, Celine Dion) but argue that because the industry was heavily dominated by men, it was hard for women’s perspectives to emerge. As a point of comparison, they then discuss Robyn and her promotion of women in technology. In the next episode they mention that this is a much larger topic and one that they will discuss again on a future episode.

Being able to hear the podcast evolve over the course of its 11 episodes is a fascinating component of The Only Music Podcast. At this year’s ICA conference, a panel on podcasting was followed by a discussion of the increasing popularity and professionalization of the podcast. A few points that were brought up included the “podcast/public radio voice” and the importance of large distribution channels. By contrast, the 11 episodes of The Only Music Podcast allow us to hear the hosts working through technical issues such as having two microphones recording at the same volume level (they have yet to receive their proper microphones). At one moment Louise admits that her iPhone battery has died and that the audio quality may now decrease. Many episodes end with Staffan asking listeners to write to the hosts if they have suggestions for improving the format. So, while the two hosts are clearly experts in their fields, I enjoy hearing the podcast develop and change over each episode. In the pilot episode Staffan admits that “It’s very difficult to create a podcast. We thought it would be very easy. It’s not…” He adds that he had a hard time listening to the first few episodes but supportive emails from listeners gave them the confidence to continue.

Staffan says that he and Louise are getting better at being themselves once they hit the record button. He imagines that they will run into some problems with licensing music if the podcast develops and its audience grows. If that’s the case, he hopes that sponsorship can help. This is a great time to tune into The Only Music Podcast, both because it deals with the ever-changing contemporary music industries, and because we can hear a podcast develop and find its voice.

Map of NBC’s combined red, blue, orange, and gold networks in 1928.

Post by Bruce Lenthall, University of Pennsylvania

Teaching a media history course nearly 15 years ago, one day I found myself stumbling in search of a metaphor to help explain to undergraduates the network radio system that arose in the late 1920s.

“Think about network stations on television,” I suggested.

“What are network stations on TV?” the students asked. “How are they different than any other stations? How do you find them?”

“Do you remember those two knobs on a television?” I asked, trying to make this as simple and concrete as possible. Succeeding, instead, in showing my age. “Essentially, one knob let you change between the national channels, the network channels. When you turned the other knob, you changed channels among the local, non-network ones.”

There was a long pause.

Finally, with the air of one who has figured out something that has long confused her, a student spoke up. “This is really helpful,” she said. “My grandmother had a television with dials on it and I never could figure out what you used them for.”

The point here is not the futility of trying to explain television knobs and dials to a generation in the age of the remote control. The point is not even my own occasional cluelessness about current cultural experiences. No, the real point here is about some of the challenges of teaching radio history.

When I teach the history of radio – as I have done in a variety of course contexts from a media in history course to a history of American culture in the 1930s – I am routinely reminded that for undergraduate students, the basics of the early radio systems have long since been lost from cultural memory. Notions of national networks, of limitations on the number of stations – and with that, limitations on what audiences might hear and who might speak on the air – are unfamiliar. Even the metaphors a later generation might use to recall some of the early days of radio no longer have currency.

At the same time, though, other elements of the American system of broadcasting as it rose to prominence remain so entrenched in our deeply held assumptions that it can be hard for students to question them at all. For many of my undergraduates, commercially funded, for-profit broadcasting seems such a natural and positive way to organize media that it can be difficult for them to step out of such a system and examine it.

Such challenges are, of course, common ones for instructors: how to make the unfamiliar understandable and to understand the familiar by reexamining it through new eyes. And such challenges are why, in part, studying media history in general, and radio history in particular, is so powerful. Comprehending the unfamiliar media of the past can help us to see the familiar ones all around us anew. Digging into the history of broadcasting provides a comparative perspective – a comparison that enables us to see the system of our own time as distinct. Examining the historical comparison and the decisions that shaped past radio allows us to take what seems natural to us and to see it as something that has been constructed by choices – choices that could have been made differently. In turn, that perspective enables students to consider the benefits and costs of those choices.

As my classes explore the history of radio, we peer through three sets of lenses: the messages and content on the air, what radio meant to its listeners, and the structure of the industry. I ask my students, which frame of reference provides the most valuable insights into radio’s past? Invariably, my students say we need all three perspectives to really understand radio. That’s true, of course. But it also reveals how hard it is for novice scholars to take a stand. All of us who research radio know there are many valuable approaches to our work that we could take; but we also know that we have to pick one because we cannot do everything at once. My students are less comfortable choosing the approach that offers them the greatest insight.

There is no question, though, which is the easiest area for them to discuss. The early radio programs may be foreign to students, but discussing those programs is not. When we talk about Amos ‘n’ Andy in the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, my students quickly understand the importance of talking about the program’s construction of race. They may not see the differences between the works we read by Melvin Ely and Michele Hilmes on this question at first, but they get there. This becomes an opportunity to consider factors that made radio so popular and the role racial othering played in the creation of a mass audience. Similarly, students are comfortable considering Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” as a potential critique of the media itself (OK, for that one, they also see Citizen Kane to help them unpack Welles’s views).

My students have a more difficult time considering what radio meant for its listeners. Here I have raised for them some of the issues I address in my own book. What did it mean to connect with far-flung and often-imagined others? To be part of a mass audience? Where did listeners find a sense of control and where did they lack it? Maybe I am too close to some of these questions or maybe others need to come first, but I’ve never fully gotten students to engage with them. Instead, I have repeatedly found my classes tacking to questions of what was on the air and, even more, the early structure of the industry.

That last one, the structure of radio, is particularly hard for students to understand. It is not just, as I have said, that the comparisons we might offer are both too unfamiliar and familiar for them. More than that, such structures themselves were – and are – often invisible and inaudible. I also wonder if, in the United States, we are not always comfortable thinking about economic motives and structures as something open for questioning. The idea that a radio system that prized commercial success and the pursuit of profit could be something we created, rather than the natural state of a society that values freedom, can be a jarring one. Exchange students from France and Germany in my classes have been quicker than many of their peers to envision means of funding media other than through advertising.

Because the centralized and commercial system of broadcasting is so hard to make plain to students, it is doubly difficult to present alternatives that existed. Alexander Russo has a detailed account of the structures that bolstered radio beyond the networks – an account I have never taught. How to showcase for students the limits of a structure, when the students do not know the structure itself?

Ultimately, understanding that structure requires students exercise imagination as much as analysis: visually representing radio’s complex reach, for instance, and, critically, imagining alternatives to a commercial network system.

In the end, though, the difficulties in teaching this material help make it so compelling. When students successfully come to terms with radio’s messages, meanings and structures, they take something opaque and make it their own, and they take something that is very much their own and find the distance to shine a light into it. Considering a host of historical media systems and critiques – hopefully – sets them up to decide what they value in, and to consider alternatives to, contemporary media as well.

And if, in the process, they learn that once upon a time, people changed channels by walking across the room and twisting a dial, well, so much the better.

Post by David Crider, State University of New York at Oswego

As someone who has previously written for Antenna about country music radio’s gender problem, I have been following the “#SaladGate” situation pretty closely. For those who are not familiar, longtime radio consultant Keith Hill was recently explaining his winning strategies in Country Aircheck Weekly. Hill stated that one way to improve ratings is to decrease the number of females on the playlist to around 15-percent. He concluded, “They’re just not the lettuce in our salad. The lettuce is Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are the females.” Well-known female country artists Miranda Lambert and Martina McBride took umbrage to Hill’s comments, and their fan bases followed suit, attacking Hill via e-mail and social media.

Hill has been on the defensive ever since, falling back on his 40 years of experience with music programming and consulting. He addressed many of his detractors directly via Twitter, and then appeared on the Radio Stuff Podcast to explain his strategy and his side of the situation. At one point in the interview, Hill noted that he had created a Twitter account during a convention panel six years ago, then never used it again until recently when the angry #SaladGate tweets started coming in. He added that the country radio audience is 55 to 65 percent female, and until now they were happy with what they heard. It was only when they were exposed to the internal data that they started to think the format was biased.

It seems to me that this is a classic case of disruption brought about by digital and social media and greater media literacy. Radio is a very insular media culture, driven by the same research metrics that have been used for decades. The Keith Hills of the world fall back on what has always worked because they see no reason to change. Fear drives their programming decisions; if they try something new or different, they could lose listeners. Until recently, they were immune from direct criticism because they worked behind the scenes and had much more anonymity than on-air personalities, who serve as the public voices of the industry. The rise of Twitter and Facebook has brought listeners to the gates of this insular radio industry, allowing them to shout, “Listen to us!” When listeners don’t like something, they can let radio management know, immediately and directly. Naturally, this development will knock a practitioner of ingrained methods off his/her axis.

Another potential disruption is the shift in how we receive our music. The advent of streaming has already broken down barriers of genre for many listeners; they now base their playlists not on whether it is Country or Rock, but instead by context or mood. Rock journalist Alan Cross points out that for Alternative Rock listeners, the gender of the singer does not matter like it did 15-20 years ago. The day may be coming soon when Keith Hill can no longer fall back on saying, “Women like male artists” simply because they had in the past, especially in a format where the majority of the audience is female.

The push toward greater media literacy has been underway for several years, and social media allows inside information to be spread much more quickly. More people are questioning the framing of media content and the media ecosystem in which it is created; in so doing, they discover patterns of bias. In short, as more people find out how the sausage (or in this case, salad) is made, it is likely that more people will find fault with the practices of Hill and others who shape the content. As the pushback grows, the radio industry will be forced to make changes because the fear of keeping things as-is will outweigh the fear of change.

The down side of this disruption is it also begets the “Twitter mob.” Hill received messages using every nasty name in the book, as well as a handful of death threats. He became the latest “target of the week” for those who enjoy tearing someone down. These people may be very passionate about their social beliefs, but they can also forget that everything they say via social media affects how people see them. In this case, as someone in a management culture that struggles to understand social media, Hill’s treatment on Twitter prompted him to call the site “a cesspool that overflows.” In a separate interview, Hill also stated that when he gets one of these angry tweets, “I know it doesn’t represent the mass Country audience.” The problem here is that when it’s Miranda Lambert or Martina McBride’s fans sending those tweets, it may not represent the audience as a whole, but it does represent some of the most passionate listeners. When it comes to social media, you ignore these motivated listeners at your own peril. However, when too many of them cross lines of decorum, they become easier to dismiss.

During his Radio Stuff Podcast interview, Hill acknowledged that there is a degree of sexism within radio and country music, but not by design: “Its outcome is sexist, but that’s because it’s simply responding to the market.” For those of us who study radio from a social-science viewpoint and wish to teach the next generation how to succeed in this or any other entertainment medium, it poses an interesting conundrum: How do we reconcile the imperative to “give the people what they want” with the fact that from a sociological standpoint, we disapprove of what they want? Continuing to improve media literacy certainly helps, as we teach our students to pay closer attention to the ever-changing needs of the current audience, instead of falling back on decades of outdated trends.

This is the tenth post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement.

So much has already been said in this wonderful series to honor Michele Hilmes and all the different ways she has had such a tremendous impact on media studies and cultural history, but there is one perhaps unlikely aspect of her legacy that I’d like to emphasize in some brief thoughts here: Michele Hilmes as “new media” historian.

I had the immense privilege of being an advisee of Michele’s through my graduate career and I benefitted greatly from her thoughtful guidance, kind nature, and sage advice. In addition, I was fortunate to have been trained by such an excellent “new media” scholar. The fact that Michele has advised many digital media scholars such as myself may strike some as odd considering that Michele is primarily known for her eminence as a radio historian. The intellectual curiosity and diversity that Ben Aslinger points to as characteristic of Michele’s approach is certainly key to this, but it also makes sense if we understand Michele’s pathbreaking scholarship as “new media” history. Indeed, Michele’s work on early radio broadcasting is a history of a new medium, just as writing about digital media of today is. From the historiographical perspective so effectively championed by Michele throughout her work as a scholar and a mentor, we can see the importance of the historical context that makes a medium “new” in a particular time and place and that scholars can only ever engage those media through traces of the past, whether the past century or the past month.

Michele may not foreground this aspect of her work — as history of old media when they were new — but her scholarship is nonetheless invaluable for new media scholars to properly historicize our work and our methods. Michele shows how to think historically and historiographically about today’s “new media” — how to see how much is not really new at all. Michele has deeply explored the historical antecedents to many of the issues at the heart of new media studies today, whether it’s media and cultural convergence (Hollywood and Broadcasting), access divides of identity and geography (Radio Voices), or transnational networked flows (Network Nations). Further, Michele’s recent work directly addresses today’s new media and its connections to Golden Age radio as what she calls “soundwork.”

The most important perspective on new media that Michele’s masterful historical work offers is an understanding of the role of culture and discourse in shaping the policy decisions and institutional structures that come to define media when they are new. In Michele’s historiographical work, how new media take the shape they do — deciding what and who media are for — is not an inevitable matter of technological determinism or economic dominance, but an ideological and discursive struggle along lines of gender, race, class, and national identity. How the dominant discourse of a medium emerges in national and transnational context shapes how that medium emerges and, as Michele shows, whose voices are heard and whose are marginalized as a result. (The constructed image of the “little boys in short trousers” that policymakers didn’t trust with the future of the airwaves is just one of the many vibrant examples from her work documenting this influence on emerging media.)

Michele Hilmes’ legacy for radio and sound studies, broadcasting history, and cultural studies is clearly profound and prodigious, but her influence extends further, as well: this quintessential cultural historian is also a profound new media scholar.

The experience of the conference seems to evolve as one’s career grows—from the overwhelming experience of the graduate student newbie to the new challenges of working the publishing tables as a tenure-track faculty member developing a book. I seem to be in the joiner stage. A member of two special interest groups (SIGs), one caucus, and a committee, I devoted a good part of my conference to meetings rather than panels. This was somewhat disheartening, as I missed a lot of good work, but it has also made me think about value of working to improve SCMS from within.

I’ve been a core team member of the Media Industries SIG since its inception in 2012. In only three years, this SIG, which pulls from film, television, game, and new media studies, has grown to become one of the largest SIGs at over four hundred members. This year, we received an incredibly diverse range of proposals for SIG sponsorship, many more than the eight we are invited to submit. Among the topics reflected were media metrics, historical queer film, independent media, and advertising. The SIG’s growth is at once a testament to the vitality of this expanding area of research and a responsibility to continue articulating what is the role of the SIG within SCMS. For example, we’ve been working to create an “experts page,” detailing the particular subject areas of interest for our members, with the idea that this could become a resource for journalists needing quotes and talking heads. While we haven’t cracked the code of how to publicize this sort of resource, the desire to promote our members remains a priority for the SIG. I should note that this topic—identifying the continuing purpose and mission of a special interest group—came up at the Television Studies SIG meeting as well. For new and older SIGs, then, members seem eager to continue to push the possibilities of what an organization as large as SCMS can help us achieve.

My view of the possible scope of an organization like SCMS has been enlarged by serving on the public policy committee. The work of this committee tends to take place behind the scenes, so you may not know it exists even as it works to suggest policy updates and innovations to the SCMS Board that help you do your jobs better. In the past two years that I’ve been a member, the committee has provided advice for the board and drafted documents to advance the organization’s efforts to advocate for Fair Use protections (in publishing and teaching), Open Access, DMCA exemptions for teachers, and Network Neutrality (more on SCMS policies can be found here). There’s a whole world of activity at SCMS beyond the conference, and volunteering can be one path towards uncovering those efforts.

In the past few years, we’ve seen a wide range of new activities created solely through the support of the Board and the willingness of SCMS members to volunteer their time. Cinema Journal has expanded its reach online in a variety of (open access) ways to serve member interests. First, there is the “Teaching Dossier,” which features blog posts from members discussing their teaching strategies in line with particular themes for each issue. Second, the always entertaining “Aca-Media” podcast co-hosted by Christine Becker and Michael Kackman delivers a monthly program that features scholar interviews and discussions of current issues within media studies. The Media Industries SIG sponsored an affiliate event (one of three) at this year’s SCMS about the Sony Hack. Super topical, this event, too, helps us envision additional ways that SCMS can address current events and the place of scholars analyzing and commentating upon them. All of this activity confirms that SCMS members have the potential to inspire the organization to become more visible to scholars and the broader public across a range of platforms, transforming the conference into only one more opportunity to enhance the value of SCMS for all who work to give it meaning.

Whether in the explicit pronouncements of pop culture commentators or in a cursory cruise of off-network, late-night television, there is ample evidence that young men remain both the primary producers and targeted consumers of much mainstream comedic content.  In the two years since the above-mentioned pieces, however, a number of incidents have invigorated offscreen debate about comedy and gender: among them, David Letterman firing his booker for sexist practices and remarks; Daniel Tosh shouting down a female heckler with a rape joke; Seth MacFarlane’s embarrassing song-and-dance at the 2013 Oscars; Jerry Seinfeld’s curiously tone-deaf take on diversity in comedy; and, perhaps most notoriously, Saturday Night Live’s clumsily PR-controlled search for and eventual hiring of African-American female cast member Sasheer Zamata.

Although it may be optimistic to suggest a correlation between those conversations and the recent programming decisions of comedy outlets, such dialogue does affect the discursive context in which we watch and talk about their shows.  In this light, the seemingly necessary belongingness between men and comedy dissipates a bit when considering the representational politics of Comedy Central’s spring lineup–namely, Kroll Show, Broad City, and the soon-to-return Inside Amy Schumer.  It isn’t just that comediennes star and/or figure prominently in the programs’ sketchy stories, something into which the network has put perfunctory effort in the past with The Sarah Silverman Program and Strangers with Candy.  Discourses of gender and sexuality additionally provide a generative grammar for the shows, imbuing their comedic portrayals of race, class, and homosocial bonding with the kind of polysemy customarily ascribed to Comedy Central’s much-lauded news satires.

The most simultaneously silly and insightful segment of Inside Amy Schumer’s first season, for instance, was a recurring bit called “Amy Goes Deep” which had the host interviewing, among others, a well-endowed man and a female dominatrix.  To be sure, the segments (like most sketches on Inside) use sexuality as a way to provoke and titillate viewers initially.  As the interviews progress, however, Schumer refrains from the sort of moralizing too-often implicit in portrayals of sexual taboos and instead gestures toward broader discourses about the ways in which we talk about those taboos.

Although nominally starring a male comedian and trafficking in the gendered caricatures so common among male-targeted comedies, Kroll Show is actually a “full-frontal assault on dude culture and the ideologies that support it, but in dickfest drag.”  It’s also the most cuttingly satirical sketch comedy show about television since Mr. Show.  Kroll’s favorite targets are the vapid fame-mongers, low-rent aesthetics, and crass commercialism of reality television.  Instead of merely reproducing and displaying televisual conventions with the lazy referentiality of an after-“Update” SNL-segment, though, recurring sketches like “PubLIZity” and “Rich Dicks” consistently ask viewers to consider the cultural and industrial discourses that construct and make commonsensical certain gendered representations of reality.

Of course, there exists real danger in the potential that viewers will decode the superficially heterosexist humor in these programs with the same unblinking acceptance as they do a show like Tosh.0.  It certainly doesn’t help, either, that Comedy Central has a tired habit of promoting its shows with the most memorable, “I’m Rick James, bitch!”-iest of sound bites.  Nevertheless, the infinitely mutable nature of comedy (and of the media infrastructures increasingly invested in it) means that no matter how loudly any one voice shouts, there are always plenty of hecklers.

Beyond aca-fandom, what do fan practices and academic labor contribute to our understanding of one another? Can these labors of love lead to coalition building across industries?

I have been engaged in a lot of discussions about participatory labor and new media lately (both in official and unofficial realms). Repeatedly, I am struck by how rarely those of us that study fans, resistance, and the free labor of online produsers (to use Axel Bruns’ neologism) see ourselves in our research participants outside of the realm of aca-fans. Recognizing the contestations surrounding the term “aca-fan,” I would argue that all scholars are fans of our research objects. If not, why would we bother? Film scholars have to be fans of film to subject themselves to hours upon hours of watching. Rare is the political communication scholar who is not, deep inside, a politics junky (the enactment of addiction language being common in many a fandom). As Jonathan Gray has pointed out, people can be fans of news though media audience studies rarely discuss the phenomena.

Certainly not all scholars are fans in the traditional sense, but they are expected to be media consumers if they want to speak with authority. This expectation, true of fan cultures as well, can be exclusionary. Studying industries or audiences do not necessarily have to consume the media at the center of their analysis (/tip o’ the hat to T.L. Taylor on that point). Analysis of texts requires familiarity with form, genre conventions, and acknowledging medium specificity, true. That is a far cry from assuming every game scholar owns the latest release or that every television scholar has watched (and liked) every acclaimed series on the air.

Even when scholars don’t claim to be fans of a medium, we are fans of research, theories, subjects, and fields. Fan, moreover, need not imply the uncritical love-fest of pure celebration. Critique,  at it’s most productive, involves the hope that that which we love could be so much better. Many digital production practices, from slash fiction to fan sites to hate watching, are acts of pleasure. As Lisa Henderson discusses in talks on her new book Love and Money, what would our research look like if it looked more like our acknowledgement sections? Can we love our research more?

When analyzing “fan practices,” by treating these as objects of study, researchers sometimes lose sight of how our experiences as scholars overlap with fandom. Beyond the love and pleasure connection, can we think about the struggles we share with the fans/audiences/industries that we study. I have heard many scholars rightly critique the exploitative if simultaneously resistive nature of “participatory culture.” Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, for example, argue that the contemporary games industry has been built upon the “playbor” of its audiences.

Research, in the best of situations, is a labor of love. We produce a massive amount of unpaid labor in pursuit of the ecstasy of the research breakthrough. So do fans. As I watched the new SyFy series Heroes of Cosplay, I was struck by the massive financial investment the cast undertook, from making their costumes to traveling around the country, for the chance to win awards that may or may not have big payouts. This was largely justified by claims that cosplay could lead to career advancement. It seems odd at first… until you consider how many of us pay to attend conferences (with or without institutional support) with the promise that it will advance our careers. We give talks, write articles, edit anthologies, advise students (in and out of our institutions), all in the hopes of “making it” and/or contributing to the field. At least that is what we tell ourselves. When we wonder why fans do similar labor, can we gain insights from why we engage in projects that many of us have trouble defending to friends and relative outside of academia?

Thinking more broadly of the implications of these similarities, I have been to several conferences in the past year that have brought together game scholars, industry representatives, and artists/designers. Talking across these industries sometimes feels difficult, because we are all (as humans) so invested in our point of view that we want others to understand what our side has to offer. Alternatively, we want others to tell us what to offer them. Building on decades of critiques of such colonizing approaches to political movements though, does coalition politics offer a better frame? For example, I think many of the problems of the mainstream AAA games industry, as it is often constructed, are the problems of academia as well. The mainstream games industry like mainstream academia is largely built upon exclusion and competition. Those of us who don’t fit comfortably with the class/gender/sexuality/race/embodiment/etc.,  norms acknowledged by our respective industries are often forced into a compromise if we stay within them or charged with an uphill battle if we want to change them. Both industries have to defend their own relevance, in a way that further promotes exclusivity and hard lines between insiders and outsiders. Both industries have been guilty of exploiting contingent labor, systematically excluding marginal voices, and fetishzing their own cannons. Both often have conferences that often price out contributors that could shake things up, and then complain that they don’t have anyone skilled in doing things differently. Both rely on certification systems that are tied into exclusionary and oppressive systems for access to employment.

When we are frustrated with another industry we sometimes simply dismiss it. I have heard scholars dismiss industry perspectives, industry representatives dismiss scholarship, indie designers dismiss both (in all cases sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly). When we are frustrated with our own industry, we try to figure out how to fix things, or leave. In acknowledging our similarities, however, perhaps the time has come to think more concretely about how we can help each other fix the systemic problems we all face.

On top of it all, Disney released word that they will be rebooting the franchise – making the sequels for films seven through nine, as well as aggressively merchandising and monetizing all of the Star Wars material through its international distribution wings. Lucas went so far as to say that in another life, Disney might have made the Star Wars franchise, especially given their innovative practices in marketing and monetizing their characters.

For Disney, the deal is a no-brainer. After acquiring Marvel in 2009 (also for $4 billion) we can see how the conglomerate is actively pursuing opportunities to expand its TV, movie and theme park domination, as well as ensuring that they are catering to the purchasing needs and desires of children – especially tween and teen boys. Moreover, the deal gives the studio the ability to market to their parents by way of nostalgia for the cultural touchstones that has always been a key to Disney’s success. The acquisition of Marvel and the Star Wars empires are natural fits for a company that already dominates the tween girls side of the market.

Conglomerates are always on the lookout for any new franchise possibility, which has become ever-important to a studio’s bottom-line. Disney is one of the few studios without a successful live-action franchise, having been burned by their experiments with The Chronicles of Narnia series, their recent attempt at launching a John Carter franchise, and the subsequent flops of both. More importantly, perhaps, Disney has not been successful in generating new intellectual content for some time outside of its TV efforts. Instead, the secret to company’s success in the past 30 years has been acquiring talent and properties through buyouts after a company proves its success, as in the cases of Miramax (1993), The Muppets (2004), Pixar (2006),  Marvel (2009) and now Lucasfilm to name only a few of these savvy deals.

For both companies, this is a win-win scenario. For Disney, they get an already tried and true film franchise, and Lucas has already signed off on the sequels and all of the “treasure trove” of spin-off material that he has assembled through the years. For Lucas, he gets to retire, pocket a lot of cash, and divest himself of the responsibility for the Empire (and, if we are to believe him, settle down to make small, experimental movies, as well as to engage in philanthropic enterprises).

This deal also seems to me to have been in the works for some time now. As someone who has been on multiple trips to Disney’s Orlando parks in the past several years, the shifts in Disney’s Hollywood Studio (formerly Disney’s MGM Studio) has increasingly depended upon Lucas-driven products to fill its park. Facing increasing competition from Universal Studios Orlando (and its Islands of Adventure sub-park, which features Marvel characters – whose licensing will likely have to be renegotiated in the wake of Disney’s takeover of those properties), and having lost the right to use the MGM name, the Hollywood Studio seems to be in the most need of a clear identity within the stable of Disney parks.

My guess is that it has been increasingly obvious to the folks at Disney that Star Wars was the property that Disney had always hoped would fill the void here, especially given the complicated licensing of the Marvel characters, and they have already made inroads into producing a revenue stream via their re-vamped Star Tours ride (remade with Lucas’ personal touch) as well as their now-annual Star Wars Weekends.

Having accidentally attended this year’s incarnation of the Star Wars weekend, one can see the huge potential for both Lucasfilm’s and Disney’s bottom line. The already packed park was super-packed with patrons, all of whom were able to interact with incredibly authentic characters from the films as well as purchase products ranging from lightsabers to full-sized reproductions of themselves in carbonite.

To me, one of the more interesting things about the announcement was the way that fans and internet types went ahead and started mashing up the images from the two corporations. However, this seems to me to be a case of where Disney is actually well ahead of the game, having already married their characters and properties to the Star Wars merchandise, as seen in some of these various combinations.

More to the point, all of these wares are on sale in “Darth’s Mall” during the weekend and the sheer variety of products can be seen in this fan video:

While there have been various reactions throughout the twitter-sphere, for fans, this is definitely a win. There is already speculation as to what the content of the new films will be, and I think that most people will agree that getting Lucas away from the tight reins of control is probably beneficial to everyone – especially anyone looking forward to innovative new works in the ever-expanding Star Wars universe. No matter what ends up happening, we are clearly in for another wave of hype, which is perhaps the most valuable commodity that Disney bought in this transaction.