paraphrase 5 pages memos

Week 7 Memo

In the article, “All Hits Are Flukes” by William Bielby and Denise Bielby, they showed

how entertainment in the culture industry are highly institutionalized, but end up becoming big

hits, which is the reason they call it “flukes”. Behind the scenes, they come up with strategies of

how they’re going to advertise cultural objects like television, music and etc. They have

acknowledged that these cultural products only happen in high profit making enterprises. The

Bielby’s have conducted research on three factors that they believed helped with these “flukes”.

The three factors that they think helped with these flukes are what makes the audience connect

with the creators or critics, how the new product cannot be as easily evaluated, and how the new

cultural can be commercially and critically separated. In their case study, the setting is highly

centralized, there’s no prediction on commercial and critical success, and the assessments are

separated. With their findings, they found that reputation, imitation, and genre help highly

institutionalized situations with their decision-making. Although this may be a reason behind

their flukes, they don’t believe that necessarily all highly institutionalized markets hit flukes.

There are possibilities of things failing and not becoming a big hit, but industries that hit flukes

like to reassure others that they succeed by thinking rationally.

In the article, “Guys in Suits with Charts: Audience Research in U.S. Public Radio” by

Alan Stavitsky, he describes how U.S. public radio changed throughout the years ever since they

relied on audience research to figure out what type of broadcasting attracts the most listeners.

Although it helped public radio managers make decisions about programming and fundraising,

some people believed that audience research changed the whole conception of what public radio

was originally about. Before audience research, public radio served a purpose to educate, but

eventually converted over to what attracts the most audience. Critics saw the radio station people

as “guys in suits with charts and pages of numbers” whom only targeted an audience that would

help them financially, but failed to see the underlying reason of public radio, which was to help

people intellectually and with their moral values.

As audience research became more popular, NPR started to look for demographics and

psychographics of their listeners to see which audience they were attracting. It helped NPR

figure out a game plan of what they should do, but there was always a controversy between what

their audience should listen to and what their audience wants to listen to. Before, what the

audience wanted wasn’t necessarily a huge concern for educational radio, the primary concern

was what was important like educating listeners and making sure that the broadcasting quality

was up to par. Now in today’s present day life, public radio only cares about what brings them

the most listeners and realized that the work that they share is a very important component for

gaining more listeners. Public radio knew that radio stations would not survive if they did not

accommodate to what the listeners wanted, so audience research helped a lot with what they

should be playing and what kinds of people were tuning into their station. As Stavitsky

emphasizes at the end of his article, he believes that audience research will continue to play a big

part in public radio because radio stations want what will bring them the most listeners, which

will bring them the most money and help them financially.

After reading both articles, I can see how it is interrelated because the entertainment

industry and the NPR both have strategies that will help them attract big audiences. It is always

hard to tell if something is going to be big or not, but being apart of the entertainment industry,

producers and radio management have to take chances. With taking chances, they know that they

have to make rational decisions that will benefit their future. Both sources of media are highly

institutionalized because there’s a structure of how the entertainment industry works and a

structure of how radio broadcasting works. In the entertainment industry, there are a lot of shows

that people can watch from news to comedy shows to romantic movies. When it comes to NPR,

nowadays people don’t turn on the radio to listen to news, they turn on the radio to listen to

music and with audience research it helped radio managers figure out songs they should play

more. The more they play the popular song, the more they get more audience and revenue to

support their station.

For example, since the song Havana by Camila Cabello is getting a lot of radio play that

must mean program directors at the music stations like it and see a lot of listeners tuning in when

they play it. Radio stations realize that this is currently the number one hit pop song that people

love and if they don’t play it in rotation, people are going to lose interest in their station and skip

to other stations to find this song. I find this particularly true because when I turn on the radio

and hear other songs aside from the top hits that I’ve been hearing, I usually change stations until

I hear something that I like. But, when I hear a song on the radio too much, it makes me tired of

it and makes me want to switch stations until I hear something else too. I think that is what

makes the radio industry tricky. They try to accommodate to what they think their listener’s

want, but don’t realize that it can be a little too much, but they don’t see it as too much because

the song is ranked number one on the charts, so they just assume that people will switch over to

their radio station if they play it.

I can see how the radio industry has changed from the past to today’s present day. Before

there was a purpose to educate the listeners, but as the years went on, radio stations became

money hungry and only cared about what brings in the most money. Of course they’re going to

play a hit song over something more “educational”. Listeners can see that when they flip through

radio stations and see the same songs playing. I think this is why certain genre radio stations help

with what people want to listen to. I know that if I listen to the popular radio stations in LA, I’m

going to hear the same stuff. Due to that, I switch over to an RnB station because I know they

aren’t going to play the top 40, but play throwback songs that I’ll enjoy actually more than

mainstream music.

When radio stations test the waters on a new song, they throw it into rotation to see how

many listeners tune in when they play it, and when they see that a lot of people tune in, that’s

when they rotate the song like crazy. Audience research helps and with the right precautions,

songs become flukes, but only certain songs. It is not likely that every song the radio station

plays is a fluke, but most of the time it becomes a hit record. Another artist I can think of is

Khalid and his hit song “Location”. When people started finding out about Khalid and his hit

song, radio stations knew that to attract his fan and maybe new listeners, they would have to spin

his song in rotation. I have seen this happen with new artists who become recently discovered.

Radio stations start playing their music and see the difference in audience.

Overall, after reading these two articles, I have realized that the entertainment and music

industry have to take a lot of initiative if they want to be successful. They want to make smart

moves and a lot of rational thinking is involved to help their business grow. As we see this

industry now, I wonder if it’ll be the same a decade from now.