Andrew Goodwin and his importance to Media studies and the music industry

20.10.2014: REFLECTION OF GOODWIN AND "DANCING IN THE DISTRACTION FACTORY"

Looking back at Andrew Goodwin and his theories after studying more about how important he is and how his theories intertwine with the ideas and initial thoughts of my own coursework I can see how I am going to use his theories in my own work.

Andrew Goodwin's 5 key aspects of music videos are as followed:

-thought beats - seeing the sound

-narrative and performance

-the star image

-relation of visuals to the song

-technical aspects of music video

Within my music video I really want to use though beats as they incorporate another level of sneaky-ness to the video. By that I mean that it makes the music video for the song more powerful and makes the video itself more of a story and enables it to keep up with the beat of the song and enables a sensible progression through the song and the video at the same time.

No song is ever fully explained by the artist either within the song itself or in an interview, the artist always keeps one aspect of the song secret, therefore the audience themselves have to decide what the entirety of the song actually means, however Goodwin says that music videos should ignore common narrative as their main role is advertisement for the artist. The narrative and performance work together to make it easier for the audience to watch without loosing interest. Goodwin also says if the artist acts as the narrator (performs the song) as well as participates within the video (acts in the narrative ) then it enables an increased authenticity of the actual 'singing' is real and not just miming to the audience, as this is a crucial part of how to judge if a music video is believable or not. 
Personally I think you can have a lot of fun with narrative and performance within the production of your own music video as personally viewing music videos I don't like being told how to feel about it and what it should mean as one word can have a thousand different meanings to a thousand different people, therefore within my own music video I would like to keep the acting very realistic yet play on the emotions on the song to enable a different interpretation to everyone who views the video.


Star image is a visual role of the artist themselves, this enables the development of their career to be documented over time and has been said to have an important part to play within the music video production process. For my own music video I want to use my main protagonist to play the part of the lead singer so it will link between the narrative of the story and the scenes of the band playing.


The relation of visuals to the song is also a part of Goodwin's theory I would like to use, however I would like to play around with this convention of music videos as I would like to illustrate the emotion and not the lyrics of the song within my video as I personally feel this will work more powerfully with the genre of music I have chosen to use.