POP MUSIC INTERTWINED WITH POP CULTURE

If you asked anyone if they consume media in their everyday life,

The answer would be YES! 

It is 2022. Consuming media has been progressively developed due to the insane amount of content being uploaded to the internet, literally every person can access and be exposed to certain elements of media throughout the globe. 

The biggest influence I have on consuming media daily is unquestionably through popular culture. ‘Pop culture’ is the term to describe a public movement to share and access media that is shared through different approaches, such as television shows, technology, magazines, and so on. Personally, my biggest pop culture consumption is through music. 

Music has always been my go to, whether that be to calm down my mood or even boost up my energy, I always need music wherever I go generally for comforting reasons.  Because think about this, have you ever listened to a song and it feels like the lyrics or even the artist just gets you? Because same… 

Music media has grown drastically due to the involvement of cultures established and influenced from all over the world. Music is significant as it is a choice of connecting and expressing ourselves, predominantly pressured through cultural proximity and we don’t even realise….

‘Cultural proximity is the intuitively appealing notion that people will gravitate toward media from their own culture.. it has emerged as an important theoretical construct for explaining audience behaviour” (Kziazek and Webster, 2008, 485). As being a true Australian, I do generally listen to Triple J or 96.1FM on the radio. The reason for being a fan of this music and not really crossing over to the typical rap or now the popular ‘drill’ music, is because these songs are relatable to a true raw Australian experience. 

Highlighting major global diversity is an example of Bad Bunny ‘MIA’ featuring Drake.

This song being completely created in the Spanish language is because artist Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known professionally as Bad Bunny, is an artist that became the first non-English language producer to be Spotify’s most streamed of the year.

Drake had to learn Spanish to be kept as a feature on the song and as being one of the biggest millionaires to walk the planet, he is the only reason that this song hit the charts. 

Studies have shown that when listening to to specific music out of one’s pleasure, the audience tends to in their own language. Cultural proximity is the concept that people gravitate towards media from their own culture. These days, diverse populations have access to increasingly growing media environments. It is known that people in society these days have a very short attention span, so learning a different language for a song is not familiar. 

Music is the popular culture that we are all known for in this generation. For the sake of cultural proximity and true audience behaviour, we all usually all tend to only listen to music that surrounds our own culture and/ or experiences. 

However, this wont stop us pumping the tunes that are replaying on our everyday radio stations!

References:

Ksiazek, T. and Webster, J., 2008. Cultural Proximity and Audience Behavior: The Role of Language in Patterns of Polarization and Multicultural Fluency. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 52(3), pp.485-503.