Diane Railton and Paul Watson's- Genre and the music video.

Music video and the politics of representation- genre and the music video.

Diane and Paul said that the most important element of categorising genres is selecting common and similar properties, this way of categorising has a specific purpose and is always done for a reason. Genres are one of the main things that helps sell a product as it is about taste therefore if someone likes a certain genre that is the genre they will continue to buy and listen to and will look for more music which is in this category.

‘Genre, whatever else it might be, is first and foremost about categorisation, about sortingcultural products into discrete groupings based on similarities and common properties.Moreover, this act of categorisation is always purposeful. In other words, this process isdone for a specific reason, whether that reason is socio-economic, cultural or academic. Inthe first place, from an industrial standpoint, genre performs specific economic functionsin so far as it works to organise the financing, production and marketing of culturalproducts so as to ensure maximum return from investment. For consumers, genre is oneof the principal ways of choosing which products to buy in the first place and also perhapsthe key marker of taste – a means of expressing likes and dislikes and identifying andcommunicating with like-minded people. In academic discourse, the concept of genre ismulti-functional. For not only are the socio-economic and cultural aspects of genre afocus of analysis across a number of disciplines, but the notion of genre is also mobilised asa way of rationalising the study of popular culture; defining the parameters of a form; as amodel of textual explication; and as a way of theorising how those texts are understood inthe process of consuming them. Indeed, it is precisely this multifunctionality that leads tothe idea that genre is a kind of conceptual golden thread, seemingly capable of describingthe whole process of creating, selling and consuming cultural products as well as providinga critical framework through which both this process and individual texts can beinterpreted and explained. And it is precisely this standard view of genre that becomes de-stabilised when we consider music video, for its role as a secondary product’