Entertainment Industries is the first book to map entertainment as a cultural system. Including work from world-renowned analysts such as Henry Jenkins and Jonathan Gray, this innovative collection explains what entertainment is and how it works.
Entertainment is audience-centred culture. The Entertainment Industries are a uniquely interdisciplinary collection of evolving businesses that openly monitor evolving cultural trends and work within them. The producers of entertainment – central to that practice– are the new artists. They understand audiences and combine creative, business and legal skills in order to produce cultural products that cater to them.
Entertainment Industries describes the characteristics of entertainment, the systems that produce it, and the role of producers and audiences in its development, as well as explaining the importance of this area of study, and how it might be better integrated into Universities.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.
Introduction: Entertainment and Media/Cultural/Communication/Etc Studies Part I: What is Entertainment? Chapter 1. The aesthetic system of entertainment: pornography as case study Chapter 2. Crime as entertainment Chapter 3. Toying with culture: the rise of the action figure and the changing face of 'children's' entertainment Chapter 4. Towards an understanding of Australian genre cinema and entertainment: beyond the limitations of ‘Ozploitation’ discourse Part II: The Institutions of Entertainment Chapter 5. The borders that law sets on entertainment Chapter 6. Music supervisors in the Australian entertainment film industry Chapter 7. Explaining Pathe’s global dominance in the pre-Hollywood film industry Part III: Entertainment and Its Audiences Chapter 8. The "good" fans and "bad" consumers of football Chapter 9. Loyalty and the ritualistic consumption of entertainment Part IV: Entertainment Education Chapter 10. Teaching entertainment at Universities Chapter 11. Top Gear, Top Journalism: Three lessons for political journalists from the world’s most popular TV show Chapter 12. Transmedia storytelling and entertainment: an annotated syllabus