Media Studies Colloquium

The Texas Entertainment and Media Industries Symposium will showcase the breadth of film, TV, music, gaming, and digital media opportunities available in Texas. This all-day event will take place on Friday, September 20, at the Moody College of Communication on the UT Austin campus. We welcome students, industry leaders, and members of the Texas film community to celebrate and investigate the media ecosystem of the Lone Star State.

Professor, Queensland University of Technology

"Screen Stories and Media Microcultures: Navigating Industrial and Critical Challenges"

Amanda’s talk draws from her forthcoming book After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-first Century (NYU Press, April 2025) that explores how the dominant and “normal” operation of commercial screen storytelling becomes a business of attracting microaudiences, what that means for the stories that can be told, and the implications for the cultural roles of screen storytelling. The project connects two decades of research about television industry change to shifts and expansion in the universe of commercially viable stories. The project aims to trouble conventional understandings tied to norms now past and pave a way to investigating and theorizing the cultural roles of screen stories beyond those of mass consumption.

Bio:
Amanda D. Lotz is a Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre and School of Communication at Queensland University of Technology, where she leads the Transforming Media Industries and Cultures research program. She is the author, coauthor, or editor of fourteen books that explore television and media industries – which includes the forthcoming Media Industries in the Digital Age with Timothy Havens (Nov 2024) and After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-first Century (April 2025).

Her most recent books explore the connections between internet-distributed services such as Netflix and the legacy television industry, as well as the business strategies and revenue models that differ. Her books have been translated into Mandarin, Korean, Russian, Italian, and Polish. She is frequently interviewed by press around the globe and has consulted for a range of government and industry clients for more than a decade. She is a Fellow of the International Communication Association.

Assistant Professor, University of Alabama

Can’t Get Enough of Myself: The Feminization of Collaborative Music Merchandise

Despite the hypervisibility of a constellation of female pop stars, the music business is structured around gender inequality. As a result, women in the music industry often seize on self-branding opportunities in fashion, cosmetics, food, and technology for the purposes of professional longevity. Extending Play examines the ubiquity of brand partnerships in the contemporary music industry through the lens of feminized labor, to demonstrate how female artists use them as a resource for artistic expression and to articulate forms of popular feminism through self-commodification. In this book, author Alyxandra Vesey examines this type of promotional work and examines its proliferation in the early 21st century.

Though brand partnerships exist across all media industries, they are a distinct phenomenon for the music business because of their associations with fan club merchandise, concert merchandise, and lifestyle branding, often foregrounding women’s participation in shaping these economies through fan labor and image management. Through textual and discourse analysis of artists’ songs, music videos, interviews, social media usage, promotional campaigns, marketing strategies, and business decisions, Extending Play investigates how female musicians co-create branded feminine-coded products like perfume, clothes, makeup, and cookbooks and masculine-coded products like music equipment as resources to work through their own ideas about gender and femininity as workers in industries that often use sexism and ageism to diminish women’s creative authority and diminish the value of the recording in order to incentivize musicians to internalize the demands of industrial convergence.

By merging star studies, popular music studies, and media industry studies, this book proposes an integrated methodology for approaching contemporary cultural history that demonstrates how female-identified musicians have operated as both a hub for industrial convergence and as music industry professionals who use their extramusical skills to reassert their creative acumen.

Bio:
Alyxandra Vesey is an associate professor in Journalism and Creative Media at the
University of Alabama. Her research focuses on the gendered dynamics of creative labor in the music industries. She is the author of Extending Play: The Feminization of Collaborative Music Merchandise in the Early Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, 2023). Her work has also appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Television and New Media, Camera Obscura, Velvet Light Trap, and Journal of Popular Music Studies.

Senior Acquisitions Editor, University of Texas Press
Note the location: CMA 5.136 LBJ Conference Room
"The Ins & Outs of Academic Publishing"

Jim Burr is a Senior Acquisitions Editor at the University of Texas Press, who acquires books in Film and Media Studies, Classics, and Middle Eastern Studies. He did his undergraduate work at Michigan State University and graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin in Classics. He’s been at the Press since 1996.

PhD Candidate Practice Job Talk
"'Drowning in a Sea of Red Ink': Historicizing the Cultures of Finance in U.S. Television"

In film and television scholarship, financing is often a footnote or merely political economic “background” for other analyses, if it is mentioned at all. Meanwhile, in social scientific research, media financing is a value-neutral practice, free of power and ideology. However, what if we understood media funding practices as inherently symbolic—infused with power, ideology, and discourse? How might this shape our assumptions about the type of texts produced and the types of institutions allowed to produce commercial media?

Integrating archival research, interviews, fieldwork, and discourse analysis, Drowning in a Sea of Red Ink traces the material, discursive, and structural development of television financing in the United States from the early network era to the streaming era. This project finds that industry professionals and trade press coverage often presented the dominant network-era financing practice in television—known as “deficit financing”—as high-risk and burdensome for producers, who often had to assume high upfront debts in the hopes that one day their show would become a big hit and future sales would erase their accumulated debts. However, new archival findings and primary source data prove that this practice was easily mitigated by large conglomerated Hollywood studios, even while it was detrimental to small independent producers, which have never found a meaningful footing in US television. In other words, deficit financing became a “performative” strategy for studios: offering a valuable way to self-mythologize and self-rationalize, particularly during moments of economic and technological change.

Pete’s presentation will focus on the new financial discourses and practices that have emerged in the streaming era. It will offer a case study on the production company Duplass Brothers Productions and consider how its “new” approach to television financing replicates many of the earlier characteristics of the network-era deficit financing model. Altogether, these findings disrupt our traditional understanding of television’s dominant financial model and challenge the ways in which we study risk in cultural production.

Bio:
Pete Johnson is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in Media Studies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film. He received his BS in Business Administration and MFA in Film and Television Studies from Boston University. Prior to graduate school, Pete worked in various areas of film and television development, financing, and sales.

PhD Candidate Practice Job Talk
"IRL+URL: Digital Ecologies of the Global Dance Music Industry"

IRL+URL examines the platformization of live music from 2011-2021 to interrogate the relationship between local music economies and global platform services. From The Cloud to the streets, this dissertation explores how the proliferation of digital tools and platform services inform the practices of local music intermediaries (DJs, promoters, and venue owners) in Austin, TX’s underground dance music scene. Over the time period this dissertation covers, live music gains significance as music streaming destabilizes profit margins for industry gatekeepers and opens up the digital music marketplace to a range of big tech and start-up competitors. Using frameworks from media industry studies and digital media theories, this project makes two primary interventions. IRL+URL nuances the assertion that new media platforms and technologies- data analytics, live streaming, and AI-powered production software- disrupt industry gatekeepers and diversify alternative media production. Secondly, this project demonstrates how live music’s platformization creates complex digital ecologies where global economies of scale materially manifest through the people, places, and practices of local media infrastructures.

Paxton’s presentation will focus on the second chapter of IRL+URL which compares the data-sharing partnerships and discovery algorithms of three ticketing services (Resident Advisor, Posh, and Dice) to reveal a spectrum of ticketing platformization in Austin. For well-financed, industry-backed venues with the resources to master these emergent tools, socially networked event management platforms offer avenues of profit maximization. Yet, for independent promoters and DIY venues, these pay-for-play affordances gradually skim off the top of precarious creative businesses and threaten algorithmic invisibility for those unwilling to play by the platforms’ rules.

Bio:
Paxton Haven is doctoral candidate in the Radio-Television-Film Department at The University of Texas at Austin with an MA in Media Studies from UT Austin and a BA in Political Science from The George Washington University. His work can be found in New Media & Society and Sartorial Fandom: Fashion, Beauty, and Culture.