New “crossroads” in the media coverage of music hits: Maggie Rogers’s “Alaska”
Heuguet, Guillaume
New “crossroads” in the media coverage of music hits: Maggie Rogers’s “Alaska” - 2018.
90
Using Yves Jeanneret’s theory of trivialité and Catherine Saouter's filière sémiosique approach, this paper concerns the construction, the meanings and the success of a pop song through mediatization. The analyses focus on the part played by online media in this process. It follows how the song “Alaska” by Maggie Roggers lives online and turns into a “hit song” through several changes of formats: from a demo played in a masterclass at NYU university and published on YouTube, through its framing by musical criticism and its release as a music video. Should one consider YouTube as a “hit machine” changing the way songs become hits? What’s the role of the relationship between amateurs artists and professionals in this process? Could pop songs success relate to new criteria of “virality”? This article offers to change this questions by showing how publishing websites, forums, critics and the music industry shape forms of experience and organize interweaving and performative narratives of the genesis of success. The network of mediations of music is not disappearing with the internet, but rather getting longer and more complex.
New “crossroads” in the media coverage of music hits: Maggie Rogers’s “Alaska” - 2018.
90
Using Yves Jeanneret’s theory of trivialité and Catherine Saouter's filière sémiosique approach, this paper concerns the construction, the meanings and the success of a pop song through mediatization. The analyses focus on the part played by online media in this process. It follows how the song “Alaska” by Maggie Roggers lives online and turns into a “hit song” through several changes of formats: from a demo played in a masterclass at NYU university and published on YouTube, through its framing by musical criticism and its release as a music video. Should one consider YouTube as a “hit machine” changing the way songs become hits? What’s the role of the relationship between amateurs artists and professionals in this process? Could pop songs success relate to new criteria of “virality”? This article offers to change this questions by showing how publishing websites, forums, critics and the music industry shape forms of experience and organize interweaving and performative narratives of the genesis of success. The network of mediations of music is not disappearing with the internet, but rather getting longer and more complex.
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