Page 110 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 97

that are presented in a temporal sequence, defined not least through the specific prac-
tices of marketing and consumption found in a shopping centre.
In Solna Centre as in most other similar places, videos/DVDs as well as records are
sold in retail shops that offer few other commodities, except for complementary
goods such as fizzy drinks, sweets and snacks to be consumed while watching or
listening to a record, tape or disk. Conversely, these audio-visual software media for
music and films can themselves turn into supplementary goods in other retail shops.
Sports and grocery shops may for instance sell the most popular DVDs and chart
music in addition to their main commodities. Bookshops often offer a small range of
classical music and jazz to strengthen their image of ‘high culture’, though on closer
inspection this reveals itself as a ‘light’, middlebrow version of the fine arts, since
most of their records are from the low-price series of record companies such as Naxos,
EMI and Decca.
The sales of music and films in Solna Centre adhere to the traditional borders
between high and low culture. It is the library that has the most extensive and diver-
sified supply of so-called quality films and serious music, while the shops are domi-
nated by the more popular genres. This reproduces a basic structural opposition
between low culture as being commercial (for sale) and high culture as non-commer-
cial (not for sale). It is true that the demarcation line does not solely depend on this
criterion, or is ever perfectly clear, since it often interplays with other oppositions that
tend to blur and disguise its effects. One such opposition is confirmed by the head
librarian: the opposition between giving people what they want and what they ought
to like, which has accompanied any cultural policy built on classical Bildung-efforts
during the last two centuries. The mixture of high (that which passes ‘qualitative
judgement’, in the words of the librarian) and low culture (‘pulp fiction’) in the
library is a concession to a recent more service-minded and liberal cultural policy.
‘Mainstream’ seems to be the most fitting genre and taste category for what is avail-
able in Solna Centre’s two main shops for records, videos and DVDs: Mix Records
2
and Video 48 Hours. Both of them offer high cultural as well as subcultural items,
including ‘quality films’, classical music and rather obscure film and music genres,
which nevertheless seem to confirm that middlebrow is the high standard of taste and
mainstream the dominant taste category in this shopping centre. The most conspic-
uous feature of both shops is the Top Charts, comprising the hundred most rented
videos and DVDs in Video 48 Hours and the twenty most sold records in Mix
Records.
This is, however, just part of the music and film consumption found in the centre.
The soundscape, a pleasant atmosphere for shopping, is created with the help of
recorded and/or broadcast background or foreground music. Audio-visuals are also
used in marketing, ads and sales promotion, not least in event marketing where live
music is often included. The promotional circuits of audio-visual media do not end
at the centre’s physical borders, since visitors to its website are given the opportunity
to play interactive computer games. Such computer games also testify to the arbitrary
character of any definition of media circuits today. It seems as reasonable to include

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