Genre

A genre is a specific type of music, film, or writing. Your favorite literary genre might be science fiction, and your favorite film genre might be horror. In music, genre refers to musical style such as jazz, salsa or rock. Genres in music videos are ways that the audience can identify what genre of music they are listening to, from the signs and mise-en-scene used in the video.

Steve Neale stresses that genres are not systems, but processes of systemisation, because they evolve over time. He says that films reflect the ideology of the time it was made, and audience responses change. For example, an audience will react differently to Beyonce's Partition video nowadays than if they were to watch it 20 years ago, due to the 'do's and dont's' of the pop genre evolving over time. David Buckingham argues that genre isn't just given by culture but rather it is a constant process of negotiation and change.

Jason Mittell argues that genres are cultural categories that surpass the boundaries of media texts and operate within industry, audience and cultural practices as well. Genre also allows audiences to make choices about what products they want to consume through acceptance in order to fulfil a particular pleasure. If an individual wants to hear rock music, they will consume music accordingly and seek out music within that genre.

Rick Altman proposed the semantic/syntactic approach. He said that we need to consider genre in two ways. The first is semantic; this is concerned with the conventions of the genre that communicates with the audience, such as characters, locations, props etc. for example, in a horror we would expect to see blood, gore, darkness and scary people/masks. The second is syntactic, which is concerned with the relations between these elements and the structure of the narratives in a genre. For example, in a romantic comedy we expect it to start with the potential lovers not liking each other. In an indie rock music video, we expect to see long haired men and guitars.

Nicholas Abercrombie recognised that there was such thing as 'hybrid genres', which are text that combines the conventions of existing genres to create a new one. For example comedy and horror are often combined as a hybrid genre, for example in Shaun of the Dean and Jennifer's Body.