Rhetoric Analysis of a Music News Website - Essay Example

s Rhetoric Analysis of a Music News Website The growing problem of online music piracy has many artists of the record industry concerned about their creative integrity and financial stability. Additionally, employees who work behind the scenes (i.e. songwriters, producers, musicians, sound engineers) share similar worries about their livelihood as a result of the detrimental financial effects of online music piracy. College students who download illegal mp3s without paying via peer-to-peer networks are the primary perpetrators; their illegal actions deprive the record industry's employees of their salaries. This issue is very important as we are all surrounded by it everyday and most important of all, it is in fact illegal. In order to understand why this target audience continues such criminal activity, their assumptions about the record industry must be examined. Music United is one website that analyzes and addresses these assumptions. A coalition group of many different organizations committed against online music piracy, Music United strives not only to disprove college students' assumptions about the record industry, but also to persuade college students to abide by the law when obtaining music. In order to accomplish these goals, the Music United site utilizes textual and technical features to establish a direct communication with its targeted audience of college students. These features are functions of appeals to guilt, fear, empathy, and the law that are embedded within the content and the purpose of the site. College students view the internet as a place of public freedom, where people can come and go, sharing their ideas, pictures, and pages along the way. A basic knowledge of web designing is all that is needed to post material on the internet for the world to see. Over time, users view the internet as a "marketplace" where everyone is entitled to every page, picture, and idea posted. College students adopt this kind of public-sharing sentiment when they download mp3s without paying. "If everything else on the internet is more or less shared for free, why not mp3s" they think. College students forget about the copyrights of each individual song they download. They believe mp3s are free for the taking in much the same way reading a newspaper article online is free (as opposed to paying $0.50 to read the same article on a hard copy). Music United disagrees with this "free for all" spirit of college students who participate in the sharing and downloading of illegal mp3 files. Not everything on the internet is for free, certainly not music. This is one of the college students' assumptions the site refutes. Music United accomplishes this goal through the use specially designed text-graphics, which appeal to guilt and fear. The home page provides an example of these text-graphics. Although they may look like regular text, these special headers and key quotations are actual graphics (clicking on them reveals they are gif files) that were most likely created in some photo editing program like Paint Shop Pro. The combination of red and white colors functions the same way a "stop" sign functions: it awakens the senses by signaling a warning. When college students see this graphic, the colors indicate that something of greater importance is being said here, as opposed to the regular black-colored text found throughout the site. The colors catch their eyes, compelling them to read the text. The font type is different and larger from the standard Verdana text found throughout the site, further emphasizing the importance of the message. The capitalization of the number ("2.6 million") and the crime ("illegally downloaded") not only stresses the importance of the text, but also accentuates the guilt the phrases elicit from its audience. When college students who engage in illegal mp3 trading read the text, they are struck with guilt. They immediately identify themselves as illegal downloader's who partake in the distribution of those 2.6 billion files each month. College students assume artists receive a substantial salary from their record contracts, advertisement deals, and concert tours. This is no doubt true. Certainly, popular culture and the media idolize these acts for their expensive taste in clothes, cars, and houses. Seeing these luxuries flaunted on television and in magazines, college students begin to characterize music artists as overpaid individuals living the exorbitant life. This reasoning leads college students to believe that they are causing no harm when downloading several songs of these artists. "What difference will my downloading make to the multi-million dollar contract that the artist has already received" asks the college student who is about to download without paying. "Furthermore, it's only me. It's not like everyone is downloading. Those older folks will continue to go to the store and buy the CDs. So what's the big deal They're still going to make their money." Music United refutes this assumption primarily through its use of pictures, which appeal to empathy and the law. Analyzing who the people are and what they are doing in the pictures is fundamental to disproving this assumption. There are several different groups of people worth noting in these pictures. One of the groups is the employees in the record industry. These are the people who are not readily seen on television; they are the producers, the songwriters, the musicians, the sound engineers who all work to create, produce, and perfect the music that is heard on the radio and sold in stores. The internet has drastically changed the field of rhetoric. Websites now allow corporations, special interest groups, and individuals to simultaneously appeal to variations of ethos, pathos, and logos with equal fervor. The Music United website is a good example of a site appeals to such contradictory emotions like guilt and empathy at the same time. The site's variety of textual and technical features allows these two appeals to coexist. Although it is not impossible for a speechmaker to achieve such a variation in rhetorical appeal, it would still be a very hard goal to accomplish without appearing contradictory or unfocused. Websites resemble a group of speechmakers within which each adopts a slightly different rhetoric appeal, but all simultaneously persuade the audience. For audiences, websites are an onslaught of variations in rhetorical appeals. REFERENCES Breen, M. P. (1976). Rhetorical Criticism and Media: The State of the Art. Central States Speech Journal, 27, 15-21. Music United. www.MusicUnited.org, 5 Apr. 2006. Olson, D. R. (1988), Mind and Media: The Epistemological Function of Literacy. Journal of Communication, 38(3), 27-36. Ward, I. (1997). How Democratic Can We Get The Internet, the Public Sphere and Public Discourse. JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, 17, 365-380. Read More