Gatekeepers

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to release the record and whether to allocate a promotion budget for it. For artists this means that they can never be sure whether their work will actually end up in the shop shelves and, if it does, whether it will be marketed. (ibid.)

Differential marketing that already emerged in the discussion of hits and misses is the second main gate that a creative work needs to pass. Hesmondhalgh (2002, p. 72) states that marketing can ensure widespread dissemination of creative work, but such work can also sink without a trace if managers prioritise other projects. According to Lampel and Shamsie (2000, p. 238) the decisions on which goods to promote heavily are based on which goods show sufficient sales momentum.

The problem with this is that such sales momentum is unlikely to occur without investments in promotion (ibid.). A further problem with marketing investment is that it increases the break-even point. The more is spent on marketing, the more sales are required to recoup the investments.

Despite this conundrum marketing is seen as a necessity within the cultural and creative industries as the time period over which sales can be expected is relatively short and producers cannot wait for sales to gradually pick up. (Lampel and Shamsie 2000, p. 234)

Media coverage can be seen as a part of marketing, but it forms a separate gate, especially for music. This is because the effect of radio and music channels in persuading people to buy music recordings is considerable (Denisoff 1986; Lopes 1992). Media coverage also includes news stories, talk show appearances, reviews, critiques and so on (Hirsch 1972a, pp. 642-643). Much research interest has been targeted at the role of radio as the gatekeeper for music recording and the payola practices associated with it (e.g. Denisoff 1975; Burnett 1996; Mol and Wijnberg 2007). The output of the music recording industry is the input of the radio broadcasting industry and thus radio stations have been the most important gatekeepers for music (Burnett 1996, p. 81). The logic of payola is that to get the consumers into the shops, the record has to be played on radio first. This has made record company managers eager to pay radio DJs to get airtime for their products. This led to the payola scandal in the late 1950s, after which the radio stations were banned by law in the USA from playing records in exchange for money (Denisoff 1975). Whether this practice has since ceased is debatable. Mol and Wijnberg (2007) state that payola is an important component of competition and payola practices affect the behaviour of both the selectors and the selected.

In addition to the radio DJs, Denisoff (1975) refers to retailers and rack jobbers as gatekeepers in the music business. They decide which products get into the shop and how they are placed. More recently, in a study on the difficulties of Swedish music breaking into the United States, Power and Hallencreutz (2007) found that the main entry barriers are the need for promotion through radio, the distribution channels and retail outlets being dominated by a set of oligopolistic firms and the strategy of record companies of concentrating on a few superstars and big hits.

The final gate to the consumer is critical reviews on the product. The main concerns with critiques are how much of an effect they actually have on sales and whether the critics are biased. According to Denisoff (1975) reviews in music magazines do not carry much weight, whereas media coverage and critical acclaim were found to be key determinants of demand in theatre (Dempster 2006).

Concerning critical reviews, Lampel and Shamsie (2000) argue that the magnitude of the influence

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of film critics is proportional to the information asymmetry confronting consumers prior to purchase. Films in general are hard to evaluate prior to their consumption. If the film has weak signalling properties (small budget and no stars, exotic locations or special effects) it is accorded limited distribution and marketing in the hopes that critical acclaim can be leveraged to improve sales. Films with strong signalling properties are distributed and promoted widely and the film company does not need to worry about the critics. Similar conclusions have been reached by Gemser et al. (2007), who found that film reviews affect art-house movie going, but only predict mainstream movie going. Criticism can also exert influence by classifying the film, regardless of the actual review being positive or negative. Zuckerman and Kim‘s (2003) study on the film market shows that the classification of a film as independent damages its box office revenues considerably.

The small number of opening screens and critical reviews defining the film as an independent lower its sales. However, a large number of reviews can help a limited release film to reach the audience.

The analysis shows that critics validate a film‘s identity as either major or independent. Being reviewed by critics that specialise in major releases increases the film‘s power to attract audience.

Whether reviews are biased or not is hard to determine as the merits of the good cannot be objectively measured. For example, Ginsburgh and Weyers (1999) found that film awards, such as those from The Cannes Film Festival and the US Academy, do not correlate with film reviews, box office or the frequency with which a film is shown on TV. Even though critics have limited influence on sales, their ethics are often questioned. According to Denisoff (1975) reviewers are corrupted by record company freebies. Hsu (2006a) found that film critics allocate disproportionately greater critical attention to arenas they are familiar with and have experience in.

This makes film critics partial to certain film categories. Ravid et al. (2006) found that film reviews by a number of critics are significantly affected by the distributor‘s identity. They also found that audiences do not seem to mind such bias as they appear to listen to the biased critics more, and more reputable critics may be more biased. Bias, however, is not solely a moral flaw of the critics;

firms within the cultural and creative industries also target considerable marketing efforts towards the critics and anticipate critical response in their production decisions (Hirsch 1972a, p. 655;

Lampel and Shamsie 2000).

Cultural and creative industries tend to be vertically disintegrated. This gives rise to the plurality of gatekeepers. Each gatekeeper enforces its own performance criteria on the goods and either selects or rejects them. As the performance criteria for cultural goods is fuzzy independent of market age, the plurality of gatekeepers and thus of performance criteria further complicates the process through which some goods reach the consumer market successfully and others remain at the fringes. To what extent the criteria applied by different actors overlap is an interesting question. Perfect overlap makes the gatekeepers obsolete, whereas extremely poor overlap makes the process impossible to pass through. In any case the fuzziness of the performance criteria and several actors imposing their own criteria makes the selection process complex. This complicates the emergence of dominant technologies or characteristics.

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