2. Who controls regulations?
• There is an organisation known as the BBFC
that controls regulations for music videos, this
can be anything from religion, sport, music etc
which they don’t tend to add age restricting
rules unless it contains adult-content.
3. Examples of their work
• Recently, there was a consultation launched
by the government to restrict the
sexualisation of children in music videos. The
outcome as that the VRA (video recordings
act) should be amended to restrict the
likelihood of this sort of content surfacing
through media.
4. Online content
• However, online content can be freely
published and anyone can produce explicit
content, so this is a clear issue to the BBFC as
it’s hard to stop people from doing this. To
combat this, they have been asking members
of the online community to report any content
this is considered against a lawful nature.
5. Case study - Blurred Lines
• Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke shows the effect
that BBFC can have on regulations. The original
video featured women with their breasts exposed
dancing around a studio with the artists. This was
highly inappropriate as it shows naked women
and there is no way it could be presented on TV
or online due to its adult content, therefore
BBFC’s regulations has led to a ‘clean’ version of
the music video to be released where the women
were less exposed and cut the extent of adult
content in the music video.
6. Case study - Rihanna
• Rihanna’s S&M is a good example of how
BBFC’s regulations can effect music videos.
Rihanna’s video was eventually banned in 11
countries and age-restricted on YouTube. MTV
also had to re-edit the video for daytime play
to cut out the explicit, adult content.
7. Why is it important to regulate?
• I believe that it is important to regulate video
because of the hypodermic needle theory. This
suggest that the audiences are passive and will
accept the messages shown to them through
media and it is simply injected into them like a
needle would. I think that it is important to
regulate because if audiences are passive and just
accept the meanings, then young children could
simply just accept poor morals and make it
become a norm in society to have such poor
morals displayed by artists such as Robin Thicke
and Rihanna.
