This chapter starts with a seemingly basic definitional question: what is entertainment? There is no doubt that something called entertainment exists: there are sections of newspapers dedicated to it, television shows about it, and professional associations for it. Entertainment is not an obscure term for a niche genre. It is a multi-billion dollar global industry with whose products a significant portion of the world’s population engages deeply and regularly. As such, it requires substantial analysis, investigation, and explanation. This analysis is the task of the Palgrave Entertainment Industries series, of which this book and this chapter are a part. Despite the size and cultural penetration of entertainment, to date, the depth and volume of academic investigations of entertainment remain surprisingly insubstantial: ‘there is simply no positive correlation between the amount of entertainment that is consumed and the amount of scholarly research in the field of entertainment’ (Bosshart and Macconi 1998: 3). Academic analyses of entertainment exist, but they are scattered among disciplines, lumped into the much broader categories of ‘media studies’ or ‘popular culture’, or focussed on a single subsector such as television or music. This chapter contributes to a better understanding of entertainment as a complex cultural system. As with Bates and Ferri’s work, this chapter is grounded on the premise that ‘the development of a more objective definition can help unify and advance the field of entertainment studies’ (2010: 2). This effort involves investigating how entertainment works as an industry, how its products circulate, and how it is understood.

Academic and Policy Definitions

A first, obvious task in this project is simply defining the term under investigation: entertainment. However, what initially seems like a simple definitional task, as it turns out, is a complicated one: entertainment seems to mean different things to different key groups. Some circulating understandings of the term include high art while others do not; some understandings include leisure activities such as dance classes while others do not.

Bates and Ferri’s (2010) article, ‘What’s Entertainment’ provides a useful starting point for working towards a clear definition of entertainment. They differentiate entertainment from two related academic and cultural fields: leisure and popular culture. Leisure may include consuming entertainment, but leisure as a government industry classification and as an academic field of study comprises numerous activities that are not commonly understood as entertainment. Leisure, for example, includes playing sports or an instrument, gardening, and gambling. While acknowledging that many forms of entertainment entail some level of physically active audience engagement (such as attending a music festival, or playing a computer game), Bates and Ferri propose that entertainment differs from leisure in that it is ‘an experience of spectatorship more than [physical] participation’ (2010: 15). A major league baseball game, they note, is entertainment, but playing a baseball game, or partaking in baseball fan rituals such as attending a baseball game and singing the team song or wearing a team cap, is leisure (2010: 15). They similarly differentiate entertainment from the much broader field of popular culture, which, in its academic form, encompasses all elements of mainstream culture, including cooking, religion, architecture, and automobile culture, to name a few of the areas included on the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association’s website (PCA/ACA n.d.). Having narrowed the definitional field by differentiating entertainment from the broader categories of leisure and popular culture, Bates and Ferri propose a definition of entertainment: they state that entertainment ‘involves some sort of communication between an audience and a text, defined broadly’ (2010: 11); that a ‘principal goal of entertainment is to provide pleasure’ (2010: 13); and that entertainment cannot be defined on the basis of its content (11). Bates and Ferri also argue that entertainment is not necessarily profitable to its producers (2010: 12), and that elite forms of high art qualify as entertainment because ‘they provide communication-pleasure to some members of the audience’ (2010: 12).

Entertainment economist Harold Vogel (1998) provides a less culturally oriented definition of entertainment than do Bates and Ferri. Bates and Ferri’s definition focusses on a specific relationship between audiences and texts. Vogel, on the other hand, takes an industry approach to his definition, stating that ‘entertainment [a subset of recreation] is that which produces a pleasurable and satisfying experience’ (4), and which can be identified through ‘enterprises or organisations of significant size that have similar technological structures or production and that produce or supply goods, services, or sources of income that are substitutable’ (Vogel 1998: xviii). Vogel’s definition takes almost no account of entertainment content or of audience, but rather uses an objective set of criteria: an entertainment organisation is different from a candy company, for example, because entertainment industry organisations are structured and operate in specific ways. Economists Andersson and Andersson (2006) similarly use the entertainment’s specific business models as the term’s defining feature.

A third cluster of academic definitions of entertainment derives from the field of psychology. Psychological definitions focus on the effect that entertainment has on people, positioning entertainment as a specific type of effect-generator. These definitions state that entertainment is that which either evokes specific types of emotional response from audiences (Zillman and Bryant 1994), or that address specific audience needs (Bosshart and Macconi 1998) such as the need for distraction from everyday concern. As a non-psychologist, I will not expend significant time here on further discussion of psychological definitions of entertainment; the key point to note is that numerous definitions circulate within academia, and the concept remains fragmented among very different disciplines and approaches.

These definitions are useful, but are only partial. This is because all of these definitions derive from a single type of source: academics. Academics’ definitions are certainly evidence-based and rigorous, but academics are only one of the broader group of people who use and understand the term ‘entertainment’. I have attended elsewhere to the understanding of ‘entertainment’ by other key stakeholders in the cultural system of entertainment: government policymakers, trade publications, and mainstream media (McKee et al. 2012, 2014). As those publications discuss, government policy has an ambivalent stance in relation to a possible difference between ‘entertainment’ and ‘art’. For example, the Australia Council for the Arts’s 2015 report, ‘Arts Nation: an overview of Australian art’ aims to demonstrate the widespread nature of arts uptake by Australians; rock music festivals, musicals, and popular novels are included in the definition of ‘art’. However, when it comes to government funding for the arts, none of these entertainment subcategories tends to attract funding. The lack of clarity around the definition of entertainment in government cultural policy is cause for concern: ‘there must be a strong theoretical basis for any definition used for public policy purposes, not least because this has important consequences for how we measure these industries, and the type of interventions we adopt’ (Galloway and Dunlop 2007: 17). Cultural policy analysis is not the focus of this chapter; the purposes of mentioning it here is to demonstrate the definitional ambiguity surrounding the term ‘entertainment’ as it is used by some of its key stakeholders.

Industry Definitions

This chapter attends to a final major stakeholder group in defining and understanding entertainment: entertainment industry professionals. As with the definitions discussed above, entertainment industry professionals’ definitions of entertainment have no more validity than academics’ or trade publications’; they represent another one of the key strands for understanding the field. To be clear: this chapter is not an attempt to advance one group’s definition over another’s. Analysing entertainment industry professionals’ understandings of the term ‘entertainment’ means adding another key group’s usage to the definitional field. In an academic publication such as this book, it also means adding the voices of a group that is muted in academic analysis: while there exist numerous academic studies of media workers’ and journalists’ professional self-definitions and industry understandings (see, for example, Von Rimscha and Siegert 2011; Curtin and Sanson 2016), there are fewer which attend to those who identify as entertainment industry professionals. As von Rimscha and Siegert note in their study of TV producers and commissioners, ‘little work has been done investigating the actual producers and commissioners of entertainment content’ (2011: 1011). In the case of this chapter, it is not the work practices or professional identity of industry professionals that is being studied; it is their usage and their understandings of the term ‘entertainment’.

Data for this investigation was gained through long-term participant observation of entertainment industry professionals. In 2010, with Professor Alan McKee, I started meeting with entertainment industry professionals as the basis for designing a new bachelor’s degree – in Entertainment Industries – at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. The idea behind the degree was to address a gap in the tertiary market by educating students to work as producers in the entertainment industries. Rather than following the conventional university approach of educating students for careers in a specific subsector – such as film and TV, music, or theatre, for example – the degree would address the entertainment industries as a whole. Similarly, rather than educating students for careers either as technicians (e.g. cinematographers) or ‘primary producers’ (e.g. actors, composers, directors, screenwriters), the degree would educate students to work in industry leadership roles in the positions which combine business, legal, and creative capabilities. In other words, as producers. In order to ensure that the proposed degree addressed industry needs and aligned with industry knowledges and practices, I spent several years working with entertainment industry producers: obtaining direct data from them about job descriptions and predicted growth areas, but also listening closely to their self and industry definitions so as to gain an understanding of their definitions. I wanted to avoid the fate of graduates encountering definitional dissonance between their university understanding of ‘entertainment producers’ and industry definitions of the same terms when they left university and entered the industry (Collis et al. 2012). Subjecting entertainment industry professionals to direct definitional interview questions often proved less than productive; asking ‘what is entertainment’, in a formal setting elicited as diverse and as vague responses as would have been gained by asking individual academics ‘what is education?’. Thus, I opted for participant observation, and listened and watched. This chapter reports on the results of this now longstanding work with a sample of approximately 30 Australian entertainment industry producers. Producers studied here are drawn from subsectors including cruise ship entertainment, musical theatre, major music festivals, commercial radio, popular music, film and television, theme park entertainment, and live performance.

Entertainment as Audience-Centred Culture

One of the primary industry-based definitions of entertainment is that entertainment is audience-centred. That is, entertainment has a specific type of orientation towards audiences: it tends to identify audience tastes, values, and desires, and then to design products which will cater to them. Entertainment gives audiences what they want and what they like. In general, it aims to address the tastes and desires of large audiences. Entertainment industry professionals invest considerable energy and resources in gauging and understanding audiences. They talk regularly and comfortably about ‘markets’ and ‘segments’, as well as about prevailing taste and product trends. Larger organisations subcontract market research firms to conduct audience research; this research is used not only to steer marketing but also to shape the entertainment products themselves. With this orientation, entertainment is no different from any commercial enterprise such as retail or hospitality. This seemingly simple point is an important one: entertainment professionals, and the field of entertainment, have a commercial orientation. This point is taken up in more detail in the following section, but in terms of defining entertainment, it provides an important cornerstone: entertainment is audience-centred.

The audience-centred-ness of entertainment helps to differentiate it from organisations and products associated with the other end of the cultural spectrum: the arts. First, a major caveat: I know that there are no hard and fast ways to differentiate between art and entertainment, and I know that attempting to do so often generates strong feelings. These feelings are generally restricted to the academic sphere: in mainstream discourse, it is seemingly unproblematically understood that there are two different areas of culture: arts and entertainment. That there are sections of newspapers called ‘Arts and Entertainment’, for example, signals this mainstream understanding. One does not routinely hear ballerinas refer to themselves as entertainers, nor theme park entertainment directors refer to themselves as artists. That said, this chapter positions the arts and entertainment as constituents of a single domain called ‘culture’. This chapter understands that this domain is a spectrum, with most products and organisations existing somewhere between the two ends of the spectrum. Finally, this chapter attaches no value to either term: this is not a return to the tired ‘high versus low culture’ discussions of the 1970s. Adorno and Horkheimer do not make an appearance in this chapter. The aim of this chapter is to define the term ‘entertainment’; sometimes this involves differentiating entertainment from other cultural products and fields.

While entertainment producers shape their products around audience tastes and desires, many arts organisations have conventionally adopted what is called the ‘audience development’ orientation to audiences. Audience development refers to a set of policies and approaches in government-subsidised arts organisations which took hold in the early 1990s. With reduced government funding for subsidies, arts organisations were compelled (by a shrinking funding pool and by cultural policies) to attempt to increase their external revenue sources by attracting larger audiences. ‘Audience development’ emerged in response. Audience development has two central aims: to attract existing audiences to buy more of the arts product, and to attract new audiences who may not hitherto have engaged with the arts product or organisation. In this, audience development sounds much like any commercial marketing. However, audience development differs from the commercial, audience-centred approach in that rather than shaping the product to match mainstream audience tastes and trends, audience development aims to shape audiences. Kawashima (2006) divides audience development into four different types: marketing, taste cultivation, audience education, and outreach. Marketing speaks to existing arts audiences; Hayes and Slater (2002) characterise it as maintaining relationships with existing arts audiences by providing them with products that they recognise and which match their tastes. This type of audience development most closely resembles the commercial, audience-centred orientation which characterises entertainment; Hayes and Slater (2002) recommend it for arts organisations which want to generate maximum external revenue. ‘Taste cultivation’ and ‘audience education’ set up a different relationship with audiences. These types of audience development aim to attract new audiences to the arts; they do so by offering to provide these potential audiences with skills and knowledge that will equip them to appreciate and hopefully purchase arts products. ‘Taste cultivation’, as Kawashima explains, might involve taking potential arts audiences into a venue before the performance, and showing them how arts audiences typically behave: where the coat check is, for example, but also when it is appropriate to clap during a performance (2006: 57). ‘Audience education’ comprises developing potential audience taste for arts products by offering, for example, free workshops about the history of opera so that audiences feel that they have the intellectual capital to engage successfully with the product. Hayes and Slater observe that key aspects of what they refer to as ‘missionary audience development’ (2002) – that is, attempting to attract new audiences to purchase arts products – is to ‘remove perceptual and intellectual barriers’ and to ‘build confidence and self-esteem’ among potential audiences (2002: 13). The difference between this type of orientation towards audiences and that of entertainment producers revolves around deficit: in the arts’ audience development orientation, audiences have a deficit – in knowledge, cultural capital, or taste – which needs to be addressed. In entertainment’s audience-centred orientation, entertainment producers have a deficit – in precisely understanding audiences – which needs to be addressed through vigorous market research. Arts development proposes changing audiences to suit the product; entertainment proposes changing the product to suit audiences. There is no question that in recent years cultural policy has compelled arts organisations to take a more audience-centred approach to designing and marketing their product: this policy setting has been the subject of heated discussion (see, for example, Meyrick 2015). The key point here in defining entertainment from an industry perspective is that entertainment producers do not discuss whether or not taking an audience-centred approach to designing their products is a good or a bad idea, and they do not have to be told to do so by cultural policy: for entertainment producers, audience-centred-ness is a core part of their practice. It defines entertainment.

This audience-centred orientation has been a constant in my observation of entertainment producers. As I have indicated, entertainment organisations rely heavily on audience research to shape their products and their promotional campaigns. This is not to say that entertainment producers are uncritical or unimaginative, or that they do not generate their own original ideas and products. It is to say that they constantly practice intermeshing their own creative ideas with their understanding of audience tastes and trends. This is, in my observation, a highly creative act: entertainment producers do not simply have their own ideas and realise them; they must come up with creative ways to combine their own ideas with their research- and instinct-based understanding of specific audiences. Some entertainment products are more heavily driven by audience research than others: winners of Australian Idol, for example, are selected by audience participation; some winners of the show have gone on to be signed by Sony Music Entertainment. In other instances, entertainment producers create a product that aligns with a prevailing taste trend among audiences: the 30+ superhero movies scheduled for release between 2016 and 2020 signal the prevalence of this approach. ‘Audience-centredness’ is not only a core ethos of entertainment: in many cases, it is also a business imperative. Commercial television and radio organisations, for example, design their programming around understanding audiences well enough to gain maximum ratings; ratings are used to sell advertising space, which in turn generates the core revenue for these organisations. If commercial TV and radio organisations were not thoroughly audience-centred in their programming, they would swiftly go out of business and cease to exist. Among entertainment industry professionals, then, a core understanding of entertainment – a defining feature that sets it apart from some other types of cultural product – is that entertainment is audience-centred.

Entertainment as Commercial Culture

The audience-centredness of entertainment as it is understood by industry professionals articulates to another defining aspect of entertainment: its commercial nature. In line with entertainment economist Vogel (1998), entertainment professionals understand entertainment as a largely commercial practice. The idea behind the majority of entertainment products and projects is the same as for standard commercial business models: for consumer and advertising revenues to exceed production costs. Entertainment organisations generally do not rely on government subsidies or on philanthropy for their funding base; they rely instead on investor finance, sales revenues, and, where relevant, advertising sales. Entertainment’s base business model distinguishes it as a specific type of cultural industry. As per the discussion earlier in this chapter, this chapter attaches no value to whether a cultural organisation is founded on either a commercial or a subsidy business model; it also understands that many cultural organisations do not fall neatly into either ‘commercial’ or ‘subsidy’ categories of business model. Mainstream movies receive government subsidies in the form of producer tax credits; arts organisations strive to become financially self-sufficient. It is not possible to develop a checklist for ‘entertainment or not’, ‘entertainment or art’, although it is possible to observe specific major trends in understandings and definitions of the term. A commercial business model is one of these major trends. In my observations of entertainment industry professionals, I have never heard mention of The Australia Council for the Arts, or of any cultural grant program. Audience-centredness and a commercial business model clearly go hand in hand: when the entertainment product or project is financially self-sufficient, it needs as many consumers as possible in order to at least recoup costs. While some cultural commentators declare that cultural products that are generated through a commercial business model are drained of their creativity – Robert Brustein of the American Repertory Theater asserts that ‘when companies become completely dependent on the marketplace we have a theatre that’s indistinguishable from Wal-Mart: just products to be bought… just something to consume and throw away, with no enduring aftertaste’ (Lambert 2012: 36). Needless to say, entertainment industry professionals do not share Brustein’s opinion. The entertainment industry professionals studied as the basis for this chapter see themselves as creative and as commercial businesspeople; they do not signal that one is compromised by the other. It is difficult to provide solid evidence in the form of concrete quotations to demonstrate the fact that entertainment industry professionals define entertainment as a commercial cultural practice; entertainment professionals do not, in my experience, declare their commercial orientation. In my observation, the commercial nature of entertainment simply pervades industry professionals’ thinking and their practice, and certainly their understanding of the nature of entertainment. For entertainment industry professionals, then, entertainment is audience-centred commercial culture.

Conclusion

From an entertainment industry perspective, entertainment is defined and characterised by its audience-centred, commercial nature, rather than by its content, its genre, its audience, or the kind of emotional response it may or may not elicit from its consumers. It is generally designed to attract large audiences, rather than small, niche ones. This definition differs from some of the definitions advanced by some academics, and by some government classification. Determining the industry definition of entertainment is not a straightforward task: entertainment industry professionals do not publish discussions about the definition of their field, nor is there a single professional entertainment association which defines the industry. But understanding entertainment industry professionals’ definition of entertainment is a key part of the broader project of laying the definitional foundation for the study of how the entertainment industries work as a cultural system.