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GIEEMP Seminar | "We're not fans just to wave flags": the audience as gatekeeper of the RTP Song Festival
PERMANENT SEMINAR OF THE RESEARCH GROUP ON ETHNOMUSICOLOGY AND STUDIES IN POPULAR MUSIC
2024-03-06 | 6 p.m. | NOVA FCSH, Colégio Almada Negreiros, Campolide (Lisbon) | Room 208 - Floor 2 | Zoom Room
Free entrance, both online and in presence.
"We're not fans just to wave flags": the audience as gatekeeper of the RTP Song Festival
Sofia Vieira Lopes | INET-md
The Eurovision Song Contest has been organised by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) since 1956, a competition between the public service broadcasters of an area that today transcends the borders of Europe. In 1964, RTP created the RTP Song Contest to choose its representative for the international competition.
Over the course of almost seventy years, the EBU's relationship with the media has undergone numerous changes. With the democratisation of internet access at the end of the 1990s, part of the Eurovision Song Contest audience - especially those who see themselves as fans - has played a fundamental role in reproducing, mediating and also creating discourses about the contest, about the competing songs and their artists. Digital media have allowed these individuals to play a role that is not limited to a passive audience that is usually seen as a mere consumer. This audience is also a creator of meaning and a crucial gatekeeper in mediating ideas and values about the competition.
Based on fieldwork carried out since 2013, the main aim of this communication is to analyse the relationship between the EBU and the Contest's audiences, with special emphasis on the groups that run websites, blogs and numerous social media pages and play an active role in creating meanings about the world's biggest and longest-running television show. It also reflects on the discourses and behaviour of the event's organisers, both from EBU and RTP, analysed in the ethnographic work I conducted and in the close relationship created with the different stakeholders of these processes.
Sofia Vieira Lopes | She is a researcher at INET-md. She holds a PhD in Musicology - Ethnomusicology (2023) from the FCSH of NOVA University of Lisbon, with a project funded by FCT (SFRH/BD/103718/2014) that resulted in the thesis entitled Music, Television, Memory and Representation: a study of the RTP Song Festival (1964 - 2020). She holds a Master's degree in Musicology - Ethnomusicology (2012), (NOVA FCSH) - with the dissertation: “Two alive hours on a dead TV”: Zip-Zip, Music and Television at the dawn of democracy in Portugal. She holds a degree in Musicology (2009) from the same institution. She has carried out research on the RTP Song Contest, Eurovision Song Contest, Music Festivals, Music and Television, Media and Music Industries, Memory.
