Funded by the Swedish Research Council 2008-2010

Against the background of significant shifts in media production over the past decades, the aim with the project is to analyse how economic and aesthetic or cultural value is created in relation to new forms of production. With the main example taken from television production, web news production, music distribution and online gaming, this project aims at developing a theoretical model of how value is produced in the larger field of media production, and how the new forms of value production can be related to changes in that same field over the last couple of decades.

Especially important for these changes is the increased marketisation and digitization of production, distribution and consumption, and the fact that media commodities are entirely symbolic in their form, produced through signifying practices by semiotic labour.

The research will be carried out as an inquiry into five specific sub-themes: the relation between production and consumption; the role of labour; the role of audience measurement; the role of format trade and copyrights; the changing character of ther trext commodity in sign economies. Metodologically it involves interviews and policy analysis.

There is a large body of international research in this area between political economy and cultural studies on questions of value creation and symbolic production. There are, however, few studies that have departed from empiric material. This study seeks to fill that space.