ABSTRACT
Most studies of popular culture involve an understanding of audiences, since by deeming something ‘popular’ an assumption about the size and type of an ‘audience’ of some kind has been already made. But thinking about who that audience might be is not necessarily straightforward. The audience is a shifting and moving object since we are all at some point part of an audience of some kind or another. Therefore audiences only really come into being by those looking to generate knowledge about them – whether it is the market analyst trying to predict entertainment trends, the policymaker trying to explain young people’s behaviour, or the cultural researcher trying to interpret the relevance of popular culture to any particular moment in history. Ways of detailing, measuring and describing audiences are therefore open to vested interests and we can understand a good deal about the culture industries by knowing about how they generate knowledge and data about their audiences (see Ang 1991; Napoli 2003; Smythe 1991).
