Skillet Rocks Out. - Media Meditation #1

Last week, Tuesday February 6th I drove to Boston with my boyfriend to see a concert. Yes, this was during a school week, however, I had no classes that Wednesday. The bands playing were Skillet, Puddle of Mud, and Shinedown. I personally went to this concert for the band Skillet, however, they were the opening band. They unfortunately didn’t play too long. Skillet has been my favorite band now for 4 years. I first started listening to them my junior year in high school. What I love about them is how not many people have heard of them. Another quality that is nice is how they sound the same way live and on CD. I have seen Skillet every summer for four years. They are a Christian rock band. I remember thinking “ I will never like this band,” turns out they put on a great show.



Media is apart of everyone’s life one way or another. A person may not think about it, but at least once a day everyone comes in contact with something media based. It is out of our society’s control these days. our world is surrounded by media. It is taking over. I decided to write about this particular media experience because one it is my favorite band of all time. Two, because it is something different than the normal talk about Facebook, Twitter, or the Internet, whatever it may be. No matter what concert a person goes to, it is a great opportunity that everyone should enjoy writing about.

What made this concert a huge media experience for me? Was it all the bands and how great they sound? Was it how the artists were dressed? How about the base of the speakers and how loud they were? Or was it the overhead TV screens on the side of the stage for people who are far away from the stage? All of these factors have something to do with media.

How good they sound is a way for the artists to gain PR and money in general, It’s just another way of word of mouth. Having a concert in general creates a lot of attention toward bands involved. Especially in this case, the underdog band, Skillet who not a lot of people in the audience have probably heard of. Now because of this fabulous media experience, people are more interested in Skillet or at least know who they are. How the artists dress is a huge deal too. People may not think about this while at a concert but everything one wears is advertising something. Which is just another media ploy telling the audience why the band is so great and why they should purchase one of their cd’s.

Now the base of speakers and such is a HUGE factor when seeing a concert. Speakers in general are in all media based stores such as Best Buy. People buy speakers for there houses; however, of coarse these speakers at the concerts are much bigger. The speakers make the loud music. The speakers create the rage and love for the band making the media experience of the concert even better. Lastly the TV screens on the side of the stage enable everyone to have a great time no matter what.

My point of this entry is that a lot of media is used with any concert. Basically anything that creates PR or is electronic or digital is considered media. This is because it is the new craze. The trick to this all, is to understand how this craze started, buying tickets on Ticketmaster for this concert on the Internet, or perhaps seeing a pop up ad saying Shinedown was coming to a city near you.

Hilliard states, “A condition of the internet to the media mix is the ability to be interactive – between the presenter (writer) and the receptor (audience). Interactivity suggests an exploitation of the internets multimedia potentials: not only a mix of audio and video, but also live action, controlled sounds, still photographs, charts and graphs, text, and animation. For the first time, the writer can combine virtually all media techniques in an interactive way for a mass audience.” This quote exemplifies how this concert wouldn’t have been much of anything if it were not for media, such as the Internet. If it weren’t for pictures of Skillet, or music by Skillet or texts about Skillet on the Internet not many people would have heard about this concert.