The Prime Minister has faced pressure to pass this scheme from parents, who believe that music videos allow their children to freely access sexual imagery . The scheme already has huge names on board such as Sony, Warner Brothers and Universal,, as well as Vevo and YouTube stating that they agree to try the scheme.
The fight to protect children against explicit music videos is far from new; ever since 1983 when Frankie goes to Hollywood released 'Relax' there has been tension against musicians and music labels to tone down their depiction on certain issues. However, this connotes one problem with the age rating, this video was banned in a time when openly being homosexual wasn't as acceptable as it is in today's society. This means that if the BBFC do begin to put age ratings on music videos, they wont just have to put them on new videos, but they will also have to change the age rating on older videos as society changes throughout time.
At the moment these are the current BBFC age rating guidelines for films, which are thought to fit the same credentials as the age ratings for music videos will.
U - Suitable for all ages.PG - Parental Guidance
12A- Cinema Release, suitable for 12 years and over.
12- Video Release, suitable for 12 years and over
15- Suitable for 15 years and over
18 - Suitable only for adults
R18 - Sexual material only for adults.
According to the BBFC website an 18 rated film may include...
- Frequent use of strong/very strong language.
- Strong portrayal of sexual activity
- Scenes of sexual violence
- Strong horror
- Strong blood and gore
- Real Sex
- Discriminatory language and behavior.
It's important to remember that for a film to be regarded in an age category it only needs to fit into one of the criteria.The new age ratings from the BBFC will have a huge impact on many genre's such as Rap, Metal and R'n'B. This is because of what the stereotypical videos of these genres contain. Stereotypically a Rap video will contain the use or connotation of drug use. A metal video may contain blood or horror. And a R'n'B video is often expected to denote scenes which sexualise those who are depicted in them.
This means that producers will have two choices. They will either have to keep making their videos with the same content and risk losing the genre's younger audiences; or they will have to sacrifice the content in order to reach the largest possible audience, however this may risk losing audience members who are die-hard fans of the more grittier scenes in music videos. As well as this, losing audience members due to the new restrictions will indefinitely lead to productions having a lower budget due to their previous productions bringing in lower revenue. This could potentially lead to a chain reaction which see's more audience members stop watching the videos due to music videos being lower quality due to their budget.
In my opinion the new age rating schemes will not impact my production. This is due to the fact that the only thing my music video can be judged upon is the depiction of alcohol abuse. However, I don't believe we make the scenes denoting this too graphical and therefore I believe my overall production would be rated a 12. As a result, this will not impact my production due to the fact that this was the lowest age boundary which I planned for,
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