Audience Theory - Reception Theory

Reception Theory implies that when audiences view media text they interpret it in different ways and have different readings of the text, as the producer/director of the film encodes a message into the media text to be conveyed to the audience. There are 3 different types of audience readings; the dominant reading, the negotiated reading and the oppositional reading. If a viewer takes on the dominant reading, then they are decoding the text in the same way that the producer/director wanted the audience to interpret it. The audience may take on a negotiated reading of the text, which means that they accept the ideology of the text however do not agree with it. Oppositional readings are when the audience completely rejects the meaning of the text and refuses to accept the messages that the producer/director wanted to convey.

This theory can be applied to music videos in the sense that viewers may be able to read into the text and uncover a hidden meaning that the musician or video director has implemented into the video.