This book provides an analysis of music videos and music television in an effort to elucidate one way that ideological values and ideas are replicated through the media. It examines how contentious music videos are treated by music and television broadcast institutions in order to maintain control of audience expectations. This book contends that control over audience expectations creates a stable marketplace as well as a sales channel to market not only music, but also related merchandise within ancillary industries. Contentious music videos disrupt this stable marketplace by defying audience expectations, and thereby creating instability in the form of controversy, defiance of community standards, or challenging proven and profitable formats. This book argues that contentious videos are subject to control mechanisms in the form of content editing or the cultivation a preexisting set of values that often defines what can be broadcast. This represents the maintenance of hegemonicpower through the media, or to put it another way the control of meaning in the service of power.