All your media companies are fucked

[andrewducker]

I was chatting to cairmen the other day about movie companies, and he was telling me that there's a major problem with the US movie industry - too many movies are being produced.  And the problem isn't that so many of them are shit - it's that there's just no way to market that many movies, nor are there enough cinema slots to show them. 

Way back at the dawn of time media was local - you'd produce entertainment for the people in your village (and usually for free).  A global market has the problem that you can produce media for 6 billion people with a few thousand producers.  If everyone produces media then you end up with so much media that everyone takes home a tiny slice of the pie, or even no pie.  This is fine* if the entry costs into the market are massive - as companies go bust they won't be replaced, because nobody can afford to make that kind of risk, and eventually you end up with a few media conglomerates controlling everything, and they can all make a profit.  When the barriers to entry are low enough that amateurs can make their own Star Trek episodes that actually look better than the original series - well, nobody is making money out of that.

Even worse, people are happy to produce lots of this stuff for free!  Over here** you will find an infinite page of pictures scraped from 4chan.  They're a mixture of photos, photoshops and art.  Many of them are not safe for work, and an awful lot of them are anime-based.  But that's not really the point - the point is that a hell of a lot of them are fucking impressive.  Some of the people making them are incredibly talented.  And they're making things and giving them away because they want to.

If you have ever had any interest in working in an industry where people are paid for producing art then you might find this a little scary.

Of course, none of this is new.  But it does seem to be getting bigger.  And you have to wonder what bits of industry will end up able to make money in the long run - and what niches they will be in.


*Clearly I'm using the word "fine" here in a very limited sense.
**Cheers to johnbobshaun for the link.  I has new wallpaper.

Comments

[andrewducker]

I can't decide if this is awesome or awful:

[andrewducker]

(Nick just told me over IM that it's awful because the dead space on the left could have been a predator with a green lightsabre)

[wychwood]

If you have ever had any interest in working in an industry where people are paid for producing art then you might find this a little scary.

Although the computer software industry seems to be doing ok - and even, say, Star Trek tie-in novels are still selling in huge numbers, despite the easy availability of fanfiction on the Internet. I don't know... I think that there's always going to be room for professionals in any of these fields, though the relationship between amateurs and professionals may shift (and the borders become more fluid?). And, to take it back more than thirty-or-so years, libraries haven't yet sent publishers out of business. I tend to think that this is another of those "o tempora, o mores" situations where people have been worrying about the same issue for a very long time.

If there are "too many" films, is the problem that there are actually too many, or that there are too many people trying to produce big-budget blockbusters? Because there are still lots of people following something quite a lot like your "dawn of time" model, producing cheap indie films that don't need to air fourteen times a day on twenty screens per cinema in every cinema in the country to break even, and doing (as far as I can see) ok with it. You can have lots of those making reasonable profits, but there's only room for a handful of blockbusters...

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

"o tempora, o mores" situations where people have been worrying about the same issue for a very long time.

If I'd only read your post I would have seen mine was unnessecary.

A thousand thanks for reintroducing me to "O tempora O mores" :D

[andrewducker]

Publishers used to have two jobs: Filtering and Distribution. The distribution is now less important, which means that they now just have to filter. I wonder how long that will last...

[wychwood]

Don't forget Marketing - I don't think that really comes under "distribution", does it? And *is* distribution less important? I know there have been a lot of changes in how paperback distributions works, lately, at least in the US.

(I'm not trying to say that things *aren't* changing, or *won't* change, incidentally, but that perhaps the changes are less fundamental than people might assume)

[andrewducker]

Marketing is important, of course. And does have an effect, so long as your product isn't _awful_.

I have an ereader - papreback are _so_ last millenium.

pperback

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

at least you can safely drop 'em in the bath - how does the ereader manage on that score?

[sigmonster.livejournal.com]

I have books that I expect to be re-reading in 50 years. They'll have the same layout, art, and fonts as the original edition because they *are* the original edition. The only thing I'll have invested (other than the purchase price) is a little bit of space, and space is cheap - much cheaper than the effort of checking compatibility and taking backups over 50 years of electronic device lifecycles, plus 50 years of charging batteries.

Plain text files might make it, but they don't have the art and layout design. Proprietary file types... maybe pdf, but are you really willing to say pdf will be around and devices will be back-compatible enough to read them in 50 years time? Libraries already have a serious problem with electronic file formats from 20 years ago.

And if I get a really bad book I can fling it very hard at the wall and jump on its broken corpse. Although you can do this with an ereader, I guess.

[andrewducker]

You can delete it and pretend it never existed :->

There is an open e-reader format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_eBook

It's XML, so even if things change the data will still be retrievable.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Of course its easy to see a threat from teh internets to the creative industries from people giving away things for free... Until you consider the general quality of free content on the internet, the amount of free content being produced by people in the creative industries (anecdotally a fairly high amount), the amount of free content based solely upon character/logos/images in copywrite or currently under license (which less then the potential legal problems actually implies a dearth rather then surfiet of creativity) etc etc...

Most of the stuff on that 4CHAN page falls into one or more of those categories. Some are direct scans of anime cells or graphic novels, some are rehashes of film posters (which really serve the purpose of those creating the films rather then damage them in all honesty).

All this without addressing the main reason that people in the creative industries probably shouldn't be too worried. The suprisingly limited reach and demographic of the internet. Still largely male, largely white and largely in middle class and above socio-economic brackets (facts correct at time of the publishing of the Oxford guide to internet psychology).

The problem with the idea that people producing things for free is ever a serious threat to organised media is that history proves that wrong time and time again. The simple thing is when enough people use and understand a medium enough for free content of such a kind to work industry will by then understand how to get people to pay for the same sort of shit. Even if they don't new industry will arise that doesn't.

People may want to give away their shit for free forever, but they also need to eat and hell if they can get paid to do something they love (be it draw, make films whatever) do you think they will continue to give it away for nothing?

[andrewducker]

I believe that the internet reached male/female equality about two years ago. It was certainly near parity with the last look I took in 2006.

And it doesn't matter if people are leaving the "giving it away for free" group to try and make money at it, if enough new people are joining who _are_ willing to give it away.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

You are also neglecting one of the core principles of art:- elitism.

If everyones making something its next to worthless equally if everyone has access to it.
Art (and to a lesser degree) the creative industries thrive on reinvention and also (counter intuitively perhaps) on being the sole product/property of a select few.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Some academic texts on the subject:-
http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:pzurAqojz3UJ:ritim.cba.uri.edu/wp2003/pdf_format/Wiley-Encycl-Internet-Usage-Gender-Final.pdf+internet+stats+gender&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=uk&client=firefox-a

Also check yer chauvanism in at the door ;)
http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/3/4/395
In the United States and Australia, men and women use the internet in nearly equal measure, whereas in Japan, India and China, men continue to dominate internet use.

I wouldn't be suprised if for many nations where internet use has not reached 48% penetration that women use the internet less then men.

http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cpb.2005.8.371
We found a number of gender differences in participants' use of the Internet. Males were proportionally more likely to have their own web page than were females. They used the Internet more than females; in particular, they were more likely to use game websites, to use other specialist websites, and to download material from the Internet. However, females did not use the Internet for communication more than males.

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

why 48%?

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

48% of the population of Europe use the internet. If you have about half the population of a continent doing something odds are that the gender split will be roughly equal. It's the normal distribution innit.

[drplokta]

About 48% of the population of Europe pee standing up. Does that mean the odds are that the gender split will be roughly equal?

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Probably not no.

But the higher the percentage of the population that use the internet the higher the chance the gender split will approach 50/50 (Or whatever the gender split happens to be in Europe).

IE. the bigger the sample the more represntitive of the population it will be. But thanks for the non-sequiter ;)

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

And it doesn't matter if people are leaving the "giving it away for free" group to try and make money at it, if enough new people are joining who _are_ willing to give it away.

Will there ever be? If there isn't now I doubt that we will ever reach that point.

[andyducker.livejournal.com]

I've not noticed any shortage of people producing content. There's certainly more writing produced in any one day, available to me for free, than I can possibly read. Same goes for music and video.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

and yet we don't appear to be at the point where the old order (media-wise) is crumbling.

[andrewducker]

I know far more people getting entertainment through "non-mediated" channels than I used to. And I believe that the internet is taking up more and more of peoples time, with TV taking up less and less, with every passing year.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Scorched Earth theorising.

We still have radio, we still have books, we still have newspapers (although I do wonder if they may soon be for the chop in hardcopy form).

[andrewducker]

Where, exactly, did I say that any industry was going to vanish entirely?

I seem to recall having said that none of this was new, it was just bigger than it had been, and that some companies would find niches that worked...

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

I'm reading Convergence Culture just now, on this topic, and it's really interesting so far.. Basically Jenkins reckons we're in a fairly long-term phase of regrouping and trying to figure out what the hell is going on - people in all sectors of media know that convergence is the way forward, but nobody quite knows how to do it best, so there's a lot of experimenting going on.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

You might be interested in this speech on that note, along with a quick Google on "some cities will have no newspaper". The film industry is in real trouble, as is the music industry (although there's a new biz model springing up quicker there), and conventional dead-tree journalism is seeing the wheels fall off at speed, with the exception of publications like The Guardian who are rapidly embracing new ways of doing things. AFAIK the publishing industry is doing better.

It's not that the entire thing is going to fall over dead - that's an idiotic proposition. But there are some pretty hard times ahead for creators, and some rapid adjustment needed to a new way of doing things. If only we knew what the new way was...

(My personal theory is that the film industry is going to end up looking a lot more like the publishing industry currently does. The lower costs of production open the way for films that only need a few tens of thousands of viewers, or even a few thousand viewers, to be profitable. And that means that instead of the generic "four quadrant" movies we're seeing today, we'll start seeing tighter segmentation. There are a good few hurdles in the way of that, though, including figuring out how exactly to market an Internet-based film so that people will actually pay for it.)

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Really all that needs to be said is:-
"home taping is killing music"

[random-redhead.livejournal.com]

Ha! welcome to the world of Archaeology! Oh and lots of other things too, thats just my personal brush with it. There are lots of things out there that so many people love doing so much that you can't get paid a decent wage to do it.

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

It there actually a problem with the US movie industry? I thought the vast majority of studio films ended up in profit eventually.

What we can expect from movie studios is to use the cinema release of films to provide an experience that is absolutely unique and can't be replicated with a £500 handycam.

2008 was a watershed year for IMAX due to The Dark Knight. When "Avatar" comes out at the end of this year it may well do similar things for 3D.

Cause if your slices of pie are getting too small, there's always the option of making a new pie :-)

[andrewducker]

Absolutely - there are always new niches. I take it you saw the PS3 in 3D thing.

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

Yeah: I was immediately reminded of those 3D glasses you owned that worked with Unreal :-D

[andrewducker]

slightly different tech - those ones were LCD shutter-based, this one looks to be polarised-light based - like modern 3D cinema.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Any clue why it's taken such a long time for polarised-light 3D to catch on, by the way? It's ludicrously old technology...

[andrewducker]

Dunno, to be honest. I do remember reading something about it being hard to keep twin projectors in synch with each other.

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

I don't agree at all about those Star Trek episodes looking better than the original series though.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

The problem I see is not so much that media behemoths are going to suffer (OH NO FEWER VAPID BLOCKBUSTERS AND MULTI-MILLIONAIRE FILM STARS) but that we're still struggling to find ways of helping smaller producers to make money from what they're creating. 'No way to market that many movies'? Not to hundreds of millions of people, maybe, at the prices cinemas charge now, but so what? It's interesting to look at the health of the major Asian film markets in terms of budgets, film and audience numbers...

On the 'giving stuff away for free' front, it's hugely unhelpful that crap like the 4chan scraper almost never seems to credit the original producers - something that I would bet most of them are not comfortable with at all (how damn hard is it to credit people? Seriously?).

By and large I'm optimistic about the emergence of new business models that work out better for the majority of people producing content, and don't do anything much to damage the quality of stuff being made. We're not quite there yet, but progress is being made...