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

[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.