andrewducker | All your media companies are fucked

All your media companies are fucked

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.

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

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...

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?

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

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.

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 :-)

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

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...

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