This is a good thing. People are constantly telling the big media companies, musicians, film studios etc. that they need a new business model - maybe this is it.
Anything that bucks the status quo in the entertainment industry is a good thing. Expect to see more and more of this and expect the traditional middle men to get more aggressive to prevent it from happening.
Lots of people post on forums about how these companies need to "adapt their business models". Approximately 100% of those people also enjoy content made by the "lazy big media companies" in question under their current business model, which is becoming less effective. Wanting cheap/free access to that content by making sure that the legal/economic framework under which is was produced continues to be circumvented is a Faustian bargain. It's not sustainable. But no-one seems to be having much success with ideas for alternative business models so far.
The fact that such people consume big media content now does not mean they wouldn't rather dispense with such content in exchange for the elimination of such laws.
In fact, an argument could be made that the production of such content smothers other, less capital intensive content made with lower expectations of large returns (for example, theater was much more successful around here before the big Hollywood blockbusters came to the scene).
However, the same conditions are toxic to smaller, independent content producers who might have done something innovative or catered to a niche market.
I don't doubt that the current conditions are toxic, but I don't think "those people" argue that the status quo is OK. Whether the conditions they argue for are toxic or not remains to be seen.
Oh, absolutely.. it's impossible to predict the future. But yes, looking at the current data the whole argument seems to fall apart: As far as I know, the movie industry is doing better and better each year, and I think the same is true for TV. Reality TV shows certainly represent successful change.
I agree that the middlemen are the ones that _should_ be in trouble, just like in the music industry. If successful TV and music can be produced without studios or actually distributing anything physically, the result should be a more direct system. It could be that the change is happening while at the same time the whole entertainment market is growing hugely (more and more people living comfortable lives, devices that make it easy to grab entertainment time where available), so that even failing businesses are growing, just slower than the whole market is expanding.
eventually free methods of consuming content will become so prevalent that content creators will be forced to adopted entirely new business models
...or just exit the market and do something else. Musicians can play live; that doesn't work very well for film directors or actors. Sure, there's the theater, but but the size of the audience you can play to is limited to the distance within which actors can be easily seen and heard. You can't really stage a play in a stadium the way you can stage a music event.
Perhaps a revenue model based solely on product placement could work
Producers and screenwriters already make the most of their opportunities there. It's possible, up a point; if I'm writing a script based in the 19th century I can look for some premium brands with a long legacy for placement or cross-promotion opportunities (you'd be surprised how many there are). But that won't work for earlier periods, science-fiction, or contexts that brands typically prefer not to be associated with, like war movies or stories with gloomy themes.
Entirely new business models are pretty thin on the ground. 'Make something and charge admission to people who want to see it' has been around for a while. The latest attempt is the current crop of 3d movies, since that doesn't really work on the sofa, but it's a big increase in production costs for relatively little box-office gain.
That does make it seem like it will be an improvement. At the very least, it will be more private.
Unfortunately, I don't see how any big media company is going to want to do any major deals with them. I doubt they would sign a contract with someone when they plan on suing the company or customers. But at least hopefully it will help out smaller companies and independent artists.
That is a fundamental shift where in theory companies like record labels and publishing houses are not necessary anymore. I think for established journalists it should be easy to bring "their" audience to a new platform.
In general, we should be working towards an established middle class of content creators.
Agree, and this will be true for every art/media creation soon enough. We are seeing the future here, and we can expect more and more developpers to jump on the wagon.
In a way, change is all good for the middle-men as well, since they will have to work hard to provide value on top of what the developpers are doing. Which is what they should have always been doing.
To me the article speaks to the frustration of past funding models giving way to new ways of monetizing creative works. The gateways that have been necessary for works to be promoted are changing from an executives sitting in an office somewhere to everyday people who like your work and have the ability to spread word of it throughout their social networks. As the technology is further developed to further empower these everyday people with even greater ability to spread creative content, such as Spotify is doing, this will accelerate even more. It's my feeling that a new way of monetizing creative works is underway. This will be a paradigm change that will allow works to be seen or heard that would have otherwise never been allowed to see the light of day. We all win when we have the greatest number of individuals having more of a say in things rather than just a select few. Authors, musicians & other creators in the future will be more in the driver seat than in the past and will be given new & different options for monetizing their products.
To me the article speaks to the frustration of past funding models giving way to new ways of monetizing creative works. The gateways that have been necessary for works to be promoted are changing from an executives sitting in an office somewhere to everyday people who like your work and have the ability to spread word of it throughout their social networks. As the technology is further developed to further empower these everyday people with even greater ability to spread creative content, such as Spotify is doing, this will accelerate even more. It's my feeling that a new way of monetizing creative works is underway. This will be a paradigm change that will allow works to be seen or heard that would have otherwise never been allowed to see the light of day. We all win when we have the greatest number of individuals having more of a say in things rather than just a select few. Authors, musicians & other creators in the future will be more in the driver seat than in the past and will be given new & different options for monetizing their products.
The problem is that they are trying to fix something which dont need fixing. Media is not broken, its exactly as good as it can be when so many people have access to writing whatever they want.
The search for a large scale business model in media is never going to turn anything out, its not the content thats valuable but distribution.
This is the sort of future I have expected for awhile now. Fewer multi-million-dollar celebrity-making hits but far more people being able to make a comfortable living off of serving a niche audience. Now that distribution is worthless, creators don't have to chain themselves to "publishers" who skim almost every penny the creator creates. Back in the Bad Ole Days before the Internet, distribution was such a titanically difficult problem to solve, they earned that skim... but they really have no call to it now. That opens things up dramatically.
>There's no sign that this model could work at scale for a large corporation.
Why should it? Most of the content people are now enjoying day to day isn't coming from large corporations. What we're witnessing now is the infancy of a shift away from the centralization of entertainment started by the industrial revolution (with access to printing presses, radio broadcasting, etc being relatively limited by economies of scale or similar reasons) back to a more community focused model that provides greater diversity in content. Most are welcoming this change as it brings them access to media of the sort they've never before had access to, as well as closer two-way relationships with the producers of that content.
This isn't limited to youtube/video content either by the way, it's happening in music and other forms of art/entertainment as well. The platforms used to provide the distribution of content and used to collect payment will prove to be interchangeable; they aren't the part of the picture that matters. What matters is the relationships creators and their patrons can now cultivate. Now that people know this model is possible, the cat's not going back into the bag. Even if youtube or patreon were to close up shop, the demand would still be there and new platforms would be adopted or created if necessary because now people have seen a glimpse of what's possible and don't want to go back.
I don't think it is. By the time they're finished riding the cable profit train into the ground, they'll find a market with all new players to compete against, in exactly the same way the music industry is playing out. There are more indies now than ever, and they're selling more records now than ever. The pie keeps getting bigger, but the old players are claiming a smaller and smaller percentage of the total pie. I believe the same will be true of video. There aren't a ton of indie movies and series being produced, but some are, and that number will increase over time.
In two years or three, when HBO, Showtime, and Starz finally decide that they want my money, I'll be hooked on shows from other providers. I won't go the extra mile to sign up for their puny little service that offers me a few series and a few movies, when Netflix and Hulu are offering me hundreds of shows and movies for less than 10 bucks a month.
I just bought a new point and shoot camera for about two hundred bucks. It can shoot 1080p video. The same revolution that happened in music is about to happen in movies and TV, and for the same reasons...it'll go faster, though, because of YouTube and the more advanced Internet culture.
It's great right now, big budget productions for free. What happens though when enough people creating the content can't make the economic model work no more?
I think the result will be drastically lower budgets to the point where someone can make a dollar selling the content for a dollar or putting ads around/before it online. It's just a matter of whether we can accept that, it may be a good thing? The budget models for movies right now does seem to be a bit out of whack.
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