The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/magazine/the-creative-apocalypse-that-wasnt.html

by aaronbrethorst • 11 years ago

98 49 11 years ago

hullo• 11 years ago

Worth noting article is by Steven Johnson, author most recently of How We Got to Now. Bonus points for Walter Benjamin reference in the lead.

henrik_w• 11 years ago

How We Got to Now is excellent! Quick and fascinating read. Especailly loved the story about Ada Lovelace at the end - waaay ahead of her times.

nubianwarrior• 11 years ago

Was my favorite part as well. Surprisingly fun read.

exelius4• 11 years ago

Good article. I think the voices that cried the loudest about this were people at the top of the food chain -- they are the ones getting cut out. In the music industry, what happened were bands just started self-producing albums once it became feasible to do so with a consumer PC. The bands ended up making more (which wasn't hard because record companies had been screwing them over for years) and suddenly had a publicity outlet other than radio. Most bands were more than happy to give their music away for free because they had been doing it for years anyway.

And I think we're starting to see the beginning of the "content crash" hitting TV as well. With the rise of cord cutting, the big TV networks are going to have a hard time justifying the prices they charge to cable providers. Cable video prices will have to come down significantly -- millennials are not willing to pay $30/mo AND have to watch ads when they can pay $8/mo for ad-free content from Netflix. People may be willing to spend $30/mo on video, but they're going to want that content to not be laden with ads.

larrik• 11 years ago

$30/month? It's not that cheap around here!

I think the bigger crash is that people prefer to watch a full season of a TV show in one sitting, rather than once a week for 9 months or whatever. How do you make television when the audience you really want is going to wait until you have already produced a few seasons to even start looking? Nevermind the damage that premature cancellations due to future viewership.

exelius4• 11 years ago

It's about $30/mo when you consider the incremental cost of a cable+internet bundle over just internet (since that's what a potential cord cutter would be considering).

And while I understand your viewpoint, cable video does offer on-demand, and they can negotiate for extended series rights if they feel it's important to their product. I don't think that's a deal breaker; just a product feature.

But at a minimum, the price needs to come down -- and I think it will as consumers become used to the idea that not every show will be available on every service. It's no longer completely ridiculous to imagine a cable TV service without ESPN or any of the other Disney channels, for example.

scott_s• 11 years ago

I think very few people actually watch an entire season in one sitting - but I think most people want access to an entire season at once. I think this is a good thing; I read a book at my own pace, and I want to watch a season of a show at my own pace. (Which usually is about five episodes of the show a week.)

There was an NY Times piece (which I cannot find) back when House of Cards first came out talking about why actors and directors who typically do movies are now doing television. Giving viewers an entire season at once gives them enough space to tell long, subtle stories, and the up-front investment from companies like Netflix lets them have production values typically reserved for feature films.

untog• 11 years ago

Am I alone in disliking the binge watching trend? I rabidly read recaps of Game of Thrones episodes every Monday morning, talk to my friends about it, etc. etc - by comparison I never talk to anyone about House of Cards because the conversation always starts "what are you up to?" "oh, OK, well I won't spoil anything then!".

There's a social aspect to TV for me (boy was I addicted to reading Lostpedia back in the day), and binge watching diminishes it. Even though it is very convenient.

rhino369• 11 years ago

Netflix has set the price for large quantity of video content way too low. They have successfully exploited the media industries price discrimination to get a ton of content for absurdly low prices. But now netflix is killing off the media companies it free rode on.

Normally I'd say that the price would move to account for it, but netflix has been pretty unable to move their prices without a huge amount of rage from consumers. I think it's similar to how the 99 cent app set the market psychology on mobile apps, Netflix's 8 dollars a month has sort of screwed the video on demand market.

I also believe Netflix knows this. That is why they are getting into original programming. But that is so much more expensive than buying second run tv shows. Especially since they created the binge watch trend.

Netflix spends a 150 million on a season of House of Cards and I watch it in a day and a half. Look at what HBO produces for 15 a month. It's high quality, but it's not a ton of a content.

I'm guessing that in 10 years netflix will have tiers and packages. You'll be able to buy an AMC package and a comedy central package, etc.

Re:30 a month

Cable pays about 30-50 dollar a month to channels for content depending on area and whats in a package. A pretty big chunk of that is sports. I bet you could buy all non sports from the channels for like 25 bucks a customer a month.

But typically channels get half their revenue from advertising.

I'm guessing 30/month is way to low. 50/month maybe?

exelius4• 11 years ago

It's not about what revenue level will sustain the existing players in the market; it's about what price consumers will be willing to accept. I don't think consumers will be willing to spend $30/mo on a single video service in 5 years. Maybe across multiple services, but the whole concept of channels is going away in favor of individual shows. The networks don't have the power anymore; the shows do.

I also bet that rather than go through Netflix, AMC et al will sell subscriptions directly to consumers. The value add from Netflix isn't that big; you could set up a very similar service on AWS and Akamai with very little investment since they already own the content rights. Much of the appeal of Netflix is in the simplicity; and I don't see them throwing that away (or consumers accepting it).

sheepmullet3• 11 years ago

"Netflix has set the price for large quantity of video content way too low."

What makes you think $8-10/month is way too low? Let's do a few back of the envelope calculations:

Globally there is an easy 500 million user market for high quality US TV content.

If we take off a 30% cut for Netflix then that is $2.8-$3.5 billion per month for the content providers.

A high quality show like house of cards, or the wire, or daredevil, or game of thrones costs around $150 million. Let's say studios want $300 million to make a decent profit.

So there's enough money through this kind of service for 10 high quality seasons of content per month. This would very quickly build up a large high quality backlog for most people.

Of course content providers would rather pump out lots of low quality crap, and spend big money on advertising average shows rather than spending that money on the content.

Brakenshire• 11 years ago

The answer is just to sell video content play on demand. You can get access to a substandard catalogue with Netflix (it's really poor in the UK, at least) or you can just pay for access on a show by show basis. The key is that they have to make it very easy for people to use, and allow people to use the media files as they wish. It's iTunes over again, only this time with a different set of established interests.

kjksf3• 11 years ago

My theory is that Netflix's low price is their strategy, not a mistake they wish they could reverse.

Jeff Bezos said "your margin is my opportunity". Netflix doesn't leave a margin for competition to undercut. No-one can compete with Netflix by offering a lower price.

And since Netflix has such a huge lead in number of subscribers, they have much more money to spend on quality of service (more content, better technology).

Low price works great for Netflix. I don't see any new entrants competing with them (other than more content owners like ABC, CBS etc. trying to do what HBO did, but it's really not the same thing as Netflix).

sheepmullet3• 11 years ago

"I'm guessing that in 10 years netflix will have tiers and packages. You'll be able to buy an AMC package and a comedy central package, etc."

Possibly. I don't think it is the way they should go though. IMO, people don't want to pay for specific kinds of shows especially not based on the content provider.

I decide on a day to day basis based on my mood which type of show I want to watch and I want it all provided through the same interface.

I think instead they should have a couple of tiers based upon show release dates and content format.

Want all the new tv content produced in the last year? Pay an extra $10/month. Want everything in 4k? Pay an extra $3/month. Etc.

That way plenty of people will just be happy with the base package of $10/month. But people who want to talk about the latest episode etc of a show can pay $20/month. Those with 4k tvs and who want to watch the latest shows can pay $23/month.

Honestly, I tend to watch good but older tv shows. Like this year I have watched Friends and Scrubs. $10/month to be able to watch these older shows is a good deal. $20/month isn't really worth it.

foobarian• 11 years ago

I think the Netflix angle is too optimistic. For $8/month I get access to a bunch of old crappy content. If I try to watch something new, or old but good (e.g. Jaws) it's not in their streaming catalog.

I'm in the category of "willing to keep paying $30/mo" if I get access to everything cable offers without ads (or reduced ads a la Hulu), and with a modern user interface. I think those are the killer apps as it were.

TheGRS• 11 years ago

I'd like to know more about how ticketmaster has affected the world of live music. Its such a bizarre market of scalping and reselling. You have entire companies now dedicated to the act of scalping, like stubhub, where the artist doesn't see a dime of the transactions. The article points out that the revenue generated by ticket sales is greater than it once was, but it still hasn't eclipsed the amount once made from album sales. I have to wonder if the "ticket industry" has something to do with that, but of course its like comparing apples to oranges.

AnimalMuppet• 11 years ago

Well, the artist sees some of the original ticket sold. And places like StubHub may increase the total number of tickets sold (or may not, I have no actual data).

The article points out that the revenue generated by ticket sales is greater than it once was, but it still hasn't eclipsed the amount once made from album sales.

That's revenue, though. How much did the artist see from album sales? In most cases, not much, given the way the game was rigged to favor the labels. The artists saw a much bigger slice of the ticket sales.

seanmcdirmid• 11 years ago

I heard a lot of the ticketmaster surcharges are kicked back to the artist, in a sense ticketmaster is playing the bad guy to get more money for a concert without blaming the artists.

jpatokal2• 11 years ago

I don't really understand why ticket sales haven't long since switched to an airline model: sell the first tickets (relatively) cheap, then ramp up prices as the venue fills up.

aschearer• 11 years ago

I think the same trends are playing out with game development. As development and distribution have gotten easier the winners are winning more. It reminds me a bit of Sam Altman's "Upside Risk":

  > It’s common to make more money from your single best angel investment than all the rest put together.

Applies to games as well as start ups.

stephengillie• 11 years ago

Book publishers and movie studios have been operating off of this model for decades. Probably others as well.

AstroJetson• 11 years ago

A well researched article, I love it when people write/speak and have the data to back up their positions.

As far as $30 a month goes for content, my Comcast bill sans internet is about $45 (I split the taxes in 1/2). I'm about to cut the TV part out, I can get all the shows we watch other ways for about $25 a month.

I also pay for some of the online content, I have enough value for the NY Times that I pay to get past their paywall (I'm trading down Starbucks $$$ coffee for a better information flow)

Another poster asked about Ticketmaster / Stubhub / etc. I've given up on major venue's, I can't afford the $100+ seats to be next to a drunk yelling "California!!" (Yes, looking at you G131 at the last Brian Wilson concert) We will go to smaller places where the ticket price isn't so bad.

One of the points in the article that's very true for me is that I have a big music library of new music that's not from the traditional mainstream publishers. I'm always picking up new stuff that I get leads on. (Which reminds me there was someone here that said they had a new album out and I got it, so that direct to consumer model works).

Things change due to technology. Buggy whips are mostly gone at this point and there isn't anyone lobbying congress about bringing them back.

coldtea3• 11 years ago

Someone said in the comments that “the voices that cried the loudest about this were people at the top of the food chain”.

In reality I think those were just the voices that were heard more. Because obviously being at the top of the food chain gives them more visibility. Plenty of small-scale artists cried too, but nobody heard them or cared for.

Regardless of what people NOT in the music business will say, the thing, from all I’ve been able to gather, goes like this:

1) Album sales ―which before mp3s used to be a decent way for a small scale independent artist to make a living (shifting even 50.000 units was enough to live on as an independent artist in the eighties and early nineties)― have dried up.

Top acts sell this myth in their interviews that if you weren’t in the charts, or you barely made spot number 46 for example you might as well not exist. That, in IT terms, is like saying that 37 Signals is not a “real company” and only Google and Facebook are. Just because they were used to limos and champagne release parties doesn’t mean the thousands of artists outside top-100 didn’t make a living and create their art.

So, yeah, there WAS a huge, booming scene outside the “Billboard Top 100” (not to mention the UK and regional European scenes, and obviously elsewhere in the developed world), and those musicians could make a decent living too.

Mp3 and streaming have killed that for the most part (the “decent living”, not the scene part).

1.2) A small aside regarding this:

You’ll hear musicians tell horror stories about how the company took all their profits, and even charged them for recording costs, held their advance etc (e.g. the classic rant by Steve Albini). That was something that mostly happened to first-time stars and star-struck kids.

Musicians with some experience in the game, independent lower-volume selling acts etc, could always go to an independent label, have better contracts and a personal experience, etc. And of course those independent musicians also didn’t need 1.5 year in the studio to make an album, blowing most of their time (and advance money) on hookers and coke.

2) In the early days of mp3 (and still today) you heard people saying “piracy hasn’t harmed album sales, I buy more music now, since I can hear more stuff before I decide what to buy” etc.

Those people were either outliers or telling BS — the declining numbers of both CD and digital sales all this time disprove their claims.

3) There’s another suggestion often heard to “make money from playing live”.

First, for smaller bands (that weren’t the Rolling Stones or the Grateful Dead), live shows were a loss leader for album sales — and it’s not much better now. In fact, in most of the world, people — when adjusted for growing up — go to fewer live shows that they used to.

Second, while this might work for some, it’s a very american thing to assume that musicians exist to “play live”. In Europe there were lots of electronic musicians (not DJ/EDM style) having decent album sales that never cared for playing live.

There’s also the issue that a musician with 30.000 fans buying their albums around the world, might not have the required number of fans in any single town (apart from his hometown or some mega-city like NY) to hold concerts. And with the 30.000 fans becoming 2.000 people still buying his CD (and 28.000 just downloading it of somewhere) the artist is now screwed.

Then there’s the inane “sell merchandise” “solution”, as if a musician is just some merchant, and if one thing (selling music) doesn’t work, he’ll just pivot to selling some other stuff.

Not to mention that all those ideas are based on very US-centric perception, where all music that matters contains guitars and plays live, and all musicians are selling to 13 to 25 year old kids (because those are the primarily buyers of BS band merchandise — not 40 or 50 year old jazz, blues, electronica etc fans).

4) Streaming just made all of this worse.

5) I’m not saying we can go back in time. Or that we have some duty to provide musicians with a living if their business model doesn’t work.

I’m Just stating this, to recap: independent musicians that used to do well income-wise in the album days, are fucked up in the digital/streaming/piracy days.

That doesn’t stop them making music (especially since you can now create something from your home studio that used to take thousands upon thousands in studio time and you can release on your own on the internet), but it does stop them making a career in music, in the way musicians in the 70s, 80s and 90s used to.

davidw2• 11 years ago

Second, while this might work for some, it’s a very american thing to assume that musicians exist to “play live”. In Europe there were lots of electronic musicians (not DJ/EDM style) having decent album sales that never cared for playing live.

There are plenty of US artists who are sort of in that category too: Brian Wilson comes to mind.

At least in Italy, there are a lot of taxes and bureaucracy involved in live shows that definitely put a damper on live music.

Kalium2• 11 years ago

Then there’s the inane “sell merchandise” “solution”, as if a musician is just some merchant, and if one thing (selling music) doesn’t work, he’ll just pivot to selling some other stuff.

A musician is just some merchant. Pretending otherwise is not only foolish, but a recipe for pain.

coldtea3• 11 years ago

Yes, they are merchants of music.

Whether they can make money selling tshirts with his band's logo is as relevant to their career as musicians as is whether they can make money selling cupcakes on the side.

kpennell• 11 years ago

Nice write up. Crazy to see it far down.

sheepmullet3• 11 years ago

I don't think the problem is piracy. I think the "problem" stems from the huge amount of good quality cheap content we have available.

I have around 1 hour of free time each weekday to spend on entertainment.

I have so many cheap sources of content, costing well under $1/hr, vying for my time. All available on demand.

Content decays very slowly. A good show from the 90's is still worth watching today. Good music from the 80's and 90's is still worth listening to today.

I just spent the last 3 months of my small amount of free time re-watching Friends. For the 2 months before that it was playing dota and watching starcraft2 videos on youtube.

coldtea3• 11 years ago

That's part of it -- music today competes with YouTube, the internet, games, social media, mobile, tv series, 100+ channels, etc. Most teenagers -- the de facto pop music consumers -- don't care for music the way teenagers in decades without all these did, when a new album was a window to another world.

But music sales have started declining even before all those become prevalent -- youtube, social media, mobile, all either began or become popular circa 2005. In 1997-2005, it was mostly the "free" downloads that did music sales in.

Now it's a combination of these and of all the other stuff competing for people's attention and winning it.

davidw2• 11 years ago

I'd like to see more discussion, numbers and focus on the 'margin' - those people who are on the edge of being able to work full time on their art/music/whatever. That's where gains or losses will be, not with bands that can sell out stadiums.

zeveb• 11 years ago

As a society, what we most want to ensure is that the artists can prosper — not the record labels or studios or publishing conglomerates, but the writers, musicians, directors and actors themselves.

I'd think that as a society what we most want to ensure is that art prospers. If that means prospering artists, great. But the goal for society is not wealthy artists but a wealth of art.

saint_fiasco• 11 years ago

There is already more art than can be consumed in a lifetime. I think at this point, some people really do buy art to support high status artists.

multinglets2• 11 years ago

Nothing will ever be more bewildering than the people who get all sanctimonious that some rando can no longer get rich turning his blues scale riff into a 7 year marketing cicada.

People who actually care about music and can do something unique with it are currently taking advantage of the internet's costless promotional channels, getting famous, and making a perfectly good living off of youtube views if nothing else.

The real issue is that these promotional channels exist and the entrenched players don't control them, so they can't fabricate a superstar out of regurgitated shitmusic anymore. Cry me a river, mainstream media. Cry me a river, narcissistic "band" who aspires to be millionaires.

bsder• 11 years ago

People who actually care about music and can do something unique with it are currently taking advantage of the internet's costless promotional channels, getting famous, and making a perfectly good living off of youtube views if nothing else.

Hogwash. Every heard of Mike Keneally? Exactly. He fits your description to a T.

Except that you have heard of him. He plays for this guy: http://www.satriani.com/splash/

Oh, and he happens to play guitar in this band: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dethklok

Now, if that guy can't make it work, I doubt anybody can.

leoedin• 11 years ago

It would be far more informative if you could tell us why he isn't making it work? Is he not making a living playing music?

Regardless, music is the ultimate free market. Regardless of how talented you are, if you don't make something that people will vote with their money to see, you won't make any money. This hasn't changed for 50 years and has absolutely nothing to do with the fall of record sales. 30 years ago talented musicians were still being ignored because their genre wasn't fashionable.

Do you really doubt that anyone can make it work as a professional musician? Really? Because I don't work anywhere near the music industry and I know a handful of professional musicians. Sure, there's far more people who play instruments and can't make it work professionally, but that's always been the case.

multinglets2• 11 years ago

Is Mike Keneally living in poverty or something? And are you honestly suggesting there aren't many many artists who make a living independently via their web presence?

jpatokal2• 11 years ago

Interesting read, but there's one fairly major shift the author missed: the transition away from long-form printed books into bite-sized, often free/ad-supported online content.

In the charge-by-the-piece print publishing world, the economics don't work for anything smaller than a hundred pages or so, which means you need to get a single author to write a lot (= a book) or compile together a bunch of stuff from different authors (= magazines, anthologies, etc). We take this as granted, but a hundred years ago smaller works were still common: Marx's Communist Manifesto was a 30-page pamphlet.

In the online world, this is no longer a concern. Much of my print reading has been replaced by following blogs, many of them on "serious" topics, where even the longest post is rarely longer than a single book chapter. And whereas it was previously quite difficult for an unknown to get accepted into a magazine, much less a book, it's now an everyday occurrence for an aggregator like HN to pick up a piece and get tens of thousands of readers for it. This parallels what we're seeing in music and film: the barrier to entry has been drastically lowered, but the effort/skill/luck needed to make money off it has gone up to compensate.

The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t

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