The Death of the Entertainment Industry (or at least Movies)

This is an incredibly subjective comment however, one often followed by its close friend 'I used to like them before they sold out'.

 

How can quality of music ever be anything but subjective? You can't say the music sales market was what drove the quality of music down to then say that the weight of the concert market towards older acts shows that quality has declined. Both points contradict each other. All it suggest to me is that the markets for music sales and markets for concerts are seperate.

Correlation does not imply causation. The weight towards pre 95 albums on both critics and best selling lists is easily explainable by the market shift away from album driven towards singles driven.

 

The movie industry will always come up with new gimmicks to keep us coming to theatres. The Drive-In will never die because it's the only place you can see a movie on the big screen while smoking weed and getting a hand job, though it could try going digital because the shitty picture resolutionhas NOT improved.

3-D has people flocking to theatres again, mostly thanks to Avatar, which had effects that trumped Jurrassic Park and even 2001 (and a dumb plot to go with). However, it will eventually grow as tiresome as the shitty 3-D from the 50's and 80's, and then what? I'm interested to see what's next, if the movie industry even HAS a plan (aside from seeing if they can spend a billion dollars producing one movie alone, which WILL happen eventually).

 

Well, but doesn't that just mean we're too close to the mid-90's to really see the impact those albums will have? I'm pretty sure plenty of musicians today (who were, say, 12 years old back then) have been heavily influenced by bands from this list: <a class="postlink" href="http://rateyourmusic.com/list/justarunner/25_best_albums_of_1994" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://rateyourmusic.com/list/justarunn ... ms_of_1994</a>

Also, I think your "of which rap and hip-hop are really just sub genres" comment grossly undercuts the influence the rap/hip-hop genre has had. Lil Wayne sold 1.5 million records in a week, and in terms of album sales, the only company Jay-Z has is Elvis and the Beatles, so...

Staying on music, the quality is only getting better, based on my first hand experience. I remember going to local shows at 18 knowing there was, at best, a 50/50 chance that the band would be watchable. Two weeks ago I went to a 100% non-mainstream music fest, and probably watched the better part of 25 sets. Roughly five failed to hold my interest, a good ten of them were solid, and four of them full out blew me away. The others were experimental, weird-for-the-sake-of-weird acts who were more spectacles than musical performances. My point is, 90% of them didn't play music that I'm into, but I couldn't help but be impressed by the overall quality of musicianship. I can only credit this to the unprecedented access to music and music making technology.

As for the topic, I agree there is way more choice (that's not an opinion at this point, really), but I would never say it's too much. I think it's only making things better. To me, the more people doing something means that if someone wants to do that same thing and get noticed, he or she will have to work that much harder to be that much better at it. It also means there will be lots of crap in a quantitative sense, but that in turn makes the best of the best better than ever.

I think the "death" of the entertainment industry is just another part of the huge change coming as a result of the information revolution. We're only at the beginning, and I can't freakin wait for what's coming next.

 

1: The movie industry is not dying. Radio didn't disappear when tv came along, tv, newspapers, radio are still here despite the internet, movies didn't die when video games reached cinematic quality, etc...The movie industry is changing, due to increased competition and more ways of generating revenue.

2. We have FAR more choices on how to spend our free time. Tv, movies, sporting events, books and video games have all gotten much better over recent years at holding our attention, the internet has become far more intuitive and idiot-friendly as it's grown up, we now have access to entertainment nearly anywhere, and it can be acquired for cheap or free. None of this includes actual hobbies (you remember, the stuff we used to do outside), which have not gone away. Movies are dealing with a more competitive field and they are limited by the structure of purchasing a seat in a theater and the shelf-life of a movie. Most entertainment is dependent on the consumer providing the requisite technology and the producers supplying content (you have to first buy the Xbox, computer/ISP, televison, etc. then purchase and consume content). Movies supply everything necessary, but they do so at a high cost with fewer opportunities to distribute, and with numerous limits on how long they can run a movie, how long you will sit through one, how many screens they have, etc.

In other words, there used to be one ESPN, now there are several. Tv used to stop broadcasting at night, now it's 24/7, with thousands of channels. The average non-professional sporting event rarely received much attention, now with a plethora of tv stations and the added attention of the internet, there's more incentive to watch college baseball, professional poker, MMA or other events. Video games were originally intended for children, now they have attracted millions of long-term consumers that spend billions of dollars and hours on them. Movies have not significantly changed how they are consumed, while everything else has.

3. When can we agree that movies are not art? If you look at movies as art, it's abysmally dumb and repetitive. If you look at movies as a way of marketing, to get millions of people to watch "content" then go buy the DVD, toys, and merchandising, to watch the next production featuring the people behind it, to see the product placement, then it makes a bit more sense why they are designed to appeal to a wider range of people. Not all movies are like this, but it's becoming harder and harder to make something like Pulp Fiction in an environment saturated by things like "insert nearly any movie title of the last 10 years here." It's too formulaic for art, but stepping out of the formula is too risky to ensure value.

 

I concur with your observation. Several of my favorite films did poorly at the box office but are cult classics or otherwise very beautiful movies.

I want to address a negative rep that I received because it directly relates to the thread:

You're missing the blatantly oblivious. Of course he hasn't created anything of "value" because none of it is his original material. As I mentioned in my original post, this is nothing new to me because I've been keeping up with local and national DJs who've done the same thing since the mid 90s and moved onto other things. The point is that he made something that was formerly relatively unknown fairly accessible to the mainstream, which in turn appeals to the lowest common denominator. You think the title "Feed the Animals" was done by accident?

 

Where are you getting this 15 percent figure? I have heard different numbers cited for worldwide box office revenues as a percentage of the total, anywhere from 30-60 percent. I've never heard of anything as low as 15%.

 

Regarding the music industry , I heard a statistic that 5% of all music released makes up for 95% of overall sales and only some 5% of music released (albums in particular) sells more than 5000 copies. (Officially anyway)

Its no wonder we are subjected to so much commercial rubbish via the mainstream media.

 

Ugh. I was worried someone was going to name-drop the biggest hack in the entire music industry. Speaking as a D.J, D.J's that use computers instead of players are hacks. There is simply no skill involved whatsoever. Re-titled mash-ups are created by hacks. Why this hipster asshole is known by ANYONE is beyond me. HE is what is wrong with the music industry. The fact that some asshole with a laptop and ProTools who shoots confetti around at his shows can become famous is living proof how stupid people are nowadays. What's next, celebrities created by their video game skills? Face the facts. The terrorists have won.

 

@Crown Royal + whoever repped Latin Groove:

Now, I'm pretty sure Crown Royal thinks I'm a hipster douche because of the fact that most of the music I post here is, well, somewhat hipsterish (Team Teamwork, Dan Deacon, etc), but that isn't true. That music is like 10% of my library.

That being said, Girl Talk is not the end of music, not the 4th Reich, and is not going to make our collective penises smaller. I don't even LIKE Girl Talk (some of my friends do, it comes on at parties and I do my best to ignore it) but right now, I'm regarding him as a little blip. He'll pass. Once the trend of music swings away from "catchy" 120 bpm dance singles, you won't hear much from him anymore. And really, it could be much worse than him.

 

I'm not sure if I'm just not making myself clear or you people are just not listening. I didn't say he had talent. I thought it was pretty obvious that I implied he brought something that wasn't in the mainstream into the mainstream and made money off of it in the process.

What do you think drives the celebrity industry? You think we have cunts like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan because they have talent?

 

http://blogs.chron.com/celebritybuzz/2010/06/radiohead_frontman_music_indus.html

If Thom Yorke says it's true . . .

As Radiohead offered their last album, essentially, for free, I think he has a point. As has been said the traditional ways of making money in the film and music businesses seem to be on their way out.

 

From what I can tell, the only studio going bankrupt is MGM, and more out of faulty business moves than any paradigm shift in the entertainment industry. I can’t name profit margins per se, but 2009 was a record year for domestic box office numbers; something like $10 billion across the whole year, and a record summer season that raked in $4.71 billion, more than any-single season in movie history.

If you’re browsing box office mojo and looking solely at theatrical gross, obviously you’re going to find some alarming numbers and make some conclusions, but that’s only because theatrical gross has evolved into a classic loss leader. Because films are so expensive to make, studios routinely strategize their investments in hopes that exposure in theaters will make profitable returns in ancillary revenue streams (DVD, HBO, etc). The first six months in 2009, I think there were five films to make the black on their production budget just in theaters (Taken, Madea Goes to Jail, The Hangover, and Paul Blart ), when something like 90 films had been released. Five, out of 90. And that was when domestic gross was at an all-time high. Fact of the matter is movies just don’t make money theatrically anymore.

But to take those numbers and conclude that it’s the end of the entertainment business is faulty. From what I can tell, this has been going on for the last ten years; Hollywood simply adapted and resurfaced their investment strategies to cover the huge losses gained from theatrical release. It comes in online downloading (pay sites obviously), Netflix, Encore and HBO, and especially DVD sales. Even planes showing the movies cough up a cut of the bargain – like you said, there’s so many options out there. It doesn’t mean the entertainment business is going down. It’s just that theatrical gross is one of the lesser revenue streams in movies.

I’m not in the biz and I’m gathering most of these facts through paltry research and last year’s riveting Biscuits vs. Tucker debate, but I think Hollywood’s gonna hang on financially. Whether we’ll get another Godfather anytime soon is a whole different matter.

 

And UA, for putting Tom Cruise in charge.

 

When Paramount originally acquired the movie rights to The Godfather, they were only willing to put up $2 million for production, and although Francis Ford Coppola turned down the shot at directing it when he was first offered it, he alone is the reason it got made. He convinced the execs at Paramount to up the budget to $6 million and also managed to get the studio interested in picking up Marlon Brando, who was not in good standing at the time.

We'll get another Godfather and movies of that caliber when more directors take stands for what they really want out a film. I'm sure there are some who already do, but we can always do with more.

I originally read this story in a Bathroom Reader, but looked into it further to see if it was actually true and found that it was. If I find a link or another source of some kind I'll post it up here.

 

Ever hear of inflation? Or that revenue does not equal profit?

When you take both of those into account, you realize 2009 was not some great, record-setting year. (Although it was better than most years in the 2000s) It's why in my first post, I outlined that revenue had increased by a factor of 2.7 from 1982 to 2003, and cost went up by a factor of 5.4 in the same period.

Since, profit = revenue - cost, that means theatrical profit has gone down.

Firstly, 2009 was not a historically great year, as mentioned above. Secondly, I'm well aware of ancillary rights, but they're not as large as you imagine, and are drying up. The amount of money movies make from both DVD and Blu-Ray sales combined is, on average, significantly less than the worldwide theatrical gross.

This is where you're wrong.

Everything you mentioned above, including PPV (another market that is on its death knell, and far smaller than it was back in the 90s) is far less lucrative than it used to be. Hell, go back and compare VHS sales to DVD sales today. The former was much greater than the latter.

By the way, if you want some sense of how things compare with inflation taken into account, look at this list;

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm</a>

Avatar (at number 14) and The Dark Knight (at number 28) are the only two films from the 2000s that even crack the top 30. Compare that to the 90s (5 films, highest at number 6), 80s (4 films, highest at number 4), 70s (6 films, highest at number 2), etc.

It has nothing to do with this topic, but what is with this obsession and constant mention of "The Godfather" I keep seeing here?

They're an excellent couple of movies, slightly worse than the great book it was adapted from. There have been several films in the last couple years that are miles better. Neither "Godfather" is even Coppola's best film. (That would be "Apocalypse Now")

Yeah, those are all debatable opinions, but I find it weird that everyone here keeps proclaiming them as the be all end all, instead of dozens of other classic pictures.

 

Data from AMR. My figures are based off Worldwide annual Studio Revenue, I assume you are looking box office centric data that doesn't properly account for revenue from studio libraries.