Let me start by saying that I like newspapers. And let me say further that, no matter how much I like them, they just might not have a future.
The Internet chews up media and spits them out again. Sometimes they get more robust. Sometimes they get more profitable. Sometimes they die.
It's a scary thought, especially if you're personally attached to an old medium like movies, books, records, or newspapers.
But just because an industry is socially worthy, it doesn't follow that it is commercially viable. Today, besides newspapers, three other media are thrashing over their futures in a networked world, and as with newspapers, the rhetoric is mostly of the nonproductive "But I like it!" and "It's good for society!" variety, with not enough thought given to whether these media are commercially viable in the Internet age.
In this report, we will take a closer look at the "media-morphosis" taking place across traditional media -- and what that tells us about the future.
Contents:
— Cory Doctorow, Internet activist, blogger, co-editor of Boing Boing
Next Page: Newspapers
The imminent collapse of the American newspaper industry has spawned entire gazeteers' worth of high-minded handwringing about the social value of newspapers and the social harm that their disappearance will unleash. It's probably all true. I love the smudgy old devils, from the headlines to the funny pages.
Newspapers are fundamentally an advertising-supported medium. Advertisers place ads in newspapers because they believe these ads will sell more products for them. The price of an ad is set by four factors:
What happened to newspapers is easy to understand: There are more and better ways for an advertiser to deliver ads of similar quality to the "spendiest" newspaper readers, most of them on the Internet.
Yes, there are large groups of people who read newspapers but fall below average on Internet use. Seniors, for example -- a group of people who are apt to have already established their brand loyalties, to be focused on low prices, and to have a the motivation and discretionary time to thoroughly research their purchases. Thus, many advertisers won't pay as much to reach those readers.
Next Page: Big-Budget Movies
Big-budget movies (BBMs) require a lot of capital and rely on studios controlling the rate and nature of distribution of the finished product. If you're going to recoup your $300 million box-office turd, you need to move a hell of a lot of DVDs, TV licenses, foreign exhibition, Happy Meal toys, and assorted "secondary" revenues.
Let's be realistic here: Nothing anyone does is going to make it harder to get movies when you want them, where you want them, and at whatever price you feel you should pay for them (including free). And the harder you crack down on Internet movie-downloading, the more attractive you make buying pirate DVDs from criminals on the street -- a virtually zero-risk transaction that directly displaces DVD purchases.
What's more, no one has yet successfully crowdsourced a movie that looks and feels like a BBM. There are lots of fabulous 9-minute YouTube Inc. videos, and plenty of lovely and promising machinima flicks, but no one's yet built the kind of purely escapist, high-production-value feature that we flock to the cinema to see every summer.
Now, maybe film studios can do what Magnolia Pictures is doing -- distributing day-and-date releases to satellite, pay-per-view, cinema, DVD, and foreign film outlets -- and recapture a lot of the money that is squirting between the fingers of the tightly clenched release-window fist. But if it's not enough, commercially motivated BBMs might simply die.
Note that movies as a genre won't vanish. There's plenty to love about 9-minute YouTubes and the quirky features that come out of indie production houses. There's never been a time when more moving pictures were being produced and viewed than today. Many of these things are economic propositions, and many are not -- they're a lot more like stage shows than they are like films. They cost less to produce, they reach smaller, more targetted audiences, and they represent an admirable diversity of voice and point of view. But they're not Big, Culturally Relevant Media in the way that a real classic BBM can be.
The specific, rarefied animal that is the gigantic film spectacle demands a technological reality that has ceased to exist-- just enough technology to distribute the films everywhere, but not so much technology that the audience gets to overrule your distribution decisions.
So, we may be at the end of the period in cinematic history where we can convince investors to pony up $300 million to make a sequel to a sequel to a remake of a movie adapted from a 50-year-old comic book. Which isn't to say that no one will make these things henceforth -- give it a decade or two and there may well be rich weirdos who fund these productions the same way there are lovely old codgers who can be coaxed into putting up the dough to mount 15-hour, all-singing, all-dancing Wagner operas. Not a mass medium, nowhere near as culturally relevant as BBMs are today, but still a going concern as a vanity/prestige form.
And the rest of it? The secret is "cheap": making stuff for the Net just doesn't cost as much the audiovisual material we're used to seeing. It may not be as pretty, but at the rock-bottom prices that some of this stuff gets made for, it's viable to make a slightly crummy-looking YouTube video that's the exact, perfect video for you and 38 other people who are kinked just like you.
Some of this stuff will be sustainable through donations, other through advertising/sponsorship, and others still will be conducted on a non-economic basis. If your material is super-targeted to just the right audience, there's probably an advertiser out there looking to reach them with messages that really benefit from audiovisual treatment, who'll pay you a (relative) fortune for the chance to place an ad with you.
Next Page: Music
This is the easy one. The problem was that the record industry was built on per-unit income from CDs (and records and tapes and so on). The economics of this stink -- if you believe the record industry, they produce an ungodly number of expensive flops for every success.
Artists have gotten a notoriously raw deal from the record companies -- the average artist with a record deal earns $600 a year or less from it. Artists have "breakage" deducted from their royalty payments -- even payments on sales of digital downloads.
Whatever profitability there is in the system is seriously jeopardized by the music-listening public's ability to get any song they want, at any time, for any price (including free). And, just as with movies, it's never going to get harder to copy music without permission.
Now the good news: The more your music gets copied, the more people there are who will pay to see you perform it live. This may not support a record label with offices on five continents, but it can probably put a comparable (if not larger) amount of money into the pockets of a comparable (if not larger) quantity of artists.
There are artists who can't perform for beans. Those artists' futures are in trouble. Either they're going to have to produce studio music on a non-economic basis (most studio music is produced on this basis, thanks to super-cheap home studios that let anyone and everyone participate) or find sponsors, grants, or advertisers who'll keep them afloat.
But as a category, the future's looking good for recorded music and the musicians who make it.
Next Page: Books
This one's more of a mixed bag. On the one hand, Internet copying of printed matter is impossible to prevent -- no matter how much energy you attack this problem with, there's no stopping a reader who's willing to retype a book (scanning, of course, is even more efficient, and getting cheaper and easier by the day).
On the other hand, for many kinds of books -- long-form narratives, for instance -- reading off a screen is a poor substitute for a cheap and easy-to-buy codex. Not because screen quality is insufficient (if it were, we wouldn't all spend every hour that God sends sitting in front of our computers), but because computers are damned distracting.
And don't talk to me about ebook readers: Single-purpose devices that cost $400 a pop aren't going to be choice items for people who resent spending money on books. And they're not going to drop to $40 unless they sell in quantity, and that means adding more features to catch a bigger audience -- at which point your ebook reader is as distracting as a PC.
No, the bad news for books is twofold: First, the quantity and variety of titles carried outside of bookstores has radically declined, thanks to the rise of national big-box chain stores, who do all ordering from a centralized database. That means that it's much harder than it's ever been to stumble across a book at the grocery store that turns you into a lifelong reader. There's some damned fine bookstores out there for people who know that they want a book, but it's a lot harder to acquire that knowledge than it has been for a century or so.
The other problem is that we're increasingly conditioned to read short blocks of text -- more text than ever, but in radically different form than you generally find between covers. Combine this with the sheer amount of read-for-pleasure text available at one-click's distance on the Net, and even those of us who worship books find ourselves reading fewer of them.
Now for the good news: It doesn't cost much to write a novel (I should know, I write 'em). And it doesn't cost much to produce one -- getting cheaper every day, thanks to low-cost, computerized setup and printing.
Electronic books are poor substitutes for print books, which makes them great enticements for print books (enjoy the ebook? Buy the book!). And the Net makes it cheaper than ever to get a few novels into the hands of a few people who love them. Being cheap, novels lend themselves to all sorts of Internet-era business models -- advertising, sponsorship, direct sales, and so on.
If big-budget movies might turn into opera, then long-form narrative books might turn into poetry. There's a hell of a lot of published poetry -- more than ever -- mostly consumed by other poets and a small band of extremely dedicated followers of the form. A few poets make a big living at it, a few more make a marginal living at it, but for most poets, income is aspirational, not reality-based (this is pretty close to the situation in short fiction already, and not far off from the world of novel writing in many genres).
But a future in which novels turn into hand-crafted fetish items for a small group of literati is one in which the relevance of the novel dwindles away to a dribbly nothing.
I think that this one is a toss-up: If I wanted to rescue novels as a culturally relevant mainstream industry (and I do), I'd put the majority of my effort into figuring out ways to get a wide variety of books in front of people who don't go to bookstores.
That's my free idea for the month: If you want to save publishing, start a small, hand-crafted "distributor," complete with a sales force that lays down shoe-leather all day long, knocking on doors at non-bookstores, seeing if they'll sell a few titles to be re-stocked frequently.
There's plenty of ways you can imagine the Internet would help here: Hell, you could just feed the books that sold at the local fried chicken outlet on Friday into Amazon's "If you liked this book, you might like that book" engine and stock those titles the next day.
It may not work, but no one ever saved a medium by demanding that it be profitable because it was a social good. Sarkozy can give away free newspaper subs to 18-year-olds until les vaches come home, but it won't change the technological shifts that are bleeding out the old broadsheets.
— Cory Doctorow, Internet activist, blogger, co-editor of Boing Boing
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