Age of Abundance: the inversion of media power

[fjtorres]

Long, detailed read documenting the explosion of content availability across most media types--music, video, books--and the shift of power/control from middlemen distributors towards consumers. Plus a (hopeful) speculation that a new breed of gatekeeper/influencer will come to power.

https://redef.com/original/age-of-ab...media-industry

If you read a list of mankind’s most important or influential inventions, there’s not far you could go without coming across those of Thomas Edison. Oddly, however, it’s unlikely you’d ever see the device he so-routinely identified as his favorite: the phonograph. While it didn’t defeat disease, conquer the night skies or take flight, the phonograph was just as Promethean as vaccines, electricity and the Wright Brothers’ ‘Flyer’. For thousands of years, media was a privilege of the elite, concentrated in cities and confined to a single moment in time. With Edison’s phonograph, music had become non-rivalrous, infinitely replicable and indefinite. Yes, it took decades until the average family could afford a record player or radio, but the dawn of democratized consumption had arrived.

Unfortunately, however, this same trend led to an ossification in content creation and distribution. Records, after all, cost money. Production was expensive – as was distribution, marketing and promotion. So expensive, in fact, that almost every artist lacked the capital required to actually release their music – a need that paved the way for record labels (or TV studios, film studios, publishers etc.) that would finance said efforts in exchange for hefty royalty fees and content rights. These money men though wouldn’t and couldn’t afford to invest in every artist with a dream. Given the upfront cost of talent development and distribution, labels invested in “Arts & Repertoire” men, whose job it was to sift through countless musicians in order to identify the select few with “commercial viability”. Potential artists were then further cut down in number when it came time to actually distributing their content – and then again via marketing/promotional support. Underlying this fact was an unavoidable truth: content publishers had scale-related disincentives to support more than a handful of artists. Why record, distribute, market and promote 15 albums if you can achieve the same unit sales with 10?

Though this system was far from ideal, it was the inevitable outcome of a market in which talent was abundant, capital limited, distribution bandwidth (e.g. shelf-space, broadcast spectrum, print layouts) scarce, barriers high, and the cost of failure significant. But as a result, the content industry slowly shaped itself around a mysterious cabal of financiers and executive tastemakers that essentially programmed the national media identity. And anyone who wanted in had to move to New York, LA or Nashville, pay their dues and hope to work their way up until they could call the shots.

But it took until the late 2000s – more than a century after the phonograph – for creation and distribution to truly democratize. With the Internet, distribution became free and truly non-rival (if a bit non-excludable), while the proliferation of low-cost media equipment, mobile devices, and powerful editing software dramatically lowered the costs of production. The rise of creator-based consumption platforms and crowd-funding platforms, meanwhile, eliminated many of the remaining barriers hindering independent content creation. This meant that content could not only be created by those outside the business, but that commercializing this content became significantly less expensive and risky. This led to a massive increase in available, indexed and distributed content.

This metamorphosis is about far more than ever increasing amounts of content and a handful of stars existing outside the traditional media ecosystem. The entire media business is inverting. For decades, scarce capital and constrained distribution capacity meant that the media’s industry bottlenecks sat in the middle of the value chain. Today, however, the bottleneck has moved to the very end: consumer attention. This shifts the balance of power from determining what should be made to finding a way to convince people what to watch, listen to or read in a world of infinitely abundant content.

Much more at the source, with pretty pictures and curves.
A good insight into the new normal for content consumption: they effectively described where we are and where we're moving, though I'm skeptical of the amount of power their influencers will accrue, individually or collectively. They're herding cats.

Still, they're not wrong.

Worth a read.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Long, detailed read documenting the explosion of content availability across most media types--music, video, books--and the shift of power/control from middlemen distributors towards consumers. Plus a (hopeful) speculation that a new breed of gatekeeper/influencer will come to power.

https://redef.com/original/age-of-ab...media-industry




Much more at the source, with pretty pictures and curves.
A good insight into the new normal for content consumption: they effectively described where we are and where we're moving, though I'm skeptical of the amount of power their influencers will accrue, individually or collectively. They're herding cats.

Still, they're not wrong.

Worth a read.

The idea of influencers has been around for a while, Gladwell mentioned it in his book Tipping Point. Certainly, people trust word of mouth a lot more than they trust ads. Word of mouth is more important now because one can reach a lot more than just your immediate friends now.

Does this mean they are a new breed of gatekeeper? Probably not. Oprah talking about the latest book/good/show/whatever certainly is influential, but that's been the case for a while and isn't really a gatekeeper per se. You don't have to go through Oprah unless of course, your target audience is Oprah fans. Same for Rush Limbaugh or any media figure with a big following.

Way back when, I discovered David Weber through the recommendation of someone who worked at the SF&Mystery bookstore (who just happened to be related to Weber). She was an infuencer but not a gatekeeper.

To a certainly extent, one can compare twitter/facebook influencers with the radio DJ's way back when. DJ's were never gatekeepers per se, each only had influence over a small set of listeners. Playing a song over and over again might get their listeners to buy it, but that's only true in a small radio footprint.

The idea of a gatekeeper, such as the old music companies or book publishers, is a different dynamic entirely.

[Greg Anos]

The price of abundant things are very, very, low. (One could say the whole purpose of advertising was to made something that was very abundant appear to be scarce and therefore valuable.)

Remember - it is not just the newest piece of entertainment that is competing for the limited purchaser's time, it is every existing piece of entertainment.

Is there a difference between "new" and "new to me"? There is more than a 1,000 lifetimes worth of existing entertainment out there - some of it truly free. Curating may help, but. . . how do you curate the curators?

Just some food for thought.

(I covered some of this a decade ago, with a monograph here on Mobileread. And the world changed. Particularly under the chapter Jet Fighters Over North Vietnam.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Remember - it is not just the newest piece of entertainment that is competing for the limited purchaser's time, it is every existing piece of entertainment.

Is there a difference between "new" and "new to me"? There is more than a 1,000 lifetimes worth of existing entertainment out there - some of it truly free.

Yup.
The old Qwest commercials really nailed it, twenty years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAxtxPAUcwQ

We're riding the light.

[cfrizz]

My favorite line in the whole article!

"The gatekeepers are still manning their posts, but the city outgrew the walls and the barbarians circumvented the gates entirely."