Music 3.0 Music Industry Blog: entertainment spending

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

The Entertainment Sky Is Rising

If you read this blog with any kind of regularity, you know that I'm one who is quite optimistic about the entertainment business, and the music business in particular. You hear a lot of doom and gloom and rather bold "sky is falling" statements in the media, but most of them are from the old guard of the business who's business is under attack.

It's quite true that things are different fiscally than they've ever been before, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. All it means is that the entertainment world as we know it is morphing, shifting and evolving to a new model. If you're part of the old school, the last thing you want is this change because things were so comfortable as they were, but it's too late - we're in the middle of something completely new. It's Music 3.0.

Here's a great inforgraphic from Techdirt by way of the great Hypebot blog that explains how the entertainment sky is rising rather than falling.

Entertainment Sky Is Rising image from Bobby Owsinski's Music 3.0 blog

You can find a nice presentation of the full report over at Hypbot.

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Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Why The Decline In Entertainment Spending Is A Good Thing

I've been accused of being negative lately in my posts and I guess if you look at them a certain way, that's true (sorry, don't mean to be). The fact is that there aren't a whole lot of positive stories around about the music business these days.

Actually, I don't see these stories as negative from the point of view that the sky is falling, and everything sucks and is dying, as much from the viewpoint that the business is in the middle of deep change and evolution. As with life, as one part dies, another is renewed.

That being said, the LA Times ran a story the other day showing how spending has declined in most sectors (not all) of the entertainment business.

Want to know the positive of the above graphic? Perhaps homogenized corporate entertainment has finally hit the wall.

It doesn't matter what form of entertainment, it has always been at it's most creative and vital when run by passionate fans. Television, the film industry, and the music business have all had their heydays when run by entrepreneurs that truly cared about the product and their customers. It's when those entrepreneurs are bought out by multinational companies and the suits take over that the product becomes watered down in the search for greater and greater profits. Sooner or later the product suffers to a degree that the consumer is no longer an automatic buy and becomes desensitized to the entire genre. Sound familiar?

The numbers on the chart above are actually a good thing. It signals the beginning of the end of an era for many facets of the entertainment industry. Soon big business will want to divest because the profits just aren't what they used to be (if they're still there at all), and we'll be back to an era of fan/entrepreneur/owner. We may not see it happen tomorrow, but we will see it happen eventually. And our entertainment will be much better for it.