solarbird:

numb3r5ev3n:

You Can’t Make a Living: Digital Media, the End of TV’s Golden…

stormingtheivory:

Cable bundling is the system that until now has provided the economic
subsidies for many expensive, high-quality, but ultimately
niche-oriented shows. Unbundling AMC and HBO from ESPN and QVC – indeed,
unbundling Game of Thrones from Olive Kitteridge –
and allowing audiences to pick and choose in a kind of pay-as-you-go
system would inevitably decrease the number and variety of options
available. In a strictly à la carte system, the fees charged to
consumers for watching a show would have to exceed the budget for
production, marketing and distribution of the show itself in every case,
without exception, on a show-by-show basis. Every show on television,
or the internet, no matter how adventurous or expensive, would be
subject to this cutthroat, all-or-nothing popularity contest. Risks
would therefore become much harder to take. […]

And this is assuming that anyone is willing to pay for the shows they
watch at all. As internet pioneer turned techo-skeptic Jaron Lanier
starkly puts it in his 2010 screed You Are Not a Gadget, “Once
file sharing shrinks Hollywood as it is now shrinking the music
companies, the option of selling a script for enough money to make a
living will be gone.” Lanier’s warning may seem hyperbolic, but
unrestricted file sharing is surely what undermined the music industry,
and it’s what’s hurting the world of journalism, too. In a sense, the
internet caused the unbundling of both the music album and the print
newspaper — and in doing so, severely damaged both industries. The
trouble comes down to simple economics of supply and demand in the
digital age. When infinite copies of a work of art can be made and
distributed globally in an instant, supply is limitless, and the value
of an individual copy gets pushed down to zero. But of course, the
original cost of creating a work of art in the first place, for the
creator, does not change a bit. Writers still need to eat, pay rent, and
feed their families. They just can’t necessarily rely on profits from
their actual work to compensate them for that endeavor. This is how a
profession gets demonetized. This is how a job — a living — gets reduced
to a hobby.

The music industry was going to shrink anyway and shot itself in the foot besides. This has already been roundly dismissed, boring boring boring. And yeah artists need to eat but SHOCKINGLY SO DO CONSUMERS AND WE ARE BEING SQUEEZED FROM EVERY DIRECTION OF COURSE WE ARE LEERY OF PAYING FOR SHIT.

Here’s a solution: full communism now. Here’s another solution: old media should pull its head out of its ass, or at least have the decency to finally suffocate in there.

Don’t sell me a shitty situation and tell me it’s the only alternative. Get creative. Isn’t that what capitalists are supposed to do? Be entrepreneurs? And if they can’t do that, again, maybe it’s time we recognized that the problem isn’t the consumer, it’s capitalism. Capitalism is the enemy of art, not people who are just trying to fucking survive.

How the music industry made owning music have negative value.