This Media Life

Grin and Share It

But this, in a nutshell, is the problem: Blockbusters are the most affected by piracy, and less commercial work the least affected.

The industry’s argument—that without the industry itself setting the price and gathering and distributing the proceeds, there would be no incentives for the artists to create the product—is obviously spurious. Rather, there will be less incentive to create blockbuster products—less incentive, one might reasonably argue, to create predictable, homogenized, crummy stuff.

In other words, what we have here is potentially very good news: It doesn’t really take too much to imagine that the undermining of the present distribution systems will be a net gain for the quality of music and film.

If there is no way to make money off the mass-market blockbuster, then emphasis and interest returns to the creation of more individualized work (the people who were interested only in the windfall-profit margins go into other businesses). Art for art’s sake, even—wherein the business model emerges after the art is made. There’s the potential here for a cultural inversion. Instead of making products that we hope will sell, we instead make products that won’t sell very much, that in fact are purposefully designed not to appeal to the disposable culture—and most precisely not to appeal to teenagers.

Indeed, any parent who’s ever despaired about the pervasive influence of pop culture, the lowest-common-denominator sexing-up of every teen, the free-for-all of mindless vulgarity, ought to be slyly encouraging his or her kids to ramp up their downloading and hence help destroy the system. Pop culture eats itself.

In some sense, what you begin to imagine here is a pre-media-conglomerate condition.

There’s much less money available, so pride of authorship becomes a large reward. You’re looking for passionate devotees (who may actually pay) instead of the passing interest of a cheap-thrills audience. What’s more, because there is so much less money in the system, you remove the middlemen. Agents, suits, focus groups—gone.

Now, I know this borders on the idealized and sentimental, but bear with me. The industry is arguing the narrow legal issues. It’s arguing, in fact, many of the restrictive points it helped enshrine in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It argues, too, on a moral level (however prosaic): Downloading is just a form of shoplifting.

But the industry Sturm und Drang is in some sense much more akin to the keening about unfair competition and the plaintive calls for new protective measures that invariably occur when industries are under siege from cheaper producers overseas. The entertainment industry is like Big Steel or Detroit or the apparel manufacturers. Entertainment, like those other industries, can claim that it is being laid low by the disloyalty and perfidy of its customers and the lack of protection afforded it by an ungrateful government, but soon enough it becomes clear that, simply, somebody else is doing its job cheaper and better.

“Even though resistance is futile, there’s still a great deal of money that can be spent on futile resistance.”

Movie studios and music companies achieved their wealth and monopoly because they offered a more efficient distribution system. Now that system is being trumped by the greater efficiency of peer-to-peer exchange.

It is not lawless teens who are wreaking all this havoc but the marketplace.

In fact, the courts and legislature will surely be predisposed to protect the entertainment industry, as they are inclined (at least initially) to protect all important and powerful sectors of the economy. Entertainment is, after all, not only one of the largest industries in the U.S. but one of our most successful exports.

Still, the real aim here, which some but certainly not all entertainment executives appreciate, is not to stop the downloading but merely to slow its impact. A soft landing would be nice.

But it isn’t the end.

Or it is, relatively speaking, the end of significant aspects of the content-distribution conglomerates. I suppose you could even argue that downloading is, consciously or not, a form of passive resistance. Gandhi making his homespun. A stand against perceptual imperialism! (It is notable how music and movie producers, once glamorous, are now widely regarded as grotesques.) But it certainly isn’t the end of movies or music—or even schemes to make money off movies or music.

Producing, manufacturing, and distribution, which represent much of the value supplied by the entertainment industry, are now pretty much idiot-proof. You can make music and movies without most of the costs that are now inherent in the entertainment-industry systems—and many people are.

As mass-market pop culture is being ripped off, another mom-and-pop culture is slowly moving into place.

If you think back to before the rise of the entertainment conglomerates, you get to a music industry made up largely of transitory, hit-or-miss labels. Tin Pan Alley. That’s where we’re heading. From there, a new music business will be formed. Likewise, the movie industry, which, in fact, is now riding high on selling the DVDs that will provide the digital wherewithal to steal the industry out from under itself, will shortly find itself as moribund as it found itself in the sixties—with television having eaten its lunch and the independents (and yes . . . foreign films) mocking the movies it did produce. And, quite possibly, the movie business will, as it once did, bounce back in some new sort of creative seventies (even without all that cocaine). Failure is regenerative.

And it’s worth mentioning, however much your children download, pop culture itself, alas, still won’t go away (although some of it will, and pop stars will be paid less, which can only be a good thing). It just gets invented somewhere else in the entertainment-distribution chain. If the music companies can’t invent the stars that MTV needs, then MTV will merely invent them itself (as it already does). No biggie. Indeed, the amateur-hour reality shows are doing just that.

There will, naturally, be economic losers. And I do not want to be so heartless as to say that in this instance virtually all of the economic losers deserve to lose, and that almost nobody will ever mourn their fate—but sometimes capitalism does have a sense of humor.

Anyway, the point here is our children (as Whitney Houston might say). And what they’re doing right now. And what we should be saying to them—what the Recording Industry Association of America would have us say (the threats they would have us make), or, alternatively, something about the larger historical forces at work and about this being a very interesting time in which to observe the passing of economic and cultural worlds.

Which, of course, they’ll be so very eager to hear all about.