So the other day I raised the question of what to watch, movie-wise. As I was hoping she would, Just Muttering has weighed in with some suggested flicks to see, augmented by a comment suggesting “Collateral” and “Mystic River.”
Another DevraDoWrite reader, after concurring with the preach-to-the-choir quality of “An Inconvenient Truth” and adding “Besides, it wasn’t as good as the hype — though it was good and I’m very glad it was made and is getting exposure,” pointed me to an article in The Los Angeles Times that gives rise to the questions of where to watch, and when. John Horn’s August 8 article, “Far Removed From the Multiplex” includes the following:
With an array of devices at their fingertips, youths don’t always think of theaters as the place to see a flick.
For decades, the movie business has followed an inflexible formula: Produce features, show them first in theaters, release them on video, then broadcast them on television. But what Gale observed — and what a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll of teens and young adults has found — is that Hollywood’s rickety model is poised to be torn apart.
With an array of devices competing to fill their leisure time, today’s teens and young adults show diminishing interest in adhering to Hollywood tradition. They’re willing to watch brand-new movies at home rather than in theaters, are starting to use their PCs as their entertainment gateway and are slowly turning to their iPods and cell phones for video programming.
They still crave to be entertained, but not necessarily inside a movie theater.
Now you know that I’m tired of the “youth market” usurping all the resources, and I’m not likely to want to watch a movie on my cell phone or iPod, but there are some ramifications of this that might bode well for the grownups…and some that might not.
Chris Anderson is getting a lot of press these days about “The Long Tail” and how technology has altered the marketplace from one with limited physical storage/display space to one with unlimited virtual shelf space, lowering the cost of distribution and making viable gazillions of niche markets. That’s good news for those of us outside the mainstream. Do I feel badly for brick and mortar operations struggling to combat this? No. I remember a MBA marketing class I took at Fordham some decades ago, the gist of which was keep looking ahead because what works today will be old-hat tomorrow and someone else is already thinking about the next best thing. This is not news, it’s life…it’s evolution.
But potential downsides also lurk around every corner. Technology has fostered a “give it away” mentality about which I am truly conflicted. I like free stuff and I like the ideas behind “open source” — sharing and collaborating are good things. I also like surfing over to YouTube and watching cool videos. But shouldn’t people get paid for their work? Why should you (or I) be able to watch my dad play at Montreux with Petrucianni and Shorter for free while others paid to attend the show or buy the DVD, which in turn, at least theoretically, enabled the promoters to pay the artists.
I know one of the arguments — sometimes known as The Grateful Dead argument — is that free goodies have promotional value and can lead to greater sales or larger attendance at live shows. “Ticket sales have doubled,” is a frequent refrain. That may be true in the short run, but as already mentioned, consumers are beginning to change their where and when demands.
Earlier this week I read a press release announcing a deal between MSN(R) Videoand the JVC Jazz Festival (Newport R.I.) “to give jazz lovers the chance to catch this year’s great lineup online starting Sunday, Aug. 13, at http://video.msn.com/newportjazz . Whether fans attended the festival and want immediate access to their favorite performances again or couldn’t make it to Newport’s historic Fort Adams to experience the acts firsthand, MSN will offer them the “best seats in the house” for America’s oldest jazz festival.”
I haven’t investigated this yet, but I’m betting that this potentially vast increase in ‘attendance’ is not reflected in the fees being paid to the performers. Let’s hope that I’m wrong.
Another potential downside has to do with quality. Competition on non-economic grounds has given rise to the amateur, greatly skewed the signal-to-noise ratio, and proliferated a lot of garbage. Whether or not you believe that the audiences appreciate the difference (and I am not one who thinks we should aim for the lowest common denominator), the net result is also lowering the value of a professional’s work in the marketplace. This is not solely a product of technology (actors aren’t happy about reality TV either), but it doesn’t help.
Somewhere I read that the average book sells only 500 copies a year, and with that fact comes the advice that writers should not quit their day jobs. Needless to say I bristle at the notion that writing, painting, making music and such are not full-time jobs worthy of compensation. I might even argue that artists’ income should be in the same realm as that of doctors’ in that they are just as vital, if not more so, to our overall well-being.