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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The digital communication technologies that emerged at the turn of the century have profoundly disrupted long-practiced norms of nearly every media industry. In particular, internet distribution has fundamentally changed the foundation of the media industry to enable the emergence of new sectors while posing a challenge for others.
Media Industries in the Digital Age reframes our understanding of media businesses in the light of these substantial changes. To develop an integrated understanding of media industries today, the book foregrounds the different funding sources that are now common. It begins by mapping the foundations and developments of media industry operation, and exploring all forms of advertiser-funded and consumer-funded media to identify connections across sectors, including digital and legacy media. The final section grounds the book’s conceptual work in examples of media making to explore how some “old” media have successfully adapted to internet disruption, and the differences and similarities of media making outside of corporations. Looking to the future, the book anticipates implications for the emerging “metaverse” media experiences and the key issues generative AI poses to the sector. Ultimately, the book argues that the contemporary differences in media industry operation vary by sector, but meaningful patterns can be identified by considering how advertiser, consumer, or government funding sets different priorities.
Offering a new and original way of understanding the media industries today, this book is enlightening reading for students and scholars of media studies and media industries, as well as global industry professionals
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgments
Section 1: Introduction
1 Media Industries in the Twenty-First Century
Industrialization of culture, revisited
Ways of categorizing media industries
Show me the money, or at least where it comes from
Context and details
Notes
2 What Everyone Needs to Know about Media Industries
Pre-digital media industry strategies
Notes
3 How Internet Distribution Challenges Media Industry Practices
From broadcast to internet
Transmitting what were once physical goods
New sectors and players in the digital age
Implications
Notes
4 What Happened to Ad-Funded Media Industries?
It’s not a media problem, it’s an advertising problem
Search and the growth of non-media advertising
“Digital advertising” is no longer a useful sector descriptor
Notes
Section 2: Internet Distribution and Advertiser-Funded Media
5 The Broad Sector of Advertiser-Funded Media
Understanding advertisers
Attention fragmentation
Programmatic ad buying
Notes
6 Opportunities, Limitations, and Understanding the Implications of Digital Media Advertising
Opportunities of digital advertising
Limits of digital media advertising
Keys to understanding internet disruption in advertiser-funded media industries
Notes
Section 3: Internet Distribution and Consumer-Funded Media
7 The Broad Sector of Consumer-Funded Media
Subscriber funding in media
Internet distribution expands consumer funding
Notes
8 Opportunities, Limitations, and Understanding the Implications of Internet Distribution for Consumer-Funded Media
Limits of digital consumer-funded media
Keys to understanding internet disruption in consumer-funded media industries
Notes
9 Governments and Media
Government funding for governmental media
Government-funded public service media
Government funding beyond broadcasting
Governments and media regulation
Notes
Section 4: Media Today and Tomorrow
10 Mass Culture in the Age of Microcultures: What Do Taylor Swift, Barbie, and Sports Have in Common?
Mass hits in the age of microhits
Notes
11 Can “Old” Media Companies Successfully Adapt to Changing Conditions?
In contrast
Notes
12 Pointless Hustle or Opportunity? Work in Simple- Professional Media
Comparing work in simple- and complex-professional media
Notes
13 Future Directions: From the “Metaverse” to AI
Media as experience
AI and media industries
Conclusion
Glossary
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
Industrialization of Culture Framework
Figure 1.2
Commercial/Professional Media Industry Matrix
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1
Top US Album Sales Figures, 2000–2023
Figure 10.2
Top US and Canada Tickets and Release Year Box Office, 2000–2023
Chapter 13
Figure 13.1
Comparison of Generative AI Response to “Cats Playing Chess” Prompt
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1
Additional Ways to Categorize Media Industries
Chapter 10
Table 10.1
Top US Albums, Artists, and US Sales Figures, 2000–2023
Table 10.2
Top US and Canada Theatrical Performance, 2000–2023
Chapter 11
Table 11.1
Top Podcast Publishers 2023
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Glossary
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For our digital age children, Sayre, Calla, Robi, and Reni, for showing us the future of media use
Media Industries in the Digital Age
How Media Businesses Work Today
Amanda D. Lotz and Timothy Havens
polity
Copyright © Amanda D. Lotz and Timothy Havens 2025
The right of Amanda D. Lotz and Timothy Havens to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6592-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024938061
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
This preface is intended for prior readers of our book Understanding Media Industries who are wondering how this book compares. For readers unfamiliar with that volume, we recommend that you skip this preface and start reading with the Introduction.
At a 2003 press conference for the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, actor Edward James Olmos was emphatic. He implored the critics in attendance not to watch the new series if they were eager for a series faithful to the 1978 original or couldn’t handle Starbuck reimagined as a woman. The assembled critics snickered at Olmos’s pleading with them not to watch in defiance of the promotional ritual, but it was a wise and strategic move in setting audience expectations.
Similarly, we advise readers seeking the third edition of Understanding Media Industries (UMI) that this is not your book. Much like UMI, this book is designed to provide the spine or general foundation for an introductory media industries course, but its priorities and context are different. The foremost priority in this book is constructing an approach to media industries that incorporates “legacy” and “digital” media sectors in the integrated way they now operate. While such integration is now feasible, the state of media industry operations remains too unsettled to write about with certainty. It will probably be unsettled for the remainder of our working lives, but it seems likely that there will be significantly more resetting of the playing field in the next three to five years, particularly for video industries. Writing a text with the depth and detail of UMI is a long and tedious task, and while an update for UMI is urgently needed for our teaching, too much continues to change too quickly to justify the time needed for a more comprehensive account of a fleeting moment.
This book is shorter and meant to be augmented to suit the needs of different courses. Different departments span different media and learning goals, and a lot of national peculiarities require specific attention that make it difficult to anticipate all needs. Our plan is to keep teaching UMI concepts that are less developed here in the lectures and discussion activities we’ve always used. Widely shared examples and cases have grown more challenging given media fragmentation and the international breadth of our readers. This has led us to focus more here on “the business” rather than relying on American examples of everything. The cultural bits have always become outdated most quickly.
There is significant new conceptualization in these pages. One part of the digital and legacy integration comes from suggesting that we not think exclusively in terms of a complex-professional media era but view it as a mode that now co-exists with a formation that can be categorized as a simple-professional mode of operation. Given that “platforms,” the “digital economy,” and the “creator economy” are now concepts that extend well beyond media into industries as wide ranging as health care and manufacturing that require very different considerations, we are deliberately precise in identifying these distributors as “media monetization services” crucial to enabling simple-professional modes of media rather than discussing “platformization” generally. Finally, we turn a critical media industries lens on the tools of digital advertising and anticipate how differences in digital ad serving may lead to different implications for streaming video than advertising had for linear video. The book covers a wide range of topics that are organized in chapters of somewhat varied length.
From the vantage point of 2024 we see a lot of variation and co-existence rather than new things killing off the old. But the robust choice among and within media sectors has spread attention and consumer spending across companies to an extent that affects budgets for media making and formal employment. Media sectors may not “die” in the way some forecast, but the need to resize for today’s conditions weighs heavily on older sectors and the future opportunities in simple-professional media making.
Acknowledgments
Writing a book about the operation of media industries is a lesson in impermanence. An account shoring up the dynamics of the new formations has been overdue, but we’re not sure how long it will be until the next wave rearranges the formations we see emerging. We greatly appreciate the gentle nudges we’ve received encouraging us to revisit Understanding Media Industries and all who have used our work over the years.
The existence of this book owes considerably to the patience and persistence of Mary Savigar at Polity. The Polity team sought top notch reviewers who quickly returned some of the most thoughtful and engaged feedback we’ve had in our careers. Our thanks to Jimmy Draper, David Nieborg, Dwayne Winsek, and Ramon Lobato for detailed engagement with our drafts and willingness to discuss them with us.
Our thanks as well to many who served as sounding boards and commented on drafts: all your voices were helpful in pulling such a comprehensive work together. We extend deep gratitude to Alfred L. Martin, Jr., Cynthia Meyers, Rita Zajacz, and the QUT Transforming Media Industries research program. Extra thanks to Brendan Keogh and Kevin Sanson for supplementing our knowledge with their expertise.
A note of thanks to the media professionals that have made it possible for scholars to better understand their work worlds. The work of Evan Shapiro and Brian Wieser was particularly valuable in putting together the account here and our thanks as well to those hosting and participating in the universe of podcasts that now offer glimpses into conversations that help explain industry thinking.
One of the very reasonable concerns of some reviewers is the dearth of extensive citation or acknowledgement of the scholarly conversation surrounding these topics. This is a book for readers who aren’t interested in those scholarly conversations, but we are deeply indebted to many who have built the foundations for our exploration, particularly to David Hesmondhalgh. Many receive only glancing mention. We know there is proper scholarly work to be done with what we present here. The need for new teaching material made this first priority, but all in time.
Section 1Introduction
1Media Industries in the Twenty-First Century
The 1990s may sound like ancient history to those born in the twenty-first century, but it is a blink of an eye in terms of normal timelines for industrial change. A remarkable amount about the experience of media and the business of media has transformed in a fairly short period of time. To illustrate just how much has changed, consider the media worlds of college students of the 1990s compared with today.
The experience of every form of media was so different in the 1990s that it led to different ways of using media. Access to series and movies was much more difficult and students lacked the personal screens and personally tailored content that seems normal now. Few students had televisions in their dorm rooms or bedrooms; more likely, they had only one shared set in a rental apartment or a dorm’s common space. Large sets in public spaces were important gathering points for everyone to come together to watch major events – MTV Music Awards, the few shows about young adults like Beverly Hills, 90210 or Dawson’s Creek that were just emerging – or to learn about unexpected events like bombings and natural disasters. Viewing was likely to be in a shared space and happened on a schedule. Those lucky enough to have sets in their room mostly used them to play VHS tapes and DVDs.
Music was also different. The early 1990s brought widespread availability of CDs. The fanciest thing to have was a multidisc CD player that would move between tracks on different discs. There were no playlists, although making mixtapes remained common because they offered the ability to combine different artists or meaningful songs. Radio and MTV were the primary way to access music you didn’t own. A big CD collection was a great quality in a potential roommate, though many people stuck with tapes because mixtapes offered greater flexibility. Although students may have walked across campus with headphones carrying a Discman, the range of music was limited to listening to a single CD at a time until early MP3 players emerged near the end of the century that allowed loading a couple dozen songs. Napster started in 1999 but was mainly for enthusiasts of particularly difficult-to-find genres. Fans of experimental jazz traded bootlegged recordings, for instance, until file sharing exploded a few years later.
Access to news came mainly from the televisions found in public spaces – the dorm, cafeteria, student center, or gym – or from newspapers that were often laying around all those places. Very little media existed outside of that made by mainstream media organizations – large, typically commercial organizations requiring vast teams of workers with specialized expertise developing media for a centralized media system that sought to distribute its products on a mass scale.
The web and the internet in general were just developing and predominantly text-based media used for sharing files. Streaming as a distribution technology for large audiovisual files was not available, though university campuses often had infrastructure available well before the general community to download and watch video files, which required a massive amount of storage. For instance, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole released the first-ever online political ad in the US in 1996. Downloading the 30-second ad took about 90 minutes to a desktop computer using the fastest modem available at the time, 33.6 Kbps. Of course, no social media existed yet, and it was really just the start of email. Yet probably the biggest difference was that very few had mobile phones and even those who had them by the end of the 1990s, could only use them to make calls.
College students of the 2020s likely find little recognizable here, and their uses reflect broader changes in media use by populations in industrialized societies more generally. For many born since the turn of the century, the ability to access all kinds of video and audio on demand on a wide array of screens has always been “normal.” Moreover, the world of large, formal, “mainstream” media organizations – or what David Hesmondhalgh terms “complex-professional media” are only one component of their media worlds.1 A whole new sector that might be loosely categorized as that of “simple-professional media” now exists and includes the work of creators, authors, musicians, and game makers working outside established media organizations. Separate from this media that aspires to be profitable, there is also now a bounty of media content that is created and shared without aspiration of commercialization.
For people of all ages, media use is integrated in nearly every aspect of daily life and shapes a considerable amount of social time and interaction. Not all of the aspects of mediated life are central to understanding how media industries work today – things like telehealth and online learning do use many of the same technologies as the media industries but operate in distinct sectors of the economy. But virtually every casual use of our mobile phones has implications for media industry operation to some extent, if only because the capability is supported by advertising dollars that once went to different media industries, especially newspapers and magazines.
When the digital disruption of media industries began, it had been nearly 100 years since new technology had so profoundly changed so many aspects of daily life. The mechanization of many industries in the late 1800s introduced similarly significant effects across nearly every industry in ways that redefined the nature of work and the goods created. The incorporation of machines into industrial processes changed human work and led to mass migration to the cities, though it was half a century before machines substantially changed daily home life for many, with conveniences like washing machines, refrigerators, and televisions in the 1950s.
Likewise, the wide expanse of “digital disruption,” or changes tied to the advent and increased availability of computers, has changed sectors across the economy through enabling vastly different capabilities in the gathering, transmitting, analyzing, and storing of once-inconceivable quantities of data. The capabilities of digital devices used in daily life by many have evolved continuously over the last quarter century. That gradual change can obscure the technological and industrial causes because societies negotiate such new technological capabilities slowly and disconnect causes from effects. It can be easy to miss just how life-changing many of these media uses have been to people who grew up before them as well as for those regarded as “digitally native.” If digital technologies have radically changed daily life for users, they’ve also been transformative for nearly every business sector, especially media industries. Changes enabled by digital production, storage, and distribution have also expanded the features of media content available, although our account here focuses mostly on the implications of internet distribution.
Digital technologies enabled – perhaps forced – change in many industries. Digital technologies store data as a series of 1s and 0s, which is different from analog media that reproduced an “analog” of the message – hence the term. The authors of a media textbook explain it this way: “Think of the grooves in a phonographic record. As the needle travels through the grooves, it vibrates in a pattern similar to the vibrations made by the guitar string or vocal cords it represents.”2 Or film works because of chemical changes to the celluloid caused by light exposure so that a representation of what is in front of the camera appears on film; or a typewriter physically imprints an exact analogy of the key you depressed.
Digital media and analog media have key differences as a result. Digital media storage is far more efficient. Think about how few songs fit on a record or cassette tape or the heft of a 1,000-page document on paper versus when stored as a digital file. Digital media also retain their quality when copied. Every time you make a copy of a VHS tape, the quality of the copy is less than the original. This is one of the reasons digital media has posed significant threats of unauthorized circulation in media industries. But also, the interoperability of digital media that ties to that common language of 1s and 0s enables “convergence” of once discrete media technologies. Analog media all required specialized technology (record players, cassette players), where digital media can store and share audio, video, and text files. This common language has helped make mobile phones, which are now functionally a computer in your pocket, essential to much of our daily media consumption.
Convergence enabled by a common language has made media goods easier to make and share. Digital files alone change how we make and use media considerably, but internet distribution changed the business of media further yet. Media companies designed their enterprises for worlds in which consumers had far less choice in how and where they used media and what media they might access. These characteristics of digital files have made tools long available only to professionals affordable to a wide range of amateurs, and have made media easily manipulable and transmittable relative to analog media norms.
The digital communication technologies introduced at the turn of the century – in particular, the mobile phone, and the ability to share text, images, video, and sound files to these and other devices – have disrupted established norms of nearly every industry. From travel to education, health care, and media, industries have seen transformations in their underlying competitive dynamics and operational norms due to digitization.
Media industries – a sector of the economy that creates written, aural, or video forms of information and entertainment – operated peculiarly from many other industries even before the arrival of digital technologies. This book explores the implications of digital communication technologies – as we know them in 2024 – on media industry operation with an eye to how those industry changes have affected the media content these industries produce and the implications of that changed content on the functioning of society.
The book’s first section introduces media industries, explains some of the peculiarities that lead them to operate differently than other industries, and highlights why the last few decades have been so disruptive to their operation. The subsequent sections then explore how different sources of funding for media have affected norms of media industry operation, often as a result of internet distribution. Multi-chapter sections explore advertiser funding and then subscriber funding. A single extended chapter explores public funding and how governments shape media content and media industry operation. The final section of the book investigates current issues and cases across media industries to tie these concepts to actual cases and practices.
Industrialization of culture, revisited
Almost two decades ago, we wrote a book that offered a framework for understanding media industries.3 There we discussed digitization as a “force of change” that was altering the operation of media industries. We knew the implications of that force of change would be substantial, but it was too soon in the early 2000s to write with much certainty about how the affordances – the distinctive tools and capabilities – of digital technologies would lead media industries to operate in sustainable new ways. At that point, little of what we saw looked to be tenable in the long term, with many enterprises based on venture capital awed by hype about what technologies could do with little regard to whether there were business models to support those ventures. Even as we revised the book a decade ago it still wasn’t clear what the relationship between media-industries-as-we-knew-them would be relative to the “new media” or “digital media” emerging. The early years of new technologies are typically full of experiments and short-lived companies and practices, and this case was no different.
Even in 2024 it remains relatively “early” days for considering how the internet and digital technologies have changed media industries, but some systematic adjustments have emerged that warrant incorporating what were once considered as “new media” into a holistic organization of media industry operation. Today we know more, and it is clear that understandings of media industries now must engage with so-called “old” and “new” media together.
“Digital media” has become as redundant a term as “digital camera” in daily life; all media industries are now digital. Life is digital. We exist in worlds that inextricably blend tools, practices, and norms of pre- and post-digital possibility (and “digital” cameras are now mostly called phones). Digital technologies have infiltrated daily life and set the conditions by which we live to such an extent that it is nearly impossible to talk meaningfully about life outside of or separate from them. Even if we individually choose to limit our use of digital technologies, the world around us runs on them. Like current sea levels, global temperature averages, and air quality, the reality of digital technology simply is a condition of life for most of us who live in modern societies.
Figure 1.1 Industrialization of Culture Framework. Created by the authors.
Consequently, there is no longer a separate “digital media” sector even though our brains can still identify the norms, organization, and capabilities of what might be called “legacy,” “analog,” or “pre-digital” media when we look at media industry operation. Whether because “old media” companies now also offer “new media” products and services or because “old media” businesses have had their playing fields radically changed by losing revenue to new forms of advertising enabled by digital technology, “old versus new” or “analog versus digital” media aren’t the categories that best explain operational variation. It is far more useful to think about how media industries work now in a comprehensive manner, although that can be tricky because they have rarely been thought of that way.
The organization of our earlier book followed our original Industrialization of Culture framework (Figure 1.1), which we devised to provide a structure to explain the vast array of businesses and activities required to bring a movie, book, or song to consumers. Our understanding is that media content develops marked by the culture in which it is created; it consequently bears evidence of the reigning ideas, trends, concerns, and traditions of when and where it is created. Commercial forms of media are also shaped by the goal and purpose of the media organizations that produce them (mandate), by economic, technological, and regulatory factors that govern how that media organization operates (conditions), and by the roles of individual media workers and the practices of their companies that negotiate among the mandates and conditions within day-to-day operation.
The Industrialization of Culture framework is also flexible enough to explain the developments and expansion of media industries that digital connection and distribution provide. The key concepts in the framework – mandates, conditions, and practices – and the idea they are structured by cultural norms and tastes, remain useful. Also, the “culture” within media organizations plays an important role in their operation. In some cases, media industry workers have considerable agency to make decisions within the boundaries created by broader sector conditions. In our research, we’ve found media workers have circumscribed agency, which means they negotiate among corporate goals, the motivations of creatives, and considerable uncertainty about the features that will lead a media good to be commercially successful. Analyzing media industries requires assessing economics or regulation, but we’ve often found that “surprise hits” or cases that reset expectations in the industry emerge because an individual was able to use their agency to challenge industry lore, the supposed, but untested rules by which industries commonly operate, to create something atypical. Individual workers don’t get a lot attention in this book, but they do play crucial roles, especially given the uncertainty created by new technologies.
We called it the Industrialization of Culture framework rather than a model because the making and circulation of media are profoundly varied. In terms of visualizing the framework, a pinball game provides the best illustration of how we imagine the framework to operate because it stresses the variability within standardizing forces typical of media industry behavior. Although we spent many pages describing and teasing apart differences in various mandates and how different technologies, economic practices, and regulations led media industries to operate distinctly, we wanted to stress to readers that there was no simple easy truth about how any media industry works. Strong levers, such as regulatory conditions that govern what words can’t be said on television or the characteristics of pre-digital technologies that required the bundling of songs into a CD or stories into a newspaper, push media content to take a particular form, just as pushing buttons with varied timing and force in a pinball game leads the ball to take a different course. There are certainly patterns to what happens and dominant norms, but there are also subtle variations and exceptions.
The landscape today looks different to us than when we developed the framework early in the media industries’ incorporation of digital technologies, but it still remains useful. Digital media companies/subsidiaries like Netflix, Spotify, Twitch, TikTok, YouTube, or Roblox don’t each require a different framework to understand them, and pre-digital companies like the New York Times or Disney that have evolved into digital media can be understood through the framework. The capabilities of internet distribution and communication enable changes in media industry operation, but the frameworks used to understand pre-digital media still apply.
Ways of categorizing media industries
Media are complicated and varied, so it’s helpful to have subcategories to organize which ones have similar characteristics. “Media industries” is an umbrella term that encompasses several industries that share features but largely operate distinctly: the music industry, film industry, etc., although there is extensive conglomeration in the media sector, meaning a few corporations operate companies in multiple industries (music and movies). In truth, any one of these industries has many parts, so we should think of them as plural, for example as “television industries” as opposed to “the television industry.” One of our goals is to identify connections and similarities across media industries, so we’ve not organized the book in a way that creates silos around particular media industries.
The ways that digital technologies have changed media industry operation – across digital production technologies, digital storage technologies, and internet distribution technologies – are too multifaceted to consider in a book spanning multiple media industries. This book focuses on internet distribution, or specifically, the implications of using internet technologies to make completed media products accessible to readers, viewers, players, or listeners.
Many initial attempts to understand changes in media industries in the early twenty-first century failed to distinguish between media (messages communicated in words, images, sound, moving images) and distribution technologies (physical goods such as paper, vinyl records, or compact discs, or mechanisms of transmission such as broadcasts using the electromagnetic spectrum, wires, or internet protocols). Media scholar Henry Jenkins importantly explained that if we look back over time, we see that media persist, but distribution technologies evolve.4 This can be seen in the shift from buying records on vinyl as the dominant form of music ownership, to their near disappearance and use among a distinct subgroup of music buyers. Or an example of the features of media changing can be seen in how the content on radio (in the US at least) changed after the invention of television reproduced many of the popular radio dramas and comedies with a version that included video. After many of these radio programs migrated to television, radio content (the message communicated) became more focused on a wider range of music genres, talk, and output that was more local in origin.
Media industries have experienced many different changes that can be tied to internet distribution, or the ability to distribute words, sounds, and video using the internet. Using terms such as “new media” early in the century contributed to our confusion about the nature of the developments at play. Jenkins helps us see how, for instance, websites weren’t some sort of “new medium;” rather, they were a new way to distribute words and still pictures. And our experience after twenty years of change shows us that predictions that have focused on death and replacement overlook the possibility that several ways of distributing media can co-exist, and how that possibility has its own challenges for the operation of media businesses. Most of this change, to date, has been expansion – in other words, we can now stream video on-demand AND still watch on television.
Internet distribution technology, by which we mean the capacity of internet protocols to send and receive text, audio, and visual messages across many devices that speak a common digital language, enabled every media industry to redevelop business models. Of course, the internet is a general-purpose networked communication system that supports a dizzying array of economic, social, and everyday activities, many of which have nothing to do with media industries. But the combined capabilities of digital communication and widescale accessibility of the internet have had profound implications for how people consume media and thus for how media industries operate.
The new models and capabilities of internet distribution challenged the control many pre-digital companies had created that allowed them to build strongly profitable businesses. Although internet distribution enabled the companies to innovate and better serve consumers, most established media companies regarded such change as a threat to their operation. In some cases, this environment of technological innovation made it possible for new companies to enter the competition.
Another reason it was difficult to recognize that media industry change was rooted in distribution technology was that new sectors, particularly the sector identified as social media, emerged at the same time new companies (e.g., Netflix) and old companies (e.g., most newspapers) expanded the availability of pre-digital media by distributing it using the internet. Social media – think YouTube and Facebook in 2007 – used the technological feature of internet transmission that allows for many-to-many sending of messages, so that each user could basically broadcast their thoughts, pictures, and videos around the world. This capability of social media was different than the one-to-many nature of broadcast transmission and many other pre-digital media.5 Much of the earliest use of social media wasn’t commercial in nature; in other words, it wasn’t driven by pursuit of profit on the part of the message sender, although the operation of the distribution platforms provided by YouTube, Facebook, and other services very quickly became commercially driven.
Internet distribution has enabled an expansion in the field of commercial and non-commercial media available, a key change for media industries. For most of the twentieth century, media industries were “complex-professional” organizations in which the creation of media required extensive teams of professionals with highly specialized skill sets. Hesmondhalgh talks about the complex-professional “era,” and reminds us that throughout history different norms have operated to create media goods, such as the patronage system and a market-professional dynamic in which specialists emerged to facilitate sales; the modern operation of art dealers and galleries is the best illustration.
In practice, all of these industry organizations for commercializing media have remained possible, it is just that the complex-professional mode became so common in the twentieth century that it came to define the period. Another mode grew in prevalence over the first decades of the twenty-first century, what we call a “simple-professional” organization to capture its difference from complex-professional operations but inclusion within a broad media sector.6 At first, the term “amateur” was often used to describe the work of people using the tools of internet distribution to distribute self-produced media for commercial aims outside of existing industries and organizations. Stuart Cunningham and David Craig termed the growing sector of YouTubers in the 2010s as “creators;”7 others identified them as “influencers” as the creation of content distributed using YouTube and other forms of social media developed into a vocation for some as a result of sponsorship and payment from advertisers. These creators typically began as individuals who casually posted content, likely as a non-commercial endeavor, though the aspiration for eventual commercial success became common as this creator economy took shape. This new sector of video creators often overshadowed important expansion in wide-ranging media creator activities in music, podcasting, and writing (blogs/newsletters, books). We use “creators” to encompass media makers throughout simple-professional media.
Unlike in complex-professional media, creators develop media independently from an elaborate industrial apparatus, requiring them to build expertise across many dimensions (production, editing, promotion). Internet distribution allowed the development of open access services such as YouTube, Bandcamp, Substack, Steam, and Apple and Android app stores that enable creators across a range of media to establish commercial media enterprises that are a crucial component of twenty-first-century media and culture. Figure 1.2 maps examples of the distinction among commercial and non-commercial and complex-professional and simple-professional media.
Chapters 3 and 4 explore the new players in the broad media economy such as social media (Facebook, Instagram) and the open internet distribution services (YouTube, TikTok; what many call platforms but we refer to as media monetization services in chapter 3). Notably, both social media and open internet distribution services are complex-professional media organizations: they operate with extensive skill specialization and require large teams to maintain and operate. However, they are different from the distribution structures previously common in the media because they operate without licensing or commissioning content (for the most part) and provide the service of distribution to those willing to abide by their comparatively light-touch terms and conditions. These complex-professional distribution services enable a simple-professional sector of media creation to be far more extensively commercialized than was feasible before internet distribution.
Complex-professional
Simple-professional
Commercial
Media industries reliant on extensive teams of highly specialized workers, often spanning production and distribution; also media monetization services used by simple professional creators
Creators who monetize media goods outside of formal relationships with complex-professional organizations by using social media and media monetization platforms like YouTube, Substack, Bandcamp, or app stores
Non-Commercial
Public service broadcasting
Hobbyists distributing videos, music, newsletters, games, etc. without concern for revenue
Figure 1.2 Commercial/Professional Media Industry Matrix. Created by the authors.
Of course, media creators worked in a simple-professional mode before internet distribution, so it isn’t the case that digital technologies create this opportunity. But it is fair to say that the capacity of digital technologies (across production, storage, and distribution) makes it much easier for individuals to create media, to distribute to a global audience, and even to access direct payment from consumers or advertising dollars from major national brands. These technologies have enabled more variation within the media sector, particularly the emergence of a commercially meaningful sector outside of complex-professional structures. But these developments haven’t replaced the distribution role of corporate studios, labels, and publishers. Rather, these changes create an ecosystem where media goods produced within both simple- and complex-professional structures co-exist. Media created within a simple-professional structure can address much more specific interests, uses, and sensibilities than media goods created by complex-professional structures that need considerable scale to justify their costs. The availability of media goods created in simple-professional structures has made it possible for a significant amount of consumers’ attention and leisure spending to shift from supporting complex-professional media, although such media continues to fulfill other needs for media consumers.
In the early 2000s, some predicted the creator sector would replace the complex-professional sector. That seems unlikely at this point, but enough consumers have moved enough of their attention and spending to affect the operation of the complex-professional sector. To be clear, we acknowledge that there is a lot of variation in how services such as YouTube operate (detailed more in chapter 3), and these differences have considerable implications for creators. Given these services remain in development – it isn’t clear how many of these services will still be here in five or ten years or that they will operate as they do now – at this point we are just aiming to pencil in a conceptual map that can guide conversations as operational norms become clearer. Placing services in categories isn’t the point – the biggest of these creators will develop into complex-professional organizations over time; for example Mr. Beast arguably has made this transition. The aim here is to establish characteristics and operational features that enable us to categorize subsets of media industries that operate with similarity (commercial versus non-commercial; complex-professional versus simple-professional), so we can talk about patterns of behavior more expansive than a single company or sector.
Show me the money, or at least where it comes from
The media industries can also be divided into subsectors based on patterns in how they operate. Generally, the major operational differences have been between subsectors built around making and selling a single good – a book, a movie, an album, a video game – and those based on continuous production – television and radio stations, newspapers, magazines.8 Of course, any television schedule is made up of single shows and newspapers are composed of discrete articles, but the major industry infrastructure of continuous production paid less attention to the profitability of any one piece of media. Notably, these continuous production industries have generally relied on ad funding while those that made single, discrete goods tended to rely on direct payment from consumers, although there are always a few exceptions.
New industrial dynamics introduced by internet distribution have made the distinction of single good versus continuous service industries blurry because digital technologies enabled new distribution practices: we can access individual articles as readily as a daily edition of the New York Times
