From innovation into globalization? or is this not the case at all?

In the past few years we have witnessed big changes throughout the creative industries, which have caused, and continue to cause many debates, opinions, and what seems to be a constant flow of ever changing technologies. Many of these technologies seem to come and go, some with more success than others, but all with one thing in common: they all remain. In other words, every technological breakthrough has contributed towards the next one, because in order for technological innovation to occur, there has to be a period of experimentation before. No matter what industry we focus on, whether it’s the music industry or the television industry, convergence, which is the subject we explored in our previous post, is always present. Convergence has led to innovation too.

For this week’s discussion we read three texts, which we will refer to in more detail further on. Two of these texts refer to different categories within the television industry: broadcasting live sports and the VOD of horror films. [1] [2] The last text deals with the music industry and the evolution of the technologies used to access and listen to music. [3]

When we speak about new technologies, the main focus tends to be on what they have to offer the public, and how, rather than the way in which they are incorporated by people. [4] As Nowak says: “One instance of this is the description of new music technologies as offering individuals an endless scope to access music.” [5] This also happens with broadcasting sports on television as we see in the text by Hutchins and Rowe when they say that “the relative accessibility and inexpensiveness of digital communications technologies have quickly lowered barriers of access and cost in the production, modification, distribution, and/or sharing of sports content.”[6] It is important to note that people expect to have unrestricted access, especially when it comes to live sports, due to their non-existent shelf-life; matches are generally only relevant in real time.

The Internet has opened up a world of content that is available to everyone. Aside from paying for the service (data), everything it contains is seemingly “for free”.[7] This has changed the way people think and how they feel about spending money.

 This, in turn, has forced industries to change too. Companies can no longer only offer one simple service, but rather, they have had to integrate other services in order to stay relevant, and still make money. As Tompkins says: “This notion (of diverse packaging/singular delivery) mirrors the ways that branding (in the age of digital) works by producing diversity and difference within a single uber-brand”.[8] In the music industry we see part of this change when we talk about “legal selling platforms of digital music files … such as Amazon and iTunes.”[9]

With the digitization of music and the rise of piracy and legal online platforms, people suddenly did not have to buy an entire CD for that one song that they wanted, like they would have before. [10] Instead they could download it, whether legally or not. All of a sudden technologies and industries were changing exponentially, and all the surfacing issues were rattling the music industry. However, were artists not forced to change their modus operandi too? It seems that up until the moment when music was digitalized, some artists were used to producing one hit single, or two, that sold thousands of CDs, even though the other songs weren’t great. With the changes that arrived, were artists not forced to re-think their texts? If people only want one song, they are likely to access it over the Internet, however, people are still willing to pay for an experience, whether this entails owning an artist’s entire collection of CDs, or supporting an artist they like in order to hear more from them.

This takes us to the second point we would like to make. People talk about technological revolutions, but as Nowak suggests in his text: “[a] revolution usually suggests a complete change of regime and a clear demarcation between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’”. [11] Although the way things work and the way the public relates to texts may have changed drastically over the past years, it has been a crescendo, where one technology has led to another, and where one behaviour has led to another, thus we can speak about incremental innovation, rather than a revolution. [12]

People’s options and priorities have changed drastically in recent years due to the evolution of technologies. The options of either purchasing or pirating texts are constantly weighed out in each individual’s head. What is clear is that people expect access to a pool of “global” content. Companies need to stay relevant, so they too have changed with the times and society, but because their end goal is to make money, they need to control access to the content somehow. At the same time, in order for them to know their target markets, these companies do case studies on their clients who produce all the data they need. In the end the clients are left with the false belief that they have access to an unlimited pool of globalized content. This is not true because the companies behind the content that’s on offer actually only have a limited amount of texts that these same clients can choose from – it can be thousands of them, but they are limited. To make matters worse, consumers are only shown “new” texts they may enjoy, based on what they have already showed they like – assessed (by the companies) on the data they (the consumers) have produced. So instead of making knowledge broader, these technologies are in actual fact only giving people more of the same that they already have and already like. In the end, these companies are staying relevant by integrating vertically and horizontally with other companies, and changing the ways in which they interact with society and their clients, but above all they are giving us a false sense of having access to more content than before. It seems that these companies are using the data we create to generate experiences that we as consumers are willing to pay for, thus meeting their end goal, which still is to make money.

References:

[1] Brett Hutchins & David Rowe. (2009). ‘Television and New Media: From Broadcast Scarcity to Digital Plenitude: The Changing Dynamics of the Media Sport Content Economy’.

[2] Joe Tompkins.
 (2014). ‘Television and New Media: Horror 2.0 (On Demand): The Digital Convergence of Horror Film Culture’.

[3] Raphaël Nowak.
 (2014). ‘Understanding Everyday Uses of Music Technologies in
the Digital Age’. (Griffith University). Edited by Andy Bennett and Brady Robards.

[4] [5] Nowak. (2014). Pg 147.

[6] Hutchins & Rowe. (2009). Pg. 363-364.

[7] Nowak. (2014). Pg 152.

[8] Tompkins (2014). Pg 418.

[9] Nowak. (2014). Pg 149.

[10] Nowak. (2014). Pg 154.

[11] Nowak. (2014). Pg 148.

[12] Stevens, Martijn. Class part of Media Course Creative Industries Radboud University, September 20^th  2016.