I think there is a crisis of overproduction here, but in the context of entertainment the effect is that everyone gets atomized into smaller and smaller interest groups watching nicher and nicher forms of entertainment. Even the closest things we have to mass entertainment now - Marvel movies, professional sports, etc - feel like they're being consumed by shrinking and less mainstream fanbases every year.
The thing is, I think that the entertainment industry is somewhat insulated from the classical Marxist causes of a crisis of overproduction. This is because the money in the industry flows alongside the money from the Marketing industry, with the two creating a feedback loop into each other that causes them both to be able to grow without limit.
Marketing and Entertainment seem like they're growing forever, and I think that's because they're not really limited by a physical commodity the way that, say, producing plastic is limited by the availability of oil and the number of people who want to buy it. With a physical commodity there eventually comes a point in the crisis of overproduction where all of the plastic is sitting in warehouses not going anywhere, all of the factories that can turn it into crap are full, and all of the crap is sitting on store shelves, and everyone in the industry has to stop production and acquisition all at once, causing a crash.
But with entertainment and marketing, when is that realization reached? Perhaps it will be reached when the Marketing executives all realize that their ads are worthless - but we've seen research time and time again suggest that this is the case, and the corporations continue to spend on it. Perhaps it will be reached when the servers are completely full and the production studios are all churning out as much content as physically possible - but then again we've seen that there is seemingly no cost to mass-deleting old content to push people onto what's new.
Personally I think that this whole thing is like a game of chicken, and eventually someone is going to blink and cause massive earthquakes across both industries. It will have to be a major player, and I predict that the fallout will be the deaths of all minor corporations in those industries and monopolization by the large ones. But it's also possible that the timescale on this eventually happening is much longer than the timescale of some other crisis occurring that renders the whole marketing/entertainment crisis a moot point.
My friend was comparing it against the 50s-90s when mass media was adopted, the vast majority then was consuming the same media and thus the cultures of each decade had distinct separate characteristics.
But since the aughts we're back to before those times, we we've sort of made media so massive that there's all these little niche pockets you can find endless content in creating a bunch of separate co-existing cultures each with their own individual characteristics existing simultaneously.
Like we went all the way back around to before there was a mainstream by creating so many different niches of media and understandings.
I'm pretty sure this is the Long Tail theory in play. As long as consumers have the appetite for new films & shows, and the storage & distribution are cheap, we can continue to churn out media to meet that demand. Amazon has acknowledged that it's part of why they're successful.
I thought the marketing was necessary to reach a big enough audience though. I don't quite understand how industry money flowing alongside marketing money props this all up?
The marketing thing doesn't apply to streaming services that don't have ads. Purely subscription-based services are, IMO, going to eventually reach a hard limit of subscribers when they fully saturate people's disposable incomes - and when that happens they'll be forced to turn to advertisements to make up for the lost growth potential, thus becoming bound up in the game of chicken. If you're dependent on ad money, and then the ad money stops, better hope you've got the reserves to last long enough to reorganize yourself.
As for the necessity of marketing, its effectiveness is a hotly debated topic. I think that there's a baseline level of effectiveness that marketing has, but the sheer amount of marketing we're exposed to on a daily basis waters its effectiveness down significantly. What's more important than whether or not it works though is whether or not CEOs believe it works, and they are currently acting as though it does.
I think that there’s a baseline level of effectiveness that marketing has, but the sheer amount of marketing we’re exposed to on a daily basis waters its effectiveness down significantly.
competitive commercial advertising is a complete waste of humanity and it's all about being the last fast food ad somebody saw on tv when they're hungry on the way home from work
everyone gets atomized into smaller and smaller interest groups watching nicher and nicher forms of entertainment
"You should try this latest anime product! It has (cliche)(cliche)(cliche) but this time the hair colors are swapped around in a new combination and also the isekai ego insert's harem has a quirky twist! Also there's sexual violence in the first episode and a fascist call to arms but it's lighthearted and played for laughs :morshupls:
I think there is a crisis of overproduction here, but in the context of entertainment the effect is that everyone gets atomized into smaller and smaller interest groups watching nicher and nicher forms of entertainment. Even the closest things we have to mass entertainment now - Marvel movies, professional sports, etc - feel like they're being consumed by shrinking and less mainstream fanbases every year.
The thing is, I think that the entertainment industry is somewhat insulated from the classical Marxist causes of a crisis of overproduction. This is because the money in the industry flows alongside the money from the Marketing industry, with the two creating a feedback loop into each other that causes them both to be able to grow without limit.
Marketing and Entertainment seem like they're growing forever, and I think that's because they're not really limited by a physical commodity the way that, say, producing plastic is limited by the availability of oil and the number of people who want to buy it. With a physical commodity there eventually comes a point in the crisis of overproduction where all of the plastic is sitting in warehouses not going anywhere, all of the factories that can turn it into crap are full, and all of the crap is sitting on store shelves, and everyone in the industry has to stop production and acquisition all at once, causing a crash.
But with entertainment and marketing, when is that realization reached? Perhaps it will be reached when the Marketing executives all realize that their ads are worthless - but we've seen research time and time again suggest that this is the case, and the corporations continue to spend on it. Perhaps it will be reached when the servers are completely full and the production studios are all churning out as much content as physically possible - but then again we've seen that there is seemingly no cost to mass-deleting old content to push people onto what's new.
Personally I think that this whole thing is like a game of chicken, and eventually someone is going to blink and cause massive earthquakes across both industries. It will have to be a major player, and I predict that the fallout will be the deaths of all minor corporations in those industries and monopolization by the large ones. But it's also possible that the timescale on this eventually happening is much longer than the timescale of some other crisis occurring that renders the whole marketing/entertainment crisis a moot point.
My friend was comparing it against the 50s-90s when mass media was adopted, the vast majority then was consuming the same media and thus the cultures of each decade had distinct separate characteristics.
But since the aughts we're back to before those times, we we've sort of made media so massive that there's all these little niche pockets you can find endless content in creating a bunch of separate co-existing cultures each with their own individual characteristics existing simultaneously.
Like we went all the way back around to before there was a mainstream by creating so many different niches of media and understandings.
Thus there's no real prevailing culture either
I'm pretty sure this is the Long Tail theory in play. As long as consumers have the appetite for new films & shows, and the storage & distribution are cheap, we can continue to churn out media to meet that demand. Amazon has acknowledged that it's part of why they're successful.
I thought the marketing was necessary to reach a big enough audience though. I don't quite understand how industry money flowing alongside marketing money props this all up?
The marketing thing doesn't apply to streaming services that don't have ads. Purely subscription-based services are, IMO, going to eventually reach a hard limit of subscribers when they fully saturate people's disposable incomes - and when that happens they'll be forced to turn to advertisements to make up for the lost growth potential, thus becoming bound up in the game of chicken. If you're dependent on ad money, and then the ad money stops, better hope you've got the reserves to last long enough to reorganize yourself.
As for the necessity of marketing, its effectiveness is a hotly debated topic. I think that there's a baseline level of effectiveness that marketing has, but the sheer amount of marketing we're exposed to on a daily basis waters its effectiveness down significantly. What's more important than whether or not it works though is whether or not CEOs believe it works, and they are currently acting as though it does.
competitive commercial advertising is a complete waste of humanity and it's all about being the last fast food ad somebody saw on tv when they're hungry on the way home from work
oh gosh I was thinking marketing for the media itself, nvm I get it.
"You should try this latest anime product! It has (cliche)(cliche)(cliche) but this time the hair colors are swapped around in a new combination and also the isekai ego insert's harem has a quirky twist! Also there's sexual violence in the first episode and a fascist call to arms but it's lighthearted and played for laughs :morshupls: