The great bewilderment about the death of material media continues, as publishers struggle with declining numbers of papers and records being sold. The findings of a research paper of Insée on how households spend their money on newspapers and books in France can most likely be applied to most industrialized countries: The younger generations stop buying daily newspapers and spend less and less money on books, Harry Potter nonewithstanding. Other media follow, CD-sales and sales for other media are in decline since the nineties. It is pretty obvious that my generation and those younger than me get their information, their music and, increasingly their movies, directly from the internet.
The ugly three sisters
In the past twenty years, the media industry has tried three different approaches to stop the decline in sales. Its probably no surprise to tell you none of them have worked.
First they started to outlaw the competition, by first lobbying laws that prolonged the time a book or a song is copyright protected, and then criminalizing the copying of such copyrighted works, even for private use. Likening your own customers to criminals, pedophiles and terrorists did only contribute to make the music industry to one of the most hated branches of economy in the eyes of the kids. It did little to deter filesharing or raise the sales again.
The second venue was to battle technology with more technology, by restricting the rights of the user to use the goods he bought by EULAs or other pieces of technology, of which the Sony Rootkit was surely the most famous. Needles to say, since there are lots of geeks around who dislike being told how their equipment should work, that approach continues to fail, as new encryptions get broken as fast as they come out, even though the media industry tried combining approach No.1 and 2 by outlawing technology that didn’t suit their old sales structures.
Lastly, the media industry tried to come up with different ways to generate revenue, which so far have proven only party successful. Concerts have replaces record sales as major source of income for bands – unfortunately, the record industry is not really needed for that. Publishers try to charge their readers for content with mixed results, which is not surprising considered that most newspapers cut their staff in the past ten years to the bone. For most editors there is little time to create high quality content, instead they spend their work cutting & pasting news agency material, which always will be available free just anywhere on the web.
All these approaches were ways to secure control over a distribution technology which was designed and built specifically to defy such control, which in a nutshell explains why those attempts were doomed to fail from the very beginning.
I’m your fucking prince! The stupid hack is in repair!
The unloved stepchild of the new interwebs was online advertising, evolving from annoying animated gifs to the ubiquitous banners, landscape banners and videos in the past years. Online advertisement offered hope for revenue to the classic media, since they could re-sell the content no-one wanted to see printed by putting it online and illustrating it with some nice ads. Unfortunately, with the advent of google ads this business model has been effectively monopolized, especially since browser technology has cought up and lets users take control of the websites they see, which makes traditional ads ineffective.
The Crystal Ball
What it all boils down to is the purpose media and media contents have for their users. Newspapers, TV channels, Radio stations are all different technologies of information delivery, a big chunk of it being product information, record reviews, restaurant critics, makeup tipps, all that trash euphemistically termed “consumer information”.
These technologies are being out-phased by cheaper and more powerful technologies like websites, podcasts and p2p, just as the medival puffer got unmodern with the advent of general literacy and the rise of the printed free press two hundred years ago. The consumer will, after a cultural or socially induced lagtime, switch to the most convenient and cheapest way to have his goods delivered, and since internet is both cheaper and more convenient than most other technologies, thats where the kids get their news.
The same goes for advertising. Marketing is a technology to getting the word out to the consumer that a certain product exists, plus convincing him to buy it. Unfortunately for the marketing companies, hundreds of free review websites, shopping portals and fansites offer not only easy ways of learning wether a product has the features one needs, but also wether other people liked it, and even in-depth information about technological aspects of new cameras, cars, computers and virtually everything that can be bought. This chorus of small voices ammends, comments, and sometimes refutes the statements of companies about the qualities and properties of their products, and it does so in transparent and verifiable form. Which means that everyone can select a product not based on the promises of marketing departments, but by relying on the experience of mostly impartial others.
So whats left is the opinion-making, and even that is increasingly taking place in channels like 4chan, youtube or other community-oriented places of the web. “Viral marketing” is a desperate attempt to cover the stunning fact that fashion magazines and stars do not longer define whats cool and hip, that the fashion czars have been shot by an anonymous mob, or rather: have been spellbound and ignored and forgotten.
Happily Everafter
Which brings us to the very simply conclusion that we’re currently watching some more branches of the economy rott and wither. Of course, there will still be some magazines and journals around in the future, and there will still be need for advertising and posters and new ways of enticing the crowd to flock to the current in-store. But the market will contine to shrink as the use of internet grows. Printed press, record industry and marketing are three additions on the list of victims of the digital world.
Now while I type this it seems a pretty obvious conclusion to me, which makes it even more astounding that so few people seem to draw the appropriate consequences.