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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26593 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Inside Disney and internal corporate boardroom drama. Iger appointed Chapek as his successor but ended up decided coming back. It touches on the fight with Desantis, the prior generation deciding not to retire, internal power struggles, managing a business where no one has the skillset for all of the businesses (creative, running parks, international, finance, sports, launching a streaming business). About a 15-20 min. Iger seems more interested in the Desantis fight than Chapek who just wanted to play nice.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/09/06/disney-succession-mess-iger-chapek.html

That's too much “Great Man of History” analysis. I think Disney was boned no matter what.

  • Huge amounts of Disney’s revenue came from linear commercial TV, which is dying, and big tentpole franchises like Marvel, which—no matter how brilliant of a creative team you hire—are going to get tired at some point.
  • They get plenty of cruise line and theme park revenue, but if you jack up the prices and/or degrade the service quality too much with nickel-and-diming with Fast Passes, demand shrinks.
  • It's incredibly hard to change the institutional culture of a company that is that big and that old.

I doubt the DeSantis thing or the board room drama doesn't really mean a damn thing, versus the economic and cultural flow that's adjusting to a giant surplus of entertainment that's available everywhere all the time whenever you want it. Post-scarcity entertainment killed the music industry long ago, and now it's time that everything else gets shanked too.

Post-scarcity entertainment killed the music industry long ago

Record labels have 10x’d their valuations from the nadir over a decade ago thanks to Spotify, and Taylor Swift’s next tour will gross $3.5bn in North America alone. The music industry is probably more profitable than ever, but the money shifted in part to touring and live stuff.

That actually has similarities to Disney. Disney owns the parks, which are the entertainment equivalent of a Taylor Swift tour (expensive and an experience participants save for and look forward to), and which are fantastically profitable.

The problem was (as others have said) that Iger spent tens of billions on TV and movie content at the exact time that was becoming less profitable and the ESPN cash cow was drying up.

How do record labels make money when every song I can think of is available from youtube for free? I don't understand why Spotify has revenue. Just download songs and put them on your phone? How hard is that?

I pay for spotify and when I find tracks I like I buy the flacs from the artists. I'm mostly paying Spotify for convenience (playing music I don't listen to for other people/events) and for access to the algorithm, which has found a lot of incredibly nice artists that fit my incredibly niche tastes.

Nearly all of those songs are on YouTube channels that send their ad revenue to the record companies.

Just download songs and put them on your phone? How hard is that?

I used to do this, and then I got a trial Spotify subscription and never went back - what they really sell is convenience. The value to me of my time and attention is greater than their fee.

Isn’t YouTube lower quality? Also for $10 a month the library that follows you everywhere, can be streamed or downloaded anywhere and has pretty much every song in the standard version directly available is pretty convenient.

Maybe so, especially if it's one of those youtube videos that was uploaded 13 years ago by the Peruvian fans of a Finnish band with some random anime stitched onto it... but that's part of the charm IMO! https://youtube.com/watch?v=_HAuXWVLyW4

  1. for many people "download songs and put them on your phone" is a hard challenge to overcome.

  2. many people prefer to listed to some prepared playlist rather than hand-curate and build music library

  3. for many people Spotify is cheap enough to round it to "free" - or at least considered cheaper than investing time into (1) and (2)

"when every song I can think of is available from youtube for free" - well, not every (the same goes for Spotify)

(Spotify is doomed to have no real profits, but that is a separate problem)

Shockingly most people browse without an adblocker. They couldn't figure out how to download a video if you put a gun to their head. Spotify, sells convenience and a clean conscience that you're not stealing from your favorite artist.

Convenience is an interesting factor here. People my (our?) generation had a vague sense of anxiety, that our kids are going to run circles around us with regards to technology the same way we did around our parents, only for it to turn out that growing up with "streamlined" software made them effectively technologically illiterate.

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