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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26571 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?

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.

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