It’s officially the dog days, of the summer and the Media Industry. Climate change has made this the hottest summer on record. Disruption has transformed Media into a virtual sharknado.
The 2020s will be remembered as a decade of massive change. Lockdown accelerated time and change for everyone and everything on earth. Generational shifts that started last decade, are now in full blossom.
As culture’s leading indicator, nothing exemplifies this new now-constant rate of change more than the Media Industrial Complex. It was not prepared for the inevitable shifts coming their way, and now, faced with a full-on tsunami of disruption, it is crumbling under its own weight.
Everyday more fully illuminates the damage done from countless self-inflicted wounds. Continued defense of terrible measurement. Utter ignorance of new technologies (AI), followed by blind knee-jerks in the exact opposite direction to overcompensate (GenAI). Continued reliance on the same pool of old wise men to “lead the way.” Two, unnecessary and avoidable strikes.
At the end of the last decade, the launch of Disney+ changed everything. In retrospect, it was the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Television. Six months later, lockdown started, and everything did change, almost all at once. Media accelerated to its peak so quickly, its constituents didn’t realize as they went over it. In less than three years, Disney would overtake Netflix for the most streaming subs on earth. 90 days after that, Disney fired their CEO. Now, just four short years later, streaming and all of Media are caught in a bloody high-speed swirl of teeth and guts.
Alena Smith thinks the solution to today’s problems is to regulate Media. There’s no question that the massive fortunes generated across Media accrue to the conglomerates and the C-Suites far more than the artists – and that new regulation around the value chain of content ownership is quite merited. But regulations are never perfect, and all of them take time.
2023 is a crossroads for Media, and we are past its halfway point. We can’t wait for change to come. We must make it ourselves.
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