As Goes Music, So Goes Video-- Long Tail, David Byrne & Do It Yourself Animation

This piece is from January, 2008, explains why you see much about music on this blog.  It is abundantly clear to me that whenever I read about the music business or mp3's or what bands are going through today, it is all a harbinger of what is on the way for those of us involved in the production of video content.  It's music today, but it's video tomorrow.

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Dear Friends,

As goes music, so goes video.  If you want to look into the digital future of movies, television shows and cartoons, just look at what's happening now in the music industry.  The technological impact on creation and distribution of content, greed and panic, artists and studios hemorrhaging money, huge financial opportunity rewarding the smart & adaptable, copyright and control of use issues, piracy bringing down old economic models and their adherents-- it will all pertain to union on-camera actors, voice actors, writers, or any professional creative type, really, if it doesn't already.

So, over the holiday slog, I've found a few things I thought you should check out.

I'll start with some links detailing some interesting ideas by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine.  His concept is called "Long Tail."   He currently has a book out about this phenomenon also titled, "The Long Tail."

Basically, he explains how the economic model shifts when formerly finite and expensive "brick and mortar" shelf spaces (e.g., book shelves, DVD racks, movie screens, network time slots) are digitized into an infinite on-demand digital warehouse where storage costs next to nothing and all content new and old, popular and cult, is easily searched, found and delivered.  The market becomes less "hit" driven.  The data show clearly that the formerly ignored "long tail" of either "old" or "niche" content suddenly becomes a significant money maker, where before only "hits" brought in the bucks and thus merited a place on the once limited shelf space of the bookstore, video store, multiplex screens, or network sched.  This has major implications for the studios, artists, and consumers of creative content.  Everything old (or niche) is new again.

If you watch the series of web-videos from the third link below (totaling about sixty minutes), Mr. Anderson mentions Amazon.com, Rhapsody and Netflix a lot, which are particularly good sources for data of how things are shifting.  Whenever he speaks of "music" or "books" just insert the name of the latest video projects you may have worked on.  Most all applies or will soon apply to the video content we help make.

I'm hoping that we actors and our our unions get a good grasp of the reality of these shifts in the entertainment economy that is the source of our livelihood as our two unions enter into contentious high stakes negotiations regarding all this.  The potential for profit for both studios and artists becons those who are willing to understand, explore, evolve with and exploit the new creative and financial potential of this new evolutionary step in the entertainment machine.

To start, a nice overview of the "long tail" effect on Wikipedia, with links to other articles on the ideas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail

Next, the site of Chris Anderson himself:

http://www.longtail.com/about.html

Then a series of videos of Chris Anderson speaking about  all this- you can select to "play all."

http://www.scribemedia.org/2006/11/13/the-long-tail/

Next, I've found a couple terrific articles from this month's Wired Magazine dealing with the evolving creative/economic models in the music world.  We've seen recently writers pow-wow-ing about making their own content for distribution over the web, free from the studios' control, meddling and greed.  Thanks to the Digital Age, musicians, who often create and produce their own songs, are finding new freedom from the traditional model of relative enslavement to the big studios.  The rock band Radiohead has recently sold its latest album "In Rainbows" directly to fans from the web-- and let their fans set the price they pay, if any-- before reverting to a more traditional means of distributing and marketing their music. 

They made millions of dollars directly from their fans, which is pretty incredible.

Both of the following articles discuss this milestone as well as other evolutionary advances in the music industry, that strike me as quite relevant to the WGA, SAG, AFTRA and the DGA.  The second article is a great piece by David Byrne, formerly of the Talking Heads, about how musicians traditionally have made money and how they might in the digital age:

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_yorke

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_byrne

Next, here are a couple interesting examples of artists making their own content and releasing it on the web themselves without studio interference.  Perhaps not profitable yet, but that can change...

Here's an example of a guy voicing his own animatics on superdeluxe.com, a place with a ton of professional and non-professional comedic videos:

http://www.superdeluxe.com/sd/series/professor_bros

Here's the multi-talented voice artist James Arnold Taylor who worked this up with a friend that is pretty cool, again sans studio.  Actually, kind of a studio of two:

http://www.ifilm.com/video/2672757

Finally, a cool little article in Popular Mechanics about how to become your own animation studio:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how_to/4236490.html

Recent developments:  Napster is joining Amazon.com, Rhapsody and iTunes and is now selling its tunes DRM-free (can be copied, burned or played on any player, as I understand it). 

Also, Netflix, which already streams thousands of movies and television shows on demand to your computer at no extra charge to their subscribers, will release a box that will instantly download and play movies and television on demand by the end of this year.  A box called "Vudu" has a similar plan.  If Netflix's video-on-demand service is included as part of their monthly subscription fee, it will effectively be what Rhapsody and Napster are- a vast library with instant and comprehensive access to all content for one low monthly fee.

And if all video is distributed this way, I have no idea how the studios or artists can make money off of this model in anyway approaching what the "old model" was.  Yet losing DRM also strikes me as the last, best hope of fighting universal piracy of all content.  We won't just be bargaining with the studios for the "digital backend," we'll also be negotiating with a world of pirates and an entire generation who are less and less attached to-- and controlled by-- the old forms of content distribution.

This piece is from January, 2008, explains why you see much about music on this blog.  It is abundantly clear to me that whenever I read about the music business or mp3's or what bands are going through today, it is all a harbinger of what is on the way for those of us involved in the production of video content.  It's music today, but it's video tomorrow.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Friends,

As goes music, so goes video.  If you want to look into the digital future of movies, television shows and cartoons, just look at what's happening now in the music industry.  The technological impact on creation and distribution of content, greed and panic, artists and studios hemorrhaging money, huge financial opportunity rewarding the smart & adaptable, copyright and control of use issues, piracy bringing down old economic models and their adherents-- it will all pertain to union on-camera actors, voice actors, writers, or any professional creative type, really, if it doesn't already.

So, over the holiday slog, I've found a few things I thought you should check out.

I'll start with some links detailing some interesting ideas by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine.  His concept is called "Long Tail."   He currently has a book out about this phenomenon also titled, "The Long Tail."

Basically, he explains how the economic model shifts when formerly finite and expensive "brick and mortar" shelf spaces (e.g., book shelves, DVD racks, movie screens, network time slots) are digitized into an infinite on-demand digital warehouse where storage costs next to nothing and all content new and old, popular and cult, is easily searched, found and delivered.  The market becomes less "hit" driven.  The data show clearly that the formerly ignored "long tail" of either "old" or "niche" content suddenly becomes a significant money maker, where before only "hits" brought in the bucks and thus merited a place on the once limited shelf space of the bookstore, video store, multiplex screens, or network sched.  This has major implications for the studios, artists, and consumers of creative content.  Everything old (or niche) is new again.

If you watch the series of web-videos from the third link below (totaling about sixty minutes), Mr. Anderson mentions Amazon.com, Rhapsody and Netflix a lot, which are particularly good sources for data of how things are shifting.  Whenever he speaks of "music" or "books" just insert the name of the latest video projects you may have worked on.  Most all applies or will soon apply to the video content we help make.

I'm hoping that we actors and our our unions get a good grasp of the reality of these shifts in the entertainment economy that is the source of our livelihood as our two unions enter into contentious high stakes negotiations regarding all this.  The potential for profit for both studios and artists becons those who are willing to understand, explore, evolve with and exploit the new creative and financial potential of this new evolutionary step in the entertainment machine.

To start, a nice overview of the "long tail" effect on Wikipedia, with links to other articles on the ideas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail

Next, the site of Chris Anderson himself:

http://www.longtail.com/about.html

Then a series of videos of Chris Anderson speaking about  all this- you can select to "play all."

http://www.scribemedia.org/2006/11/13/the-long-tail/

Next, I've found a couple terrific articles from this month's Wired Magazine dealing with the evolving creative/economic models in the music world.  We've seen recently writers pow-wow-ing about making their own content for distribution over the web, free from the studios' control, meddling and greed.  Thanks to the Digital Age, musicians, who often create and produce their own songs, are finding new freedom from the traditional model of relative enslavement to the big studios.  The rock band Radiohead has recently sold its latest album "In Rainbows" directly to fans from the web-- and let their fans set the price they pay, if any-- before reverting to a more traditional means of distributing and marketing their music. 

They made millions of dollars directly from their fans, which is pretty incredible.

Both of the following articles discuss this milestone as well as other evolutionary advances in the music industry, that strike me as quite relevant to the WGA, SAG, AFTRA and the DGA.  The second article is a great piece by David Byrne, formerly of the Talking Heads, about how musicians traditionally have made money and how they might in the digital age:

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_yorke

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_byrne

Next, here are a couple interesting examples of artists making their own content and releasing it on the web themselves without studio interference.  Perhaps not profitable yet, but that can change...

Here's an example of a guy voicing his own animatics on superdeluxe.com, a place with a ton of professional and non-professional comedic videos:

http://www.superdeluxe.com/sd/series/professor_bros

Here's the multi-talented voice artist James Arnold Taylor who worked this up with a friend that is pretty cool, again sans studio.  Actually, kind of a studio of two:

http://www.ifilm.com/video/2672757

Finally, a cool little article in Popular Mechanics about how to become your own animation studio:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how_to/4236490.html

Recent developments:  Napster is joining Amazon.com, Rhapsody and iTunes and is now selling its tunes DRM-free (can be copied, burned or played on any player, as I understand it). 

Also, Netflix, which already streams thousands of movies and television shows on demand to your computer at no extra charge to their subscribers, will release a box that will instantly download and play movies and television on demand by the end of this year.  A box called "Vudu" has a similar plan.  If Netflix's video-on-demand service is included as part of their monthly subscription fee, it will effectively be what Rhapsody and Napster are- a vast library with instant and comprehensive access to all content for one low monthly fee.

And if all video is distributed this way, I have no idea how the studios or artists can make money off of this model in anyway approaching what the "old model" was.  Yet losing DRM also strikes me as the last, best hope of fighting universal piracy of all content.  We won't just be bargaining with the studios for the "digital backend," we'll also be negotiating with a world of pirates and an entire generation who are less and less attached to-- and controlled by-- the old forms of content distribution.