Over the last few days, after the broadcast of “Phil’s Deli” and in reaction to a post and comments on Baby Got Books, I’ve started thinking about how works of art get distributed, particularly in regards to books, movies and TV shows, and audio plays. Each is being affected by the Internet and the digitized life, but none, it seems to me, has caught up with technology yet. What finally pushed me over the precipice to write this post was getting an email forwarding a link to Michael Moore’s new film, Slacker Uprising.
Moore is trying something different here. He’s giving his movie away. (And, just for the record, I’m not endorsing, condemning, exfoliating, or cleansing the film. I haven’t watched it and haven’t decided whether I will or not. If you don’t care for Michael Moore, I would suggest that you not watch it and that you don’t bother leaving angry comments on this post. I’m concerned here with art, society, and technology, not politics.) He’s not the first show biz figure to try giving some content away; Radiohead got some very nice news coverage doing so, and a couple of others have apparently tried it out.
What is occurring to me is that we are about to see a vast–and quite possibly useful–change in the way that works of art are distributed. I don’t claim that this is some kind of original insight; I’m just trying to work through this, and this blog has become the medium through which I think through these things.
Let’s start with movies. Film, as an art form, is all but dead. Oh, sure, you can see loads of violence, trillions of dollars-worth of special effects, and computer animation out the wazoo, but precious little of it even aspires to art. The economics of the movie business have gotten to the point where, not only would Citizen Kane not get made today, neither would Stagecoach, On the Waterfront, The Hustler, or Five Easy Pieces. And yet, there might be hope.
The most public face of this hope is, of course, YouTube. People are already making short films and releasing them on YouTube or its equivalents and hoping that viral marketing will get them the attention they desire. And now we’re getting a feature film. And some TV shows. People are starting to figure out how you can make money–and show business is, in the end, a business–by doing things online.
This is a major change in the means of distribution. And being the means of distribution is the whole point of being a movie studio or a TV network. If someone takes that away from you, your goose is cooked. Just look at the record companies. iTunes and iPods and programs like Garage Band and Audacity have made it possible for anyone to produce music and to distribute it without a record company. Paul Simon discusses this and the evolution of recorded music from the vinyl album to the mp3 in a discussion with Charlie Rose (starting at minute 43:00 of the video). He indicates that he’s no longer thinking in terms of making another CD, but instead releasing new songs individually and less as groups of songs and more as lone items.
The implication is that the record company is no longer a part of the equation. The means of distribution have changed.
