The Slow, Painful Death of the SoCal Entertainment EcosystemAnd other trends in arts, culture & society
Below is my latest arts and culture briefing. You will notice a recurring theme in most of the stories featured here—namely the growing crisis in the macroculture. Many parts of the microculture are thriving, but large legacy institutions are more vulnerable than they have ever been during my lifetime. If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (for just $6 per month).US film and TV production is down 40% from its peak.Here’s my ugly prediction: Hollywood will never make as many movies and TV series as it did a few years ago. According to the Los Angeles Times:
All the big spenders (Netflix, Disney, etc.) are cutting back. They don’t really have a choice—their cash flow isn’t strong enough to support those peak levels. And this is now a self-reinforcing trend. The major players can reduce investment because their competitors are doing the same. The only real growth segment in video is self-produced stuff on YouTube—and that isn’t going to keep Hollywood cast and crew employed. This will have a spillover effect on music. Big companies have been buying up old songs, with the plan of licensing them for TV and film use. A dramatic decline in those areas will inevitably put a squeeze on these music catalog owners. All this is more evidence of the cultural stagnation that I’ve warned about repeatedly. But it’s going to get worse before it gets better. SoCal recording studios are disappearing.“Los Angeles' recording studios have heralded some of music's greatest hits, but are fading out due to real estate issues and rising costs,” Variety reports. “There are at least 10 truly world-class rooms still in L.A.,” producer Glen Ballard told Variety. “But there used to be hundreds.” Some of these recording studios deserve landmark status—for example, Capitol Studios in Hollywood.  Is this problem fixable? I can’t see that happening unless major record labels start investing money in making new recordings, instead of buying up old song catalogs. Imagine if they took a fraction of the billions they’re spending on publishing rights, and put that into launching new artists and new albums. But there’s no sign of that. Which leads to our next news story…. Strange things are happening on Spotify’s country music playlists.I can’t emphasize this enough: Streaming platforms are the natural enemies of record labels. The latter will eventually regret giving the keys to the kingdom to tech companies—who now control the relationship with the music consumer. The latest shenanigans at Spotify are happening on country music playlists, where hit songs are featured—but they are mysterious cover versions that seem to be AI-created. If you let the technocracy control listeners, they will use this power to maximize its own cash flow—and at the expense of musicians, labels, and publishers. Record labels should align themselves with the musicians—but they haven’t figured this out yet. Are rock and hip-hop fans living in the past?I’ve stirred up lots of controversy by showing how old music is killing new music in the marketplace. When I first looked at this in 2022, old songs represented 69.8% of streaming. It’s now 72.8%. I can easily envision this number reaching 80% by the end of the decade. We now know which genres are most (and least) reliant on old songs—thanks to Luminate, the market research firm that provides these numbers. Rock fans are most likely to listen to songs more than five years old. Hip-hop and pop fans also stick to familiar hits—only around 25% of their streams are recent songs. Country and Latin music is the most dependent on new releases, but even these fans still prefer old songs.
Banks now look like Starbucks, but why?A bland conformity spreads over the land, and everything starts to look like Starbucks. The latest casualty is your local bank branch. ... Keep reading with a 7-day free trialSubscribe to The Honest Broker to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives. A subscription gets you:
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The Slow, Painful Death of the SoCal Entertainment Ecosystem
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