late night thoughts about the web, part II - streaming

streaming

The internet has just totally fucked up all the ways that we used to release media in a sustainable fashion. I mean, say what you will about the exploitation of artists, but pre-internet, artists were getting paid, man. And I mean paid for the work they were doing, making art. Not getting paid by making all these entrepreneurial offshoots like whiskey, makeup, or clothing brands. It used to be, Steven Spielberg would make a bunch of movies, and get paid a bunch for them. It used to be, even if a musical artist didn’t own their masters, people would buy albums, merch, go to the cheap concerts, and the artists would make money. And don’t get me started on how they used to pay a couple hundred dollars (maybe thousands) for painters to do magazine covers or art for Playboy short stories…

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s good that the internet was able to get so many things to so many people. We’re just paying for the devaluing of art that’s been going on since the days of the oldternet.

In the 90s, we’d have legal dramas and erotic thrillers battling it out for box office titles against an occasional comic book adaptation or a Philip K. Dick action movie adaptation. Movies of all sizes and budgets made up the cinematic calendar. We used to have movie stars. People didn’t remember the names of Tom Cruise’s characters in movies, they just went to see him. Matt Damon explains what happened pretty succinctly in a video, but it boils down to this:

Netflix and streaming killed the DVD market, which is what small and mid-budget movies could rely on to make money. With that killed, fearful studios decided to go and invest money in their “tried and true” projects, superhero/franchise movies that cost $150+ million dollars, or uber cheap indie or horror movies that would make money back in theaters or just give the studio prestige. That, plus all these corporations being allowed to buy and merge studios together, is why we have less movies coming out, and less different movies coming out.

Not to mention the whole snafu that’s transpired over television. If you weren’t in the know - one of the big deals about the most recent Writer’s Strike was over compensation of streaming shows. Back when shows were airing on television, the people who worked on that production would get residuals, checks for each time the show was aired. These residuals keep some actors alive. With streaming, though, without any transparency of views, companies like Netflix and Hulu pay people a flat rate, and they never get any residuals. While this might be an acceptable cost for big stars, for the writers and other people who would get residuals if their show came out 20 years ago, this just makes the whole field unsustainable. Even when you look at the employment rates and the amount of productions in Hollywood, those numbers are way, way down.

There are easy culprits to all of this, of course. The huge corporations. The venture capitalists that feed money to these streaming machines. The tech bro disruptors of industries that figured out how to be relatively fair and pay people.

At the end of the day, these thoughts about the web boil down to thoughts on how the tech bro has completely “disrupted” life. Having these products move people from movies and television to watching “content” on these little screens has completely morphed the medium into something else entirely.

But maybe… change is okay?

Maybe the medium morphing because of new delivery systems is okay. Maybe the fact that you can drop a whole season of Love is Blind and have people binge it while eating popcorn and not leaving their couch is… okay. Maybe it is just another way of enjoying things.

Isn’t choice okay?

Only thing is, are the people behind these things being fairly compensated?

Are the people behind the Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, etc… sharing their wealth?

Or are they just using these newfound delivery systems as new ways to control the artists who make art? Controlling how artists write their scripts, forcing them to account for their show being peak “second screen” “content”, rather than something that requires your full focus?

Let’s look at the salaries of these individuals. You tell me if it seems fair.