In the 20th Century, media became an industrial product. This process had started with print, initially in the United Kingdom, and led to the massive

Hip Hop, Blogs and NFTs: Unbundling, remixing, and reintegrating Media

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2021-07-20 16:30:07

In the 20th Century, media became an industrial product. This process had started with print, initially in the United Kingdom, and led to the massive successes of the newspaper and publishing industries. This same approach was applied to film, leading to the Hollywood studio system, which consciously employed the same production line framework as Ford's Detroit factories. So too did music become a production-oriented industry. Tin Pan Alley and the famous Brill Building were factories of culture, churning out songs, which would be paired with artists, recorded and pressed for distribution.

The heart of this transformation was the realization that there were economies of scale that, especially when coupled with the protections of copyright, could generate attractive profits for shareholders. The media company would have knowledge of its customer, through the new science of market research. This insight would be used to develop products that the market would desire. The products would be produced as efficiently as possible, pushing talent to create new work on budget and schedule.

Using the growing power of the media and its advertising complement, marketing departments would endeavor to turn products into hits, and hits into sequels, series and ongoing successes. The experience was delivered and defined by the industries directly, with a clear line of responsibilities-- and influence -- flowing from the creators to consumers. This taxonomy of roles gave a lot of power to the producers, who monopolized both development and delivery of goods across all industries.