It makes sense when you look at it economically.
Hollywood is pretty well locked down into a monopoly structure. It is fragmented between MPAA, SAG, etc., but you're either inside the system or you are indie, and if you are indie, you will be climbing a mountain to compete and if you succeed, you will be absorbed by the system because it will want to suck your blood and will pay you handsomely for the priviledge.
Monopolies naturally price to maximize their own profit, which creates a deadweight loss to society since in all but strange coincidental cases, the point of maximum profit won't be the equilibrium price of the perfectly competitive market. Not only does this affect things like DVD prices, but it affects the product itself.
Making an original film is more expensive than filming a re-make. The original film takes work to develop and write, and then you have to promote it and hope that it is popular enough to make a profit. A remake is cheap; most of the work is done. You just hire some names, revise the old script to include product placement in the form of handheld cellular telephones and include a token black/woman/both actor that is popular at the moment, punch up some special effects for the trailer, and the original work's popularity will promote this for you. High profit thanks to low costs, even if the film does not perform well at the box office or rental service.
The deadweight cost here is your opportunity to see an original film being thrown away so they can produce fodder for a future Nostalgia Critic Old Versus New reel.
Perhaps part of their motivation is concern that the technology to be a well-received indie is developing rapidly enough to become a threat. I don't think that it is; Flash has been around for a very long time, now, and despite Newgrounds giving people a place to showcase, there are very, very few Flash videos that are truly works of art. Even with a Hollywood SFX studio coming into your computers via BitTorrent, only about 0.01% of films made with it will make you say "holy shit," just like how only 0.01% of Flash videos both push the medium to its limits and present a work that is worth viewing. The rest is/would-be amateur hour and chaff.
Now, stepping back to music. Yes, music is a more-open environment. It is very possible for one guy at home with a computer to knock out two excellent albums a year with pro-grade mastering, turning a real profit measured in dollars instead of pennies, selling both digital and physical media to his fans. But, that only happens if the public knows who that guy is.
Radiohead turned big numbers with their tip-jar system because:
* Lots of people know about Radiohead, because they were introduced through The System.
* Lots of people like Radiohead, because they make better music than the other bands introduced through The System.
* Lots of people want more Radiohead, enough to look for more Radiohead.
* Fans of Radiohead, the ones who will buy branded merchandise, like shirts, stickers, and mouse-pads, see the tip-jar as another way of supporting the band, and will give various-degrees-of-generously because despite the opportunity to take the music for free, by paying, they become a part of the band. It's the same effect as charity drives where you pay for something trivial like cookies or lemonade.
It would not work for Name Of Unknown Band In State Of Your Choice because they aren't established like Radiohead is, and that is where the big vision of a world where anyone can make it big in music with a computer and a microphone falls apart. One, you must somehow bootstrap yourself amidst countless other musicians with the same hope, motivation, and goal as you. Two, you all are competing for the same dollars. Of course, each potential buyer has different tastes, but each potential buyer has only so many dollars they're willing to spend on music, and dividing the competition by genre doesn't change the fact that you're amongst thousands fighting over any given fistful of pocket change.
Author
Topic: MPAA threatens to disconnect Google from the Internet (Read 11453 times)