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Why Movies Are Not Exactly Like Music
Ars digs into the proposition that movies will go the way of the music business, and finds some reasons not to be totally gloomy about Hollywood's immediate future. For one thing, the movie biz managed to introduce a next-generation format to follow the DVD, a trick that eluded the music crowd (anyone remember DVD-Audio? SACD?). Blu-ray isn't making up the gap as DVD sales fall, but it is slowing the revenue decline. Perhaps the most important difference from the music business is that movies aren't amenable to "disaggregation" — unlike CDs, which people stopped buying once they could get the individual songs they really wanted. Ars concludes: "The movie business is facing many of the same challenges that are bedeviling music, but it's not about to go quietly into that good night — and it may not have to."
DVDs sales are going down, but some of that gap is Amazon Unbox, Netflix, iTunes, DVRs, Hulu, etc.
The movie industry gets paid from all of these sources (including DVRs in that movie companies are paid to air movies on cable).
BluRay sales aren't huge because some retailers keep insisting on charging $35 for BluRay movies. We all know the cost of the disc is minimal. Amazon can sell BluRays for $10-$20. I'm not going to pay $35 for a movie, and I'm not alone on that issue.
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Uh -- because movies have pictures?
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On the other hand, it does have one tremendous weakness that doesn't afflict music: consumers often watch films only once.
Really, if anyone should be working on a system to enable on-demand viewing of their intellectual property it should be the movie industry.
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An obvious difference is that people are interested in seeing a movie exactly once, and as soon as possible.
Music relies on people wanting to hear it multiple times and they are probably more interested in the music well after it exists. And complete knowledge of the contents of the music increases, rather than decreases, their desire to hear it.
Do they get into the fact the people are wasting there time and entertainment budgets on gaming?
Can't go see a movie when you are busy playing CoD:MW2 or Tekken 6 or etc.
Also at 60$ a Crack you might be hurting for expendable cash.
Perhaps the most important difference from the music business is that movies aren't amenable to "disaggregation" -- unlike CDs, which people stopped buying once they could get the individual songs they really wanted.
I stopped watching movies a few years ago, now all I watch are the trailers. They are free, you get 80% of the story, and it is always the best parts too. What's not to love?
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not to be totally gloomy about Hollywood's immediate future
Why would I even care? Seriously. I like movies, but if the big centralized studios vanished and we just had independent filmmakers left I don't think I'd shed any tears. I might actually welcome that just to see what happens.
I was horrified when I saw some of the prices on the PSN video store. £2.50 to rent Zoolander. In the UK, that film is on TV every other weekend and then DVD is probably onto £3.99. There's no way I'd rent that, much less fork out the £6.99 for the SD version.
That said, with proper 3D movies coming into play, I'm quite willing to still go to the cinema, sure I find the price quite high but if you haven't seen a 3D film yet I urge you to go and see one, it's very rare that I'm impressed with technology but this is something else.
Movies are definitely not like music, except it would be nice if you could download your favourite single episode of Family Guy, The Simpsons or The Big Bang Theory instead of having to fork for the box set (or can you already do this).
Summation 2
The summary seems to suggest that audio needs a new physical format. Why? It's not like the so-called "musicians" of today want to make longer records (for which more storage would be necessary), and it's not like consumers want higher-quality audio, either - it's been repeatedly (although I wouldn't say conclusively) shown that most consumers can hear no problems with 128Kbps MP3's, and that they're perfectly happy with said bottom-of-the-barrel quality. CD's aren't great, but it's not as anybody's starving for something better (as opposed to video, where people seem to want constantly higher and higher resolution). Also - and I hate to say this, but - it seems as if the music industry is starting to "get" digital distribution which further negates the need for a new format (as opposed to the movie industry, who still totally less-than-three's physical distribution).
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1. Forget chasing 'pirates'. This will save a lot of expensive legal bills. Cut back drastically on advertising too, as you don't need to whip people up into a frenzy to get them to theatres in the first week.
2. Make film (Citizen Kane2, The Reckoning: starring Adam Sandler or something).
3. Make a VCD cut and make unlabelled cheapo vcd's. Using the economies of scale, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate vcd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies. Your margin is the difference between a bulk pressed cd and a small scale burned copy.
4. Simultaneously sell the film as a download for the same price as you get for the vcd. ...wait a few weeks
5. Make a nicer, longer dvd cut of the film and, again, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate dvd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies.
6. Sell the dvd cut of the film online at the same price as the DVD wholesale price. .... wait some more
7. Theatre release of film in lovely THX/35mm
8. Dvd/Bluray boxed sets with extra everything.
9. Laugh all the way to the bank (which then gambles half your money away and pays the other half to its CEO).
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Also, one pretty significant difference between the two is the cost of production. Terminator 2 cost about $90 million and is 137 minutes long. That's $647.482 per minute. A typical album might contain an hour of music or so and can (despite what the MPAA wants you to believe) be produced for next-to-nothing*.
Of course, I am not taking into account all the last millennium issues with distribution and publicity. I'm talking about the costs of actually making a movie or album
*By "next-to-nothing" I mean that cost of time in a studio and a good mixer/sound technician is low enough that even unknown, new bands can pool their money and pay to have an album recorded quite easily.
Five bucks is what I pay for a flick. No more. When it hits the five dollar bin at Wal-Mart, that's when I may or may not buy it.
And Netflix lets customers keep a flick for two weeks at that price. Unless it's a cult classic like Rocky Horror or an animated electronic babysitter for single-digit-year-old children like Cinderella, I don't see what kind of flick you'd necessarily want to keep longer than that.
Another difference is that music is still produced as an 'album', with al the related expenses, but is now often sold as tracks. This means that some tracks probably are required to cover some of the expenses of other tracks. OTOH, movies as still sold as complete units, and are sometimes bundled with other units to generate additional profits, not cover basic expenses.
The other difference is that music has been sold directly to masses for a few generations, so the incumbents has gotten used to this as the normal situation. OTOH, movies has only been sold to the masses at the retail level for a generation or two. Prior to the 80's, movies were sold to first run theaters, then a series of lower priced venues, then to TV. Even in the 80's, with VCRs, there was still an debate whether a movie should be 'priced to sell' or 'priced to rent'. It was not uncommon for a movie to be priced $50-$100.
I do not see that bluray is going to be a big format. We have music players which changed the music industry, and we are not going to be told what we must have to watch a movie. I think the anti-piracy push of the industry shows they get this. They want to keep video cameras out of movie theaters, to protect the real profit centers. They want to stop free video streaming, so they can develop that profit center. An amazing number of movies and tv are available for streaming. This, of course is made possible by extremely tight DRM, another thing the music biz does not have, and something, I think, the video biz will have to give up in time.
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The movie business is facing many of the same challenges that are bedeviling music, but it's not about to go quietly into that good night
Music is going completely away? Wow. After several millenia of human musical composition I would have figured the art form had some staying power, but I guess it was a pretty good run after all. Though I must admit I was kind of looking forward to the idea of hearing new music in the future.
oh well
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how are you going to feel when there are no big studios left to greenlight "Cheaper by the Dozen 3"?
If Twentieth Century Fox dramatically scales back its operations, then the Gilbreths are going to have to shop their works to smaller studios, including those that use the medium of SWF serials rather than traditional feature films. But these studios will have to compete with reality TV: see Jon and Kate Plus 8 or 18 Kids and Counting or Table for 12 or the new series starring Nadya Suleman and her kids.
Music and movies are fundamentally different. Aside from the obvious visual aspect, they are much longer, require that you pay attention, and get worse with each viewing.
How many people would put on Top Gun each morning when they get into work? How many people would actually pay attention to it after the fifth time that week? How many people wouldn't notice how cheesy the dialog and special affects are after subsequent viewings?
I suspect that if you were put into a PET scanner, entirely different portions of the brain would light up when watching a movie vs. listen to music.
So while music can be listened to over and over again with the same level of enjoyment, movies can't be watched over and over again...unless you are stoned.
I don't think movies are going to go the way of music.
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I read the title - "Why Movies Are Not Exactly Like Music" - and thought, "If you can't tell the difference, you've got bigger problems than piracy!"
I can download an album in less time than it takes to listen to it. I can barely tell the difference between the downloaded version and what I would buy at a record store. And it's already in the format I want, either for listening to it on the computer or putting it on my iPhone.
A movie, on the other hand, I'm probably going to have to leave to download overnight. It still won't be quite as good quality as the DVD version, and it will certainly be inferior to the BluRay version. If I want to watch it on my TV, I have to go to the hassle of burning it to a DVD. (If I want to watch it on my iPhone, I have to go to the even greater hassle of transcoding it.) It's probably easier to just walk to the video store around the corner and shell out the $4 to get 3 movies right away.
What's more, that 200 MB album I downloaded is probably going to get listened to dozens of times. The 2 GB movie might get watched twice if it's REALLY good.
CDs and their predecessors are collections of individual performances, with a few exceptions.
You've just broken the heart of every artist that's ever agonised over the running order of their album.
Good music can be produced for next to nothing, whereas it is much more difficult to do that with movies. A song or album can be credibly done by an INDIVIDUAL, or maybe a band and a few extra people to produce. Ten people, tops, unless they're padding it.
I agree up to a point, and I happen to prefer, on the whole, cheaply recorded music.
But consider that lots of people like the expensive stuff. The mainstream superstars spend millions on studio time with extremely high end equipment, studios with expensively built acoustics, engineers and mic technicians and session musicians who charge professional rates. How much do think it costs to hire a 40 piece orchestra for a day?
Still cheaper than a typical movie, but not what you can afford to do with your disposable income.
A song or album can be credibly done by an INDIVIDUAL
There are a couple problems with writing, recording, and self-publishing your own album:
Your logic operates under the assumption that a movie has a fixed value, that intrinsically all films are worth $20.
In a free market, value is determined by supply and demand.
You're trying to validate theft of IP by a product losing value due to low demand. Just because an item is placed on sale, that doesn't mean you are entitled to pay nothing for it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Well, the "shuffle" feature on CD players introduced back in the 80s broke their hearts first. I'm just pointing it out. :-)
And while they are exceptions, not many albums are produced with 40-piece orchestras.
I've seen more than a few musicians (a couple, personal friends) who have built acoustically engineered sound rooms in their homes. And computers can replace 99% of the expensive equipment, other than instruments. Heck. Most of that expensive audio equipment is nothing more than specialized computers. All the digital stuff, anyway.
And while I certainly don't begrudge costs like studio musicians, engineers and techs, we're still talking several orders of magnitude cheaper than movie production.
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People use need to mean want. I don't know where the cutoff is for 720p vs. 1080p, but I know that above roughly the 40" mark (higher for DLP sets that have a bit of blur to them) the blockiness of 480p becomes very noticeable. I chose a 40" 720p set a couple years ago for precisely that reason; I see no need for BluRay, and I'd rather my less graphically capable systems (e.g. the Wii) don't look completely horrible. I expect around 60"-70" or so 1080p becomes "necessary" in the same way; if you go with a lower resolution it looks like crap, so to make your investment worth anything, you need video of sufficient quality.
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When you've got FTTH at home you get used to certain levels of image quality ...
Like getting used to the convenience of the automated ATM machine...
That is, they sell albums based on people wanting just one or two songs.
The recording industry was singles-based for most of its history. A 78 held only one song per side. A 45 only held one song per side*. It was 1948 before the twelve inch album was premiered.
Most albums were "greatest hits" or other compilations; if you wanted a single you bought the 45 single.
During the 1960s and 1970s, many rock and roll bands made "concept albums" that were meant to be pleyed in their entirety; Sgt Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, most Pink Floyd offerings, and many more.
When the CD came out is when the "album theivery" where you had to buy a whole CD full of second rate songs to get the one good one.
Why does a movie that cost $100 million to produce cost the same as a music CD that maybe cost $10 million (or $1 million, or less)?
Less; far less. You can get a record recorded in a professional studio and 1000 copies professionally duplicated with cover art and so on for the price of a good PA system and a few mikes (every band needs a good PA and mikes).
Good music can be produced for next to nothing, whereas it is much more difficult to do that with movies.
This movie scares the hell out of Hollywood. A parody of Star Trek and Babylon Five, it's very well done and hilarious. You can download it for free from the linked site (the producers of the movie). It only cost a few thousand dollars to make.
* The humorous song "They're Coming to Take Me Away" had a "B" side that was the song played backwards
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