“The End” isn’t about some crazy 2012 apocalyptic theory for the end of the world, but it does ask the question about whether or not we’re facing the apocalypse of print and broadcast radio/tv. All three of these mediums are losing their audience, especially young people, to the internet, where people can access pretty much whatever they want, whether it is a song, movie, tv show or news article. Text, images, audio and video can all be viewed on a computer screen and the internet stores it for us to access whenever we want for free! The video even mentions the Open Content Alliance, which is working with Yahoo and Microsoft to digitize all the world’s books! Imagine having every book imaginable at your fingertips, but is this a good thing?
The issue for mainstream media isn’t how we consume the content we want, it’s about getting us to see the advertisements that pay a lot of money to get our attention. When we download a tv show, we don’t see the ads that paid for that show to go on the air, and so the advertisers lose money and thus the tv station loses money. This could be a bad thing since networks would have less money to spend on making quality content for us, OR we could look at it as a way of putting pressure on the tv networks to make better content that would encourage us to watch more television. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of garbage on television these days, and I think it’s a possible reason for the lack of success we see in television today, rather than the rise of the internet.
What about the music industry? It has been fighting things like file sharing and torrents since it first began with the likes of Napster and other file sharing software. Do you know anyone in university who has an iTunes library with thousands of songs and has paid for all of them? I’d be surprised if you do. Our generation is used to free music, and we get to carry it all in our pockets with an iPod, with thousands of songs at our fingertips. FM radio is losing its audience too because we can access whatever song we want for free, and there are no annoying advertisements either. When we download music are we hurting the artist (who make very little profit off record sales) or the record label? Artists make most of their money from touring live, and the more fans they have (through downloading music perhaps?) could mean a larger audience that want to see them on stage. Some artists like Nine Inch Nails have embraced this idea by releasing their music for free and increasing their ticket sales.
Bottom line, mainstream media conglomerates need to adapt to this new information environment rather than try to fight it. The 2 questions they need to ask are how can they get an audience and how can they profit from it. I don’t think we’ll see the end of print, radio and tv, but they will undoubtedly change. For better or for worse? What do you think?
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