(www.apricitas.io)
To me, the entertainment industry suffers from a lot of the same problems in most other industries that chase "efficiency", in terms of resources used and profit made. Economies and industries and labor are interdependent and more "alive" than balance sheets and bank accounts.
For the film industry, when you start moving things away from LA to "save money", it has knock on effects that happen over long periods of time. Multiple Quarterly Earnings Reports long, if you will. Local businesses that depend on the film industry close due to less work, so then there is less expertise available. Less expertise means it can command high prices. Suddenly it's too expensive to film in LA altogether. So the rest of the jobs leave too.
This pattern seems super common, not just in the film industry.
It is a narrative that interweaves with AI, too. AI is supposedly an efficiency boom. In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer. Is that worth the price we're paying? I know my answer. The article gets close to it by mentioning the consolidation in Hollywood, but I do not see how we fix this without enforcing our antitrust laws. It is embarrassing what we let rich people do in the name of stock price go up.
Software is a very clear example on this front. Valheim [1] is a game that was made mostly by one guy, at first at least. Not that long ago, this would have been a multi million dollar game produced by a wide array of people. It's just that tools, markets, and more have made it possible for even single developers to have an absurd degree of efficiency. And LLMs are probably going to bump this up exponentially.
This is why a metaphor I'm currently drawn to is one of people living in a very agrarian society just prior to the Industrial Revolution. What would they have envisioned being created? Super farms of course. And those super farms were indeed created, but the overall impact was such that those super farms became a practically inconsequential part of the overall economy. The future we're moving into isn't going to be the same but more efficient for those on top. That efficiency is going to revolutionize the economy in ways that are probably impossible to see from a distant, much how somebody living in an agrarian society couldn't have even begun to imagine the 'real' impact of the Industrial Revolution.
We’re now entering a new era where projects like Halo Reclaimer[1] are more creative and more popular than some of the slop put out by the AAA world with massive marketing budgets. There’s no slop, no micro transactions, just Halo Forge turbocharged by virtually anyone who loves Halo and has a Claude subscription.
[1] https://fangamesdb.com/games/project-reclaimer-halo-3.html
The main difference I see is they used Claude to write patch notes. ReSkate is pretty strict about only using AI for code, all assets and official comms are human made. I guess it's because a lot of their players are real life skaters and that community hates anything that looks fake.
The problem is, in a world running on next-quarter financials and bonuses, long-run disadvantages don't matter as long as the persons in charge of decisions can fuck off with golden parachutes before the house of cards crashes down.
> Competition increases, margins decrease, baseline minimal standard of quality for success increases.
Or everyone tacitly agrees on a new low standard of product, maybe adds in regulatory capture to prevent competition from rising, and even if you want, you won't be able to find an alternative. Enshittification galore.
Economic hubs work when there is more efficiency to be found in industrially-codependent resources being located close to each other, than there is in cheaper labor costs outside the hub. Hollywood's heyday was when there was enormous value to putting actors, agents, producers, cameras, sets, editors, VFX, writers all within close driving distance of each other, so that you could organize new movies and shows at the drop of a hat. In a day and age when teenagers are able to use cellphone cameras and pocketmoney to produce stories that are compelling enough to command attention and advertising dollars, the value of that geographic proximity has declined tremendously.
AI didn't build the coffin, but it's been putting nails in it.
Of course they do. Median real weekly wages[1] have been rising for decades all while the average number of hours worked per worker have fallen[2].
The problem with the CPI basket is, it needs to be constant of products to be comparable, so NO technological advancement is considered in that basket. Instead, they use the price of butter and tomatoes. Well, a fictious 1950s person wouldn't care that is can buy more butter or tomatoes than we can, but would want smartphone and a plane ticket to thailand.
The monetary reason is that the reason those things go down is because of technology advances and not because of changes in the value of the currency. Inflation should be about the currency, and less about what cool advances people are doing to make cheaper TVs and better websites
The practical reason is that if the basics like rent and food go up relative to wages, then a lot of people end up crushed by the basics alone and have no disposable income left for the cool stuff. The baskets are often too biased towards spending patterns of those who live the good life and for whom luxuries actually matter
The quality of the house your grandparents (for 1920 probably your grand-gran parents) is vastly different. Those houses cannot be compared at all, when I take my dump in the heated warmth in a nicely smelling place listening to some music over my airpods.
It's a statistical tool concerning populations, not a sampling of what hacker news user cicko in their wisdom thinks increases quality of life.
“If you would please look at the chart…” when it is known that inflation is a politically-charged figure that is indirectly manipulated to show much lower figures than the price increases the average person with average expenses (rent, car, fuel, food, etc.) experiences.
Let alone doing comparison of inflation over longer timespans. Garbage model in, garbage numbers out.
You can think of it with a thought experiment: A smartphone (with hypothetical internet) in 1920 would be worth almost all the money in the world. If you simply had one smartphone in 1920, the richest billionares would offer most of their wealth to have one. Hence in 1920, a smartphone would be worth at least $10M in todays money. Yet you can buy one for $500 today - so you are twenty-thousand times richer than 1920. The same applies for flatscreen TVs, antibiotics (really valueable when you need it), polio vacination etc.
You can't measure this with CPI, yet people complain about the CPI is fake. It is just a statistical average, no more no less. It always was irrelevant. It is the arguments people do with that number, that are bullshit. Basic statistics teach you never use an average to come to conclusions about the individual.
Looking at an article from the CATO institute, over the last 30 years wages have climbed 169 percent, while food prices 111 percent.
But an even better measure is PCE, or personal consumption index. Rather than CPI, or any other "household basics" measure, which subjectively categorize goods and then tracks those, PCE measures the total dollar amount spent by the entire U.S. consumer sector on goods and services. This is what is used by the FRED database referenced in the reply above.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/why-dire-pronouncements-abou...
It’s 30 to 50% of most peoples paycheck, it’s really the piece that matters and the one that is most complicated to solve.
For examples:
1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.
2. the glacial pace of issuing building permits for burned out homes in LA.
3. the sudden influx of many millions of immigrants pushes up the demand for housing, resulting in higher prices
> 1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.
> According to state data, approximately 57,421 rent-stabilized apartments were vacant across New York City
Is it actually more complex than that? If the regulation that makes it unprofitable to rent them out is rent control, that's still an accurate statement of why they're not being rented out.
That's about 2.4% of the total number of rented apartments, and about 1.5% of the total housing stock.
How long do you think those apartments are unoccupied, on average?
What portion of the stock do you think would normally be healthy to have on the market?
Scroll down a bit and read the section: "Key Causes of Vacancies"
The market, left to its own, will keep building because someone will see the prices people are willing to pay and think “I want in on that” but then the government comes in and blocks them from building. No building = supply lower than demand which always equals higher costs
Further, It would only have taken you one 5 second search to see the ways government regulations can cause unoccupied apartments
https://www.google.com/search?q=in+what+ways+can+government+...
Please try again.
P.S. google "how many unoccupied apartments in nyc"
Which market are you thinking of?
Los Angeles? Where the homeowner vacancy rate is 0.7% and rental vacancy 4%?
If you literally weren't thinking of anywhere when your responded, where did you get the notion from?
[1] https://api.census.gov/data/missing_key.html +/- one percent
The problem isn't so much that housing has gotten expensive. It's that many of the existing places have moved up-market compared to what they were 30-40 years ago. 75 years ago, Scarsdale NY or parts of Long Island were expensive. But Palo Alto was a drab middle class suburb. As the tech economy has boomed, that has driven prices up in Palo Alto for the same reason they were already high in Scarsdale. And now you have to move to Gilroy.
That's a misleading metric for two reasons. First, "people" includes all the people who bought a house decades ago before the prices went up, and correspondingly paid the old prices instead of the current prices. And second, it assumes that if housing becomes more expensive what people all do is pay more for housing rather than being unable to afford it and then having to take a longer commute to access housing they can afford, live with their parents, become homeless, etc., which negatively impact the amount or type of housing they get instead of the amount they pay for it.
Meanwhile between 1984 and today median income increased by ~290% while median new home prices increased by ~425%:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
And that's with the gap having reduced a bit in the last couple of years, since home prices have declined slightly since the peak in 2022 while median income continued its usual trend.
People are moving out of opportunity zones (and you know…losing opportunity) or moving in with roommates to keep the average percentage low.
Feels like such a basic factor to miss for what is supposedly an economists blog. That metric means nothing.
From https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rental-housing-unaffordabi...
> The net effect of this longer history is that renters today spend much more of their incomes on rent than they did in previous generations. The median renter household in 1960 spent less than a fifth of their income on rent. By 2022, housing costs consumed 31 percent of the median renter’s income. And in inflation-adjusted terms, the median rent is up 75 percent over these six decades while the median renter income has risen by just under 15 percent.
I'm semi-convinced that the reason why we see so many bad ideas in housing is because the good ideas negatively affect too much of the voting public. Or, they perceive the ideas as negatively affecting them.
This is not true.
Not that it matters as I don’t think this is what motivates NIMBY’s but for anyone reading that believes so, this is incorrect.
The old single family home next to the new apartment building gains land value. And this shows up county after county [1]. Building more housing is a valuation win-win, the pie just grows.
[1] https://gardner.utah.edu/news/recent-apartment-construction-...
Noise and dust from construction are often mentioned as well. Construction means heavy trucks entering places where they usually don't intrude.
As a homeowner I don't want to see my home price go down relative to all other homes as that leaves me in a precious position if I need to move, but if all homes fall in price together then that actually makes the prospect of moving less risky as, if I have to move into a house that is a step-up from the one I have, the cost to do so is lower. That would be an improvement over the status quo. High housing prices are a problem even for those with significant equity in a home.
But who doesn't want to see their wage go down is those who build houses. This is the bottleneck. The vast majority of people cannot afford a new house, which means they're stuck in their used houses, which means there is no inventory opening up for those with no houses.
> it's just that the solutions are deeply unpopular.
Is it? The solution in motion is to use AI to push software developers out of software development so that they have to become construction workers, thereby increasing the supply of construction workers, pushing construction wages down. It doesn't seem that unpopular (at least not outside of HN, but even on HN many welcome it with open arms). Maybe it will become unpopular once the motions are complete? That's a tad bit late, though.
I’m not saying that’s the case. I’m only saying the metric “housing cost as percent of wages” isn’t enough to judge if people are doing worse or better
To take just one example: a 65inch tv costs just $700 compared to $4k just a few years ago
2. Shelter accounts for roughly 34% of the CPI, whereas it makes up only about 16% to 17% of the PCE which underplays the pressures of housing people face. Housing arguably is one of the most basic necessity and people will spend on it. For majority of the people in the country housing as a % of income is the biggest expense, so weighing it at 16% sounds almost ridiculous.
3. PCE also famously isn’t based on household surveys like CPI which means it doesn’t accurately represent the actual inflation either.
4. PCE also doesn’t accurately represent lifestyle downgrades even though it tracks them. PCE will capture if you swap chicken for beef (like people are doing right now) but the conclusion you’ll come to is that people have the same amount of spending power as before.
I also think it’s unfair to look at just food prices. Housing and healthcare have bloomed massively.
We should evaluate research by the research itself, rather than by the author’s subjectivity credibility alone. The is the point I was trying to make by providing alternative research and adding a little bit of nuance to the reply, but perhaps I should’ve been more forthright in addressing my own bias as well.
Why is this the argument when someone challenges your source, but when it comes to someone else's source your argument is:
> This is research from a labor advocacy group, with the explicit aim of the organization to advocate for this sort of thing. This doesn't mean the research is is automatically invalid, but it is bias worth mentioning.
Using CATO as a neutral source though, is sketch no matter what.
> Links the fucking CATO institute
Pot, meet kettle
Not what real means!
So to point out how inanely out of touch economists are.
The problem with that is the worker economic base unit is a family not one person. Now compare 1960-70s where one person in the household works 40 hours a week. Compare with a modern family where both parents are working a combined 70-80 hours a week.
So yeah workers are working slightly less hours and families as a unit substantially more.
> Of course they do.
That level of certainty is not justified.
Hooray for just-in-time scheduling where workers have to be available full time but rarely get scheduled full time. It’s an innovation that has been great for capital and terrible for labor.
The reality is that requiring benefits imposes a cost, and employers manage that cost by limiting who qualifies. So yes, this hurt many workers - and disproportionately impacted disadvantaged people who didn't make the full-time cliff.
Ignoring increntives is actually shaking your fist at the sky.
Typically the real disagreement here is over whether workers should get benefits at all.
EDIT: can we get another `vouch` or two for groundzeros2015's currently [dead] reply? It's well-argued and an olive branch and deserves to be visible.
I addressed but one of your points here and ignored essentially the rest of your reply. A rather myopic one sentence reply to a more nuanced comment.
Sorry to sink to the lowest common denominator, friend. Thank you for making me see this.
re: regular people and their money, I will say, something about the bigger picture just feels off. I look at the graphs you linked to, and do not see it reflected in the people around me. I don't mean to be dismissive of the data, more that I feel like I am missing something, or it is, if that makes sense?
Furthermore, wealth applies more pressure against certain costs like housing[1] than against others like food or durable goods. Cheap toasters only go so far in making people feel like they aren’t falling behind.
[1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/home-prices-surge-five-tim...
The reluctance to give up resources also an understandable aspect of human nature, but power concentration in the hands of the few is always problematic. I'm very much a capitalist but the last few decades have persuaded me that wealth taxes are a necessary and moral correction to capitalism's unfortunate spiraling acceleration of inequality.
For instance: marketplace competition requires some regulation, but recognizing that regulation is a necessary evil with many opportunities for abuse (e.g. regulatory capture) helps inoculate against socialism's worst excesses.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
People are earning about 12% more and working about 5% less since 1980, but everything costs roughly 3x what it did in 1980 relative to wages, and that's where most people are pinched.
Also, I chose weekly wages because annual wages are complicated by time off, which was the other item in question.
Compare that to how much wealth appreciated, like a price of gold or real estate.
Median real wages increased by the narrowest possible meaning of this word.
Trickle down economy is literally a trickle.
AI making things cheaper and faster makes it worse, not better because it drives competition up and strengthens the bridge trolls at the attention gate aka platforms while taking power from both viewers and creators.
Everyone who uses those products and services. Prices go down and people can get much more in aggregate. More entertainment, healthcare, etc.
Especially if we're talking about jobs in creative industries that require customers with the means to support and consume their output.
Besides, an overabundance of surplus labor, if properly managed, is as likely to lead to a better world than a worse one. There's no ironclad rule that everyone, or even the majority, need to work to live or live to work to be happy. And many creatives, in particular, would be happy and productive working on personal and noncommercial projects if funding were no longer an issue.
When you consider that this conversation assumes we are talking about the US and not the rest of the world? It is sobering.
The AI bet hinges entirely on the new types of work that arise from it.
Of course there is. Permanently replacing labor is quite obviously and quite literally the point of AI. No previous tech shifts are comparable.
That's why the tall bank buildings that dot ~every small town (and plenty of big ones) in the US are full of bankers tending to paper ledgers, and with a secretary in front of every office. We still get milk delivered every day, as well as a block of river ice from last winter every 2 or 3 days (or more often if it's been particularly hot). We dig our ditches by hand, with hand-made shovels and pickaxes. The material for the clothes on our backs was woven on manual looms, from cotton that was harvested by hand, and carded by hand, and spun into thread by hand. We wear them in homes made with iron nails that were cut by hand, from ores that were mined by hand and smelted the only way we know how: With charcoal, in clay furnaces that were made with hands and that are stoked by hand.
Technology progresses. You're playing to an end-state of AI that assumes labor disappears entirely because you have yet to see what the new labor system looks like.
If we think about it, AI can be seen as dumping cheap products below cost and disrupting the domestic market.
I mean the real cost of production is unknown due to skirting of copyright laws in many cases and even if we discount that, it is well known that AI is being pushed far below the actual costs for providers. There are disruptive technologies, yes but this is not the same if the real cost is hidden or deferred and it doesn't compare with horses/cars or whatever analogy that comes up often.
In the physical world, this is called dumping isn't it? Just because tech is involved it doesn't change the fact. Countries already have anti dumping laws.
Copyright laws themselves are not completely "real", not in the sense that digging coal out of the ground is. They were once tailored for Disney to maximize its profit; now that Disney is no longer the juggernaut it once was, they may be re-tailored to maximize the profits of the new juggernauts.
Beyond that, my hobby is film and I know tons of people in the industry. I've made indie films with them.
All the jobs have gone to Europe. It's simply cheaper to film there now. Amazon and Netflix built infrastructure and taught local crews how during the pandemic content wars.
Looking at my Gen Z wife, all the eyeballs have gone to TikTok.
There's the answer.
When I was growing up movies were watched in cinemas. It was a big event and we saw maybe 5 a year.
Over time more start appearing on TV, but those tended to be a bit older, but also cherry picked the good ones. (I don't live in the US).
PayTV didn't appear until mid 80s. They had more movies, but again tended to cherry pick. VHS meant we recorded the ones we wanted to see. All these things together meant we tended to watch "good" movies.
Hollywood of course were making lots and lots of movies we never saw, or had and way to see. The bad stuff simply didn't have a channel to the world.
The arrival of Video Stores changed that. Suddenly the mediocre (and worse) had an outlet. And trust me, there was plenty of rubbish in there. But there was still a cost to distribute.
Today, distribution cost is zero. If Netflix commission a movie it'll get onto Netflix. Regardless of the result. Some really good stuff, most mediocre, lots of real rubbish.
Repeat for Amazon, Disney, Hulu, et al.
Overall movies haven't gotten worse. Objectively production values are higher. But your access to mediocre and bad movies has increased.
Judging past output though introduces survivor bias, which in turn makes comparison to today misleading.
The scene workers have gotten better though. And there are a lot of good movies being made still, but not by the mainstream industry that used to really deliver.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-re...
It is changing the economy. It is changing how work is done. We are not going back, even if the emphasis in the workplace and role it performs matures.
Economists (including but not limited to Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Arthur Levitt) also spent a decade arguing against Brooksley Born's 1998 warnings that unregulated over-the-counter derivatives would inevitably lead to a financial crisis.
Economists can be spectacularly wrong and short-sighted (and blinded by prior assumptions of how things work) until suddenly the thing that should have been obvious the whole time is no longer ignorable.
Anyway what I’m trying to say is that I think COVID and its aftermath is a much bigger factor here than AI, especially when it comes to “live / performing” art
There's twice as many scripted shows today and twice as many movies released despite the average person spending half the time they did 30 years ago watching TV and movies. For less than the price of a 1990s cable tv subscription we can access almost any movie, instantly streamed to our HDR TVs at home, on demand. The digital VFX we expect of a low tier direct to streaming show are better than the some of the best 90s movies (practical effects excluded).
There are hundreds of thousands of people across the world using the 4k camera in their pocket they bought for a few hundred dollars to make hyper specific media and distributing it free on YouTube. They are editing it in cheap or free video editors on their computer or built in to their phone.
It's easy to shit on modern media. With democratization comes slop. There's garbage now just like there was before. But we are absolutely benefitting off the efficency gains of the last few decades.
Outsourcing seems extremely short-sighted in this environment. You're devaluing your brand, and giving expertise and training to another place that can make their own products.
I also wonder how much can be attributed to weakened intellectual property protection. Comments in this thread say they don't pay for anything because they can watch it all for free.
There was nothing the business leaders could have done to prevent the effect of basically an unlimited supply of video entertainment being added to the market.
Sure, we can blame AI for a lot of crimes, but let’s start with the people who offshore everything first. Then when those offshore people get fired because of AI, you don’t feel so bad because it’s not like you’re firing anyone or killing any companies in the same country, right?
At the end of the day, what is the functional difference between offshoring and AI? People in this country still get fired and can’t find work, because the work is no longer done in this country. And then later, much of this work is no longer done by humans in any country.
Profits über alles.
...because nothing in it supported the thesis?
Print and audio/video have been showing clear declines since the 90s, thanks to the death of print, CDs and cable. Maybe AI is part of this, maybe not, but if it is, we're talking about a slight change in slope. These industries were walking dead before CNNs were a thing.
The one industry where you'd expect to see the clearest impact (coding) is basically flat.
It's the same thing in business. One has to relentlessly decrease the cost of doing business, because your competitors are doing it as well. You run and run and stay in the same place.
I haven't read the cited article, but the professor would need to show that industry profit margins are increasing to make his point. I haven't seen any evidence that margins increased in general.
tv and movies killed radio and opera. and now tiktok is killing tv and movies. it's not complicated.
If by "audience" you mean "people," sure, but I don't think that's particularly meaninful. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that podcasts and TV shows aren't even kind of comparable or able to replace one another.
Before I’d always feel distracted by things weighing on me that I needed to get done. Now a huge load of those things are asked of grok bot quickly, then I close the laptop and go spend time where I should be.
It feels like it’s lifting a huge burden from my daily life.
What a gross and completly apt terminology for the commoditization of art from the bureaucrats by the way.
If you have 0 standards.
Even if you take an old established media, like literature, you can trivially read all the classics by the time you are 30.
Saying that about gaming industry, which is barely 50 year old, is a joke.
One can only say that when they no idea what "high standards" actually means.
I don't think this is true, at least not for an ordinary person, unless you're dedicating your life to it (hardly trivial) or ploughing your way through for the sake of completion rather than absorbing them intellectually and emotionally. Writers like Joyce can be difficult to even parse if you're trying to read their work quickly, and to truly understand it you'll probably need to engage with secondary sources. And then there's the likes of Proust, which aren't exactly difficult to read but are extremely long (and probably won't do much for you unless you take your time with them). There's no objectively valid set of 'classics' but we're talking about certainly hundreds and arguably thousands of books. A book a week every single week from the age of 15-30 would do it if we're taking about a medium-sized set of classics...
Some time ago I started playing all the games that to me felt worthwhile to play in roughly chronological order.
I think the project is overall quite different than "reading all the classics" though - a lot of old games have aged pretty poorly so I can either skip them or abandon after giving them a fair shot.
I'm currently roughly in the 2000-2010 era of games. (It's not pure chronological, because I tend to sort play order by console, then by series, then by year.)
No film, no music, no game.
There's good, but there is no truly magnificent to the level I burst into tears and see the face of God.
Come on people. Your standards are too low.
Producing things of value takes a lot of time and effort, you would be too busy to waste time lamenting about things outside of your control.
Hang in there! It gets better!
Anybody with a big imagination must feel trapped by mediocre content. Daydreams are often more enjoyable.
Even if we're over-estimating "excellent" by a lot, that's still more games that anyone can reasonably play.
Ever bothered to actually go through the "all new releases" list on steam and actually check each new release? You should try it.
99% of "stuff" there is worthless trash, think 0 effort assetflip, which is never going to make $100 steam tax back. 1% is barely passable, as in "not a blatant insult to consumer". Unique stuff worth playing is extremely rare, if you're not 7 years old and you played more than a couple of games in your life of course.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who has played as many games as I have, and I couldn't disagree more. I find this sentiment more common amongst people who have played 20-30 games in their lifetime. The more I play, the more interested I am in the smaller titles sprinkled throughout the month. Even a janky, low budget game can do something unique. I have a massive backlog.
There are very cool games coming out every week, IMO. Just this next month,
- The Kingsfield inspired game Queen's Domain. That looks visually amazing.
- Noble Fates is a very cool Colony Sim that surpasses Rimworld in some respects (even if it comes short in others)
- Worship is a game where you play as a cult leader and command minions like Pikmin (I'm a sucker for cult games).
- County of Fortune is a massive city builder that goes a scale beyond what most city builders allow
- Silver Pines is a horror game borrowing from the genre's greats. It got a 97% on Steam.
But I suppose that's part of the problem with all media. We have more media than ever, so tastes get more divserse. This can consequently be bad for "cultural" purposes because you can meet 1000 people and struggle to find more than 2 who like the kinds of games or movies you watch regularly. So you instead default back 20 years ago to The Wire or Sopranos or The Dark Knight Rises, etc. Around the last time we have "mass culture". or Sports.
For gaming, GTA VI will be an interesting time, even if I don't personally care for the series. Because that may be the first time since perhaps Pokemon GO where you have so many subgroups of gaming aligning together for a single release.
As a kid, I played games with a board and counters. Sometimes I made my own board and counters. And there was only one channel on the B+W TV.
It might be this one Yellow Economy[1]. But I'm not 100% sure.
[1] https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/yellow_economy_14_...
You can make your album accessible to every human on earth for free.
So my Instagram is full of very very high quality music, much of it I'll only listen to once.
Music from all over the world.
Its great.
Yet sad. So much music I'll never get to. I have to spend 40 to 50 hours a week generating income. If only I did better on that Meta interview way back.
I'd be retired now, free to indulge in endless entertainment.
I also want to make games and music. Open source everything after 5 years. Honest games you buy once and self host forever.
Most content sucks ass. What may appear to be bountiful content is actually a lot of okay and meh content. Very little of it fits to your actual taste preference. It's a whole lot of mediocre. We as humans do not know what plentiful content looks like. We've never lived in it.
Most movies suck. You doomscroll and are dissatisfied. You refresh your media recommendations and sigh. You are excited to see a new fantasy or sci-fi film that scratches that itch, yet often left disappointed.
We are still in a desert. Anyone who says otherwise is settling for the status quo that our childen will call primitive and beastly.
Jobs are disappearing because cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content. It's the optimal pareto frontier of content and does the most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours.
When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
This reminds me of the comparison between Japanese manga and American comics/graphic novels. Some people say the former offer a much wider variety of content and ideas because it is often started by a single (often quirky) author, whereas the latter is usually designed by a committee, which ends up favoring more bland ideas. Anime usually starts of as manga, and that's why anime is so creative as well.
Perhaps AI will help single authors create more work by themselves, and we'll have a renaissance of comic books and other forms of (mostly digital) entertainment in the west. And we'll spend less time watching those TV shows on streaming platforms that follow the same few recipes.
Understanding is a combination of consumption and reflection. There is simply not enough time to do so. This is driving a push towards content that is so simple to consume that it takes no effort.
That limit is called time, which people struggling to get by rarely have. And the "most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours" is an extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
The hate for technological advances is so strong that we're wanting... Entertainment austerity for poor people?
Oh my God.
This community needs more hope.
> extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
You're telling this to someone who is Meisner-trained, who acts and performs, who has directed, shot lots of films, and who is heavily involved in the arts. A24 is my jam, and even that's not enough to sate me.
I sincerely hope this isn't a performance.
I want better. Both as a consumer and creator in the arts.
It isn't exactly a desert? It is more like a full buffet, but nothing but cheap, mass-produced sugar literally everywhere. All the 2-star donuts and chocolate cupcakes you can eat, and nothing but that.
Hollywood's cost structure makes it impossible to try anything new. I'd contrast that to Japan where creators can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, have a manga made, and then an anime, and maybe even some video games. And these all reinforce each other: last year I discovered an atrociously drawn anime that had got me curious about the source material -- that blew me away and I bought all of the printed materials that have come out so far and expect to buy all the rest.
Not least, Japan still gets new 4-panel comics like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door, something almost unthinkable of in the Land of the Nepo Baby where we haven't had a new one since Dilbert.
Most new ones do, but they've been making like a dozen great ones each year for for like 80 years.
Honestly TV (including the back catalogs) are where most of the truly good video content is.
> cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content
This part I really agree with. It's the reason shitty Netflix reality shows are among the most popular 'watercooler discussion' shows today.
Some of this stuff is pre-AI, Photoshop smart tools stuff. Especially clothing ads. Nobody has a live model pose with each item color any more. Or even each item. (I used to know actress/model/waitress types in LA who did that. Grind job: "OK, the blue sweater is next, and hurry it up, we have 50 to do before lunch". But it paid OK.)
Every streaming service feels more and more user hostile. If I want to watch South Park it’s a 15$ a month subscription just for that .
Paramount Plus has nothing else.
I want to watch Lanterns, another 30$ a month.
Maybe King of The Hill , 20$ a month. The Reboot has this weird lazy animation style.
The streaming model has imho mostly killed old style television formats with the new way of hyping up a show in the first couple episodes by tossing money and talent, then leave people to hang with unsatisfying conclusions once you've got that sub money. It's all about convincing people to sign up and stay signed up with promises for new content. The quality of the content doesn't matter as long as there's a lot of it and it's enough to keep people from unsubscribing.
With traditional TV your value was directly determined by how many people were watching so you could sell addspace. And despite there being less choice and harder for independent players to get time, in some ways it was weirdly more democratic because if a show sucked or an episode sucked people would just change the channel or watch something else. With streaming they still do that but it's all in the same price scheme so doesn't hurt their bottom line. They're incentivised to just crank out as much crap as possible to keep subs up. Won't last.
[1] https://pages.skybrian.com/2026/us-households-by-income-band...
If certain ultra conservative countries don’t like LGBT representation they don’t get to be in your major movie.
At this point I don’t know the difference between Chat GPT writing the next marvel movie or Disney hiring someone. Either way the story needs to be crystal clear. You never watch something that makes you think.
I don't mind too much, I just miss overall quality and don't care who tf is "represented" or not.
But honestly I think most localized TV experiences are awkward. Switzerland barely is tho, that's clean and boring in a way but rarely awkward.
The industry goes through slumps and renaissance periods as the creative juices wax and wain. Game industry is falling into the same trends.
Even during creative slumps there's always someone out there not following the trends making something good
What came out this year that you think you'll watch again in 10 years?
The thing is that most people would rather not do that and prefer to keep watching garbage. You can only lead a horse to water...
This is funny, because every damn time I find something I want to watch its on paramount+.
There has to be a paradox/law named after this at this point. "The thing you're trying to watch will always be on the service you don't have."
The modern "Netfix model" has seemed to resulted in large number of new TV shows (relative to number of new movies) which always seem to get killed before their plotlines are resolved. And when I have something in mind I want to watch I often don't even know where to find it.
I'd prefer to go get DVDs from Blockbuster at this point - it'd be more convenient!
Although, I think Netflix also does not directly employ the people that make media, just like Apple. They just employ the people that curate it and distribute it.
I bet the median American has more real disposable income than four years ago.
I bet the median American spends more in real terms on entertainment (and streaming specifically) than four years ago.
Almost without fail, the data in almost any area of modern life seems to be way less negative than people’s vibes about it are.
The average amount of time spent doing "Relaxing and leisure" activities (mostly TV) has increased 6% in the last twenty years. There was a small decrease after the post-COVID peak, but working time has also decreased in this time frame.
I do feel for anyone trying to find a new H1B sponsor. I've lived and worker as a foreigner before, its stressful for sure. It is also a tough spot for a country to be in, if your domestic labor is struggling to find or keep jobs itsnhard to justify continuing protections for foreign labor.
My hypothesis is, YT, Reels and TT are eating everyone’s lunch, as people spend more time on those. And for people who don’t watch much, there’s Spotify. Basically attention span degradation across all age groups.
American media dying is a natural effect that was ongoing even before AI
> So based on that, we believe what is most fair is to put current trends in because you cannot predict at what point consumers and demand is going to be -- you're going to begin to see demand destruction based on the pricing environment.
https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/04/23/so...
The per capita part is very important to explaining the figure, don't ignore it, but if you break oil (and related products like kerogen, bitumen and NGL) into light, medium and heavy we hit peak medium oil in 2008.
I expect AI use to cause an increase in output, not a decrease in employment. At least right now. In TV and Film it would translate to more content that was too expensive to film before. If your business is making movies and then suddenly the market is flooded with fast and cheap movies, then you're going to make more fast and cheap movies too!
I think we could stop all content creation today and everyone would still have enough to last through their grandchildren's lifetimes.
And unlike a lot of things, media doesn't expire. I still regularly find albums, movies, and books from decades ago I enjoy today.
Media of all forms is just worth less now due to oversupply.
Media doesn't expire, but with increasing distance to the cultural context it was created in, enjoying any work in all its nuances becomes harder. Take for example Arrested Development - one of the funniest TV shows of this century, but unless you bring sufficient knowledge on the Bush Jr. administration, you'll miss the funniest layers of many jokes and stories.
And it gets all the more interesting to look back at how the Zeitgeist changed over time, as tropes evolve and tastes keep changing.
I don’t think people will ever really want to only watch old stuff, or lack desire for new stuff. But, in terms of thinking about the volume of media available I think the non-expiring idea is valid. YouTube alone has 500 hours of video uploaded every 1 minute.
When a job is no longer required, it means we (humanity) managed to do something clever to get it done with less labour - a great achievement!
This frees up those involved in that job to pursue other work, increases supply, and drives down prices - i.e. society overall experiences an increase in standards of living.
The only negatives are on the individual who's laid off through 1. frictional unemployment (the hardship someone goes through when switching jobs), and 2. potential salary reduction as they go from a lucrative job to being a newbie in their new career. But like any career, they can build that up again.
The best mindset is not to take any job/salary for granted in the first place, as it's not someone else's responsibility to employ us.
> increase supply
Not necessarily. Supply could stay the same.
> drives down prices
Not necessarily, if raw materials got more expensive.
> The only negatives are on the individual
You might want to have a look at youth unemployment rates. Sometimes, there simply are no jobs: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/unemployment-rate-for-you...
Changing careers reduces your income and your purchasing power. If it happens to too many people at once, standard of living decreases.
You simply neglect demand in your entire argument.
Try LLMing this (it efficiently interrogates both your assumptions in a single prompt):
> in standard economic thinking, is it possible for a job to be made redundant due to improvements in technology and that employee to be reassigned elsewhere, and for either long run supply to go down or long run prices to go up?
Note: there will always be edge cases, for example if I owned a business, I could theoretically replace someone with AI, and increase my prices, which would contradict the idea that greater efficiency always results in more supply and lower prices, but overall in the long-run that won't happen.
You really need to factor them in and their earnings in any discussion like this. It's still smaller than consumer spending on this stuff was before but it's the growing part.
What percentage of the earnings of influencers flows back into the economy as part of production costs instead of small percentage as spending or sitting as wealth in banks.
For all this data knows, a decent number of them are making online content with AI assisted tools.
the author does concede the higher level data is less dramatic, in the closing statement but not before he got the clicks
A side-effect of the democratization of content creation and the explosion of ways to consume content is that there’s more low-quality things to consume. Low-quality content will always be produced in greater abundance than high-quality so there’s more garbage to dig through, but there are still gems out there.
Personally, after years of infrequent movie attendance, this is the first month that I can remember in my adult life that my wife and I saw two movies in the theater and given the opportunity there’s a third we’d still like to see!
That doesn't mean there isn't trash, and I suppose if tv series are your jam it's likely sub-par, but for me it's unmatched by light years.
"Let me tell you why!"
"Is not X, it's Y!"
and so on. It's so tiresome. I can't stand AI scripts. It makes the entire video feel like a waste of my time.
(I still jump in for the occasional video tutorial etc but it’s always targeted - go for one thing, swoop in, close it when I’m done.
I had been replacing it with podcasts, but they are so ad-infested now that it's been pushing me more and more to audiobooks. I also watch a fair bit of content on smaller special interest platforms, like CrunchyRoll for Anime or Pepperbox for guns. They're easy to sub and unsub depending on what I'm interested in. I often rent old movies. And more and more... I read.
I had used Prime's videos for a while when they had something I liked, but the ads have gotten so bad that I now go out of my way not to emotionally invest in anything they produce. The experience has left me skeptical of other platform exclusive shows and I generally just go do something else with my time. I used to be a big fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek, but at some point they both started producing Platform Content and in response, I haven't watched anything from either for about a decade now.
And how many people work on a well-loved indie artifact of about the same market position?
Gonna guess the latter supports way fewer jobs. (This isn't meant as a judgment in taste or moralizing--my own entertainment tastes run indie towards pretentious, so economically I'm part of the problem.)
Are you suggesting creatives just give their work away for free?
Provide food for critical thinking instead of accusing people of not being critical thinkers.
For example, tell us what new media from the US is actually great today. What do the arts offer that is next level and worth watching? Is there a rise in arts in other counties that we are missing? What could Facebook boomers need that leads to more and higher quality arts and movies?
In contrast, thought-terminating clichés like "facebook boomer" show critical thinking on your part.
I fully agree with that: calling someone a "facebook boomer" is just plain pathetic.
(btw the boomers are my parents' generation: don't go thinking I take it personally. I'm a GenX'er and GenX'er are badass, which is why I don't give a flying fuck saying what I think).
Something something about the pot and calling some kettle black etc.
Apparently the amount of movies actually being produced has barely recovered to post 2008 levels.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in...
The 2023 Hollywood Strike strike, the COVID lockdowns shutting down theaters, and the aggressive film production (UK, Poland, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Spain, Colombia) and VFX (Ireland, India, Colombia) subsidizes right as American states like California, Georgia, NY, and others began cutting them meant much of the American film and television industry got obliterated earlier this decade.
The reality is revenue is roughly consistent, but production costs one you remove subsidies (like what most of the US and Canada did) become exhorbitant in low margin industries like entertainment.
It's now cheaper to produce an "American" movie or TV show in Ireland, using British actors affecting an American accent (thank Hugh Laurie, Idris Elba, and Dominic West for that), with post and VFX done in India than it is in the US.
This is something that has been reported on in the space for a decade now, but not much can be done.
This article is also another example of why HNers should stick to their own lane, as most lack context or visibility into other industries.
Maybe we haven't had enough time to see the full impact, but right now, most job losses seem to be attributable to shifting consumption habits and a supply of content (both professional and amateur) that vastly outweighs demand.
Is it a magic external power amplifier controlled by a handful of powerful companies? Like giant social networks for example, where the most successful network wins due to literal network effects coupled with the ability (capital, income) to pay for the technology and staff to run it. Or Big Oil who needs capital to exploit an oil field and ongoing money to pay their expert staff to work for them. Or Big Pharma, or Big Ag.
The alternate lens is that AI is like a dictionary or medicine reference or some other keystone textbook. Very expensive and time consuming to compile, but after that it requires little to no cost to duplicate and every copy helps a new person be better.
Unfortunately for the trillion dollar “labs”, I can’t see how AI is going to be the next Standard Oil, Meta, Pfizer, or John Deere. Unless the labs can somehow capture the market, destroy or outlaw the competition, or in some way cripple the general public’s ability to run their own models, then they are doomed to failure.
In the long run, Standard Oil will lose out to me hanging a solar panel off my balcony. Facebook is losing out to self organised networks using commodity chat apps (ahem, owned by whom? -all). The Labs will lose out to ollama.cpp running on my own hardware.
Now, one thing The Labs could do of course to defend against me running my own stuff, is to buy up all the VRAM so there’s none left for me! It’s as if my local inference was powered by milkshake, and they drank my milkshake, they drank it up!
Isn’t this the wrong conclusion.
It’s that streaming as the monetization vehicle no longer creates an opportunity for movie maker to make huge returns.
Once, a blockbuster movie could make $1 billions.
Today, the movie maker only gets a sliver of the $12/mo subscription fee.
The consumer behavior, or opportunity as you put it, that supported those billion dollar blockbusters has changed largely due to competing media. Film and TV are not the only show in town anymore.
The amount of video being produced has never been higher, as well.
Rise of influencers and content creators - less hollywood gatekeeping and more commoditizing the distribution of content across YT, Tiktok, instagram. Big names moving out of networks and into distribution channels they have more control over - making more content, more money, and with less resources.
I noticed that a good percentage (between 30 and 50%) is AI generated and I was wondering what impact it had on the actors/musicians/... . I mean, with a few 10s of Euros now you can achieve something that before it would've costed you several thousands or tens of thousands (depends on the quality of the production I guess).
I assumed at the time it must've been a slaughter for that part of the gig economy and this seems to confirm it.
Soviet Union was one of last countries with true art. Art requires seriousness. Western art has turned into entertainment long ago. All movies are made so that you can accompany them with popcorn.
There were topis with sort of a prescribed understanding, mostly related to early history of the Soviets. There were opportunistic authors who produced politically correct slop. These fellas quickly changed course in 90s and now have mostly left for Israel. But there was also massive live stream of true art alongside all that, realistic, serious and even Christian: Russian classical culture is so deeply Christian that you pick it even in an atheistic setting.
you have to be very careful quoting those sources that are based on incorrect data. One might have three jobs and make 5 times less than it used to be. It's a rabbit hole that needs its own thorough research.
At least some of this will be AI companies buying and scanning every book available...
Don't even get me started on shows. There are a ton of great ones but now they have 2-4, sometimes even 5 year gaps! The "increased" quality doesn't warrant it! I know people say "well now they're movie-grade" but I really could not care less. I don't need every episode of every show to be blockbuster quality. Just make it not suck! I would love to go to the movies and buy all the subscription services but it's simply not worth it! /rant
Barclays laying off thousands in the UK obviously puts the decision on AI productivity gain.
> What actually happened is cooler than what could happen
It’s hard to think of a fictional story that beats actually rowing across the world.
They are totally different content, and one inarguably more addictive and shallow than the other
But you’re right.
I'm sure all their fans will agree that it's a good thing Metallica has such a consistent track record of being all about "love, energy and heavy music", instead of ever divisively singing about or getting their hands dirty with politics, and stayed in their lane and stuck to romantic love songs and upbeat pop jingles like One, And Justice for All, Disposable Heros, Blackened, Eye of the Beholder, The Shortest Straw, Don't Tread on Me, For Whom the Bell Tolls, etc.
Also thought the graphs around covid were interesting, there wasn't a spike up or anything it's just been consistently down.
The article said we're not in a recession. I thought we were lol
Oh wow, someone did a dance, and then someone copied it, and then someone copied it, and then someone copied it, and then..
One tell of a hive minded thinker is when they have knee jerk reactions to things and shoot from the lip.
Personally responsibility, when averaged out to billions of people, being given choices based on the work of scientists, engineers and researchers, with no barrier to leverage your neurology and data?
I have never perfectly understood how we reconcile what happens at scale, where its trillions of choices every minute, over the user base the size of several countries with individual responsibility.
The best answer I have is that it should be a fair fight / Fair choice. There should be a reasonable expectation of what the average outcome in a given situation is, and the players should have equal ability to engage in that transaction.
Your experience being humanizing is one experience, the average experience being dehumanizing is still entirely possible.
I mean, If what I said affected your world view to the point that you have to respond the way you did, I am not sure what can be said to make it better for you.
This is the field of my work, so I know with certainty the point I am making.
My response to the situation was to learn and understand it so that it can be made better for normal people. So that they have an actual fair chance.
I assume you have the ability to acknowledge the difference between a single individual’s choice at one moment, and the choices of that individual at different times of the day.
Firms don’t bet on a single human making a reasonable choice. The bet that given enough humans, enough will be in the right circumstances to make the choices that benefit the firm.
Even individual agency shifts at different times, which is why food ads play at specific time slots.
No one is an island.
- Kono Express. [1] Disney laid off an character animator from the Star Wars factory. The animator decided to see what was possible with the best modern tools. He's using both AI tools and Unreal Engine. There are six episodes now, and each one is a bit better than the last, as he gets a handle on the technology. The first episode looks like generic sci-fi stuff, at good quality but not yet perfect. By episode three, he has this nailed. It keeps getting better. Episode six [2] is a delight. He's now almost up to current Hollywood quality. One person, turning out half an hour of content every few weeks. Who needs Disney any more?
- Asian vertical dramas. 17,000 episodes per day. Apparently 55% of China's AI capacity is cranking these out. Search for "asian drama creation tools". Amusingly, Google and Bing have completely different tool lists. These are all software as a service products, with accounts and token charges. Currently, visuals are quite good, with some notable errors. Complex patterns on clothing don't stay consistent, for example. Continuity errors remain common. Automatically generated audio is currently terrible, at least in the English translations. Plots are so cliche that it's clear people are re-using the same prompts. "Heiress girl returns from countryside" is very popular. Here's a recent drama, about startup working hours.[3] The plot is silly but the visuals are OK.
- There's starting to be a thing for turning out movies based on old SF novels. So far, these seem unauthorized by the original author, but that will change. In time, every good book will have its movie.
The good stuff in this space is getting to be better than the Marvel Overexpanded Universe.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikm5lP0zsi0
Many people spend hours browsing Tik Tok rather than watching film or television.
Even long form YouTube videos are highly popular. Many folks spend time watching those rather than movies or tv. I believe Tom Hanks was speaking about this many years ago.
That being said….
I remember growing up and my teachers would always emphasize the importance of reading. I’m sure it would be a great thing for humanity if everyone spent their free time reading books rather than on film or television. In such a scenario would people complain about job loss then? This could be a fruitful idea for a science fiction short story come to think of it.
When I read, I don't get that feeling. Even here on HN where it is mostly wasting time.
I think this is why so much media has viewer comments. It's something to engage with and lose awareness of the passing time.
Lying preserves the legal basis for copyright?
Maybe what that means is this: it's not illegal to lie about something being copyrighted (to discourage copying) if you don't actually take it as far as taking someone to court over it.
International media is much better than it used to be.
In that case we're in deep shit. It's already worrisome to see the effects that various technological "advances" (like smartphones) have had on culture and society. This is likely to make things even worse.
Also how much is the end of ZIRP and how much is jobs moving abroad? I'd love to see the article go a bit deeper
the media landscape has changed. youtube, tiktok, reels are the dominant media. the money the creators make there dwarfs this 200k loss of jobs.
The issue is, its global, creators aren't limited to desk jobs in america.
Movies just don't make economic sense unless they're blockbusters and that's mainly because of the decline in movie theaters for various reasons but also the death of physical media sales. DVD sales in the 1990s were a bit of a Golden Age. Matt Damon talked about this [1].
Up until the 2000s the TV economic model was:
1. Produce a full season of TV, typically ~22 episodes, and air those on network TV. Sell ads;
2. Sell physical media. Unlike movies, this wasn't as big of a factor until serialized TV came about but it was a factor; and
3. Syndication. Basic cable channels and foreign distributors would pay to air TV shows.
Premium cable (eg HBO) was an exception. It still had foreign distribution but cable subscriptions replaced ad revenue.
In all of these cases, actors, writers, etc would get residuals or back end participation. For what became TV shows, there was a whole ecosystem of pilots. Scripts would be bought. Some would get greenlit for pilots. Some of those would get a half or full season order.
A TV season meant basically a full year of work for those involved. All the pilot activity meant more work. Residuals allowed actors and writers to survive between jobs. There are still people getting significant residuals from Friends from over 30 years ago.
All of that died with streaming. Netflix streaming first began as a means of monetizing old seasons of TV and older movies. It was additional revenue. But as Netflix grew, all the studios saw dollar signs and launched "me too" streaming services, most of which were doomed from the start. Streamers began to cannibalize the syndication and physical media revenue.
Netflix in particular made the decision relatively early that they needed original content to survive. By having a worldwide customer base, they didn't care about physical media and didn't have to pay for syndication. Also because of some unfortunate contracts in the late 2000s, there was little to no residuals for streaming so that too was more saved money.
And the cost-cutting continued. Smaller seasons (8-13 episodes) with smaller writing rooms meant fewer people employed, particularly when it might be 2-3 years between seasons. Suddenly you needed 2 jobs a year to survive where once it was 1. That's a huge difference because you're lucky to get 1 job. And you got no residuals on top of that.
This coincided with more general Hollywood cost-cutting to move productions out of LA to Canada (particularly Toronto but also Vancouver), Atlanta and elsewhere.
Hollywood was an ecosystem. Short term profit-seeking has basically destroyed it but also, so has the high cost of housing. LA used to be somewhere you could live cheaply and this enabled people to chase their dream. Many didn't make it but this was the entry to the funnel. Some did.
Now there are fewer jobs and those are increasingly dominated by second and third generation nepo babies.
Why do you think there's so much recycled IP now? Relaunches of 1990s and 2000s properties. The people involved are out of work. That's why. And it's easier to greenlight something with a track record. Also, notice how many podcasts there are of people who used to be in shows? The Office is particularly egregious for this. I swear half the cast have podcasts now. Why? Because they're out of work too.
I cannot overstate how much expensive housing has strangled Hollywood. Expensive housing is an input into everything you produce and do. Yet people see it as their retirement. What retirement? If your $200k house is now $1M, so is every other house. You still only own one housing unit's worth of wealth. So you need to multiple houses, to be a landlord or Airbnb host. And we wonder why the housing supply sucks.
> I cannot overstate how much expensive housing has strangled Hollywood.
I hardly know anything about the tv/movie industry, but this is a bit of funny juxtaposition when Toronto and Vancouver also have famously unaffordable housing.
Technology has almost always been adopted in Hollywood.
Media grew to become social media, and skills of social media became relevant and new positions.
yeah, worthless analysis of side effects without taking into account any causation variable to anchor anything to anything.
Art is gatekept by distribution. You only pay artist because otherwise they will go independent or use the other studio/record-label/etc. It's the only reason artists got paid handsomely in the past.
Today, money only come from spotify, netflix, and soon one or two movie studios. News and Newspaper is already gone, it's past the point of monopoly and into billionaire personal toy.
This also answers why live performance is the only thing going up. It is the only thing that still require any choice from the artist. Everything else is give-me-or-media-or-else.