Just over ten years ago I was running a digital media centre: the first in South London to my knowledge. Tucked away in the basement of The Studio, a great little arts centre on the fringes of Bromley (politically and culturally, as well as geographically) in Beckenham.
We provided facilities and training to the local community: the curious general public, artists wanting to explore this new medium, professional print designers eager to satisfy their clients’ demand for ‘something interactive’, and filmmakers with loads of great footage (mostly Hi8) but no money and a lot of patience. We had a great programme of classes and open studio access, and facilities worth about £50,000, all geared up to bring together the skills required to create interactive CD-ROMs.
Six months later the Web took off.
This meant that a lot of our courses and equipment for creating CD-ROMs became redundant. But we could adapt. Web design needed less gear than interactive CD-ROMs, all of which we had. And we found new tutors, so it wasn’t a huge shift to start running courses that met the sudden surge of interest in the internet, email and the web.
Ancient history. So what?
· In 2003, MySpace was launched, giving artists an easy way of building a fan base without relying on big companies as gatekeepers to their public.
· YouTube was launched in 2005. Distribution – often cited as the reason so few British films get seen – was suddenly available to anyone, filming on anything from a mobile phone upward.
· The Red One camera was released in 2007, giving digital a quality suitable for high-end filming and cutting production costs, or increasing the quality of low-budget films.
· The iPhone was released in 2007, bringing video to the palm of your hand.
· And the BBC iPlayer was also released in 2007, giving wider access to their programming.
There’s a very handy timeline that illustrates very clearly the increasing rate of change in the media: http://www.cemp.ismysite.co.uk/timelines/media/
It’s not just about technology changing how the work is done. It’s also changing the way the industry works, how it’s structured and where the power lies. A band can record an album, get the music heard, build up a following and sell tracks online for less than an A&R man’s drinks budget.
Not only that, but the internet is changing how money is made. The music industry of the late twentieth century was built on sales of recordings; they’ve struggled to get to grips with online sales, and have finally wrapped their heads around that. But the effect of bands using MySpace is not about making money from selling recordings: it’s about gaining visibility. The most radical consequence of the internet is – ironically – that more money is being spent on live music.
This demonstrates the broader change that the web has brought about: a lot is given away ‘for free’. It was not always thus: in the early days of the web, many publishers stuck to their existing business model of selling information, with a paid subscription to their sites. But the web had grown through collaborative information sharing and no-one wanted to pay when the same information was free elsewhere. The slow giants got caught on the hop.
What happened was that ‘business’ changed. Today’s ‘free’ is tomorrow’s ‘market share’. Or a means of selling something else through advertising, which is now reflected back in free newspapers driven by advertising and spurious sponsored surveys. It’s no longer as simple as making something and having someone pay for it: rightly or wrongly the speed of the internet has – ironically again – made money-making a much longer game.
This is what we need to stay on top of. Not simply working out how iPlayer distribution affects performers’ rights, but recognising that this change is constant, and getting faster. And it’s rarely driven by the big industry players we’re used to dealing with. It’s increasingly driven from the ground up, and that groundswell is increasingly coming from performers themselves.
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