Ever since numberFire saw its ability to engage and re-engage users increase exponentially through the addition of editorial content, I've been thinking a lot about the future for writers, musicians, actors, etc. These days, the creation of content for its own business purposes - its sale to end consumers in hard physical forms like CDs, DVDs, etc - seems like a dwindling concept. There are 4 factors compounding that problem:
1) No Viable Payment Replacement: iTunes can't solve the 50% decrease in sales the music business has seen over the past decade. People used to buy entire albums. Unless you were Michael Jackson, Tracks 1 & 2 would hit the top 20. Tracks 3 & 4 in the top 100. Tracks 5-16 were usually garbage outtakes. Despite that, people paid $16-20 for a casette... (Damn you Camelot Music!). At $.99/track, with 2 consumption worthy tracks, you cut that to 12.5% of the money labels used to make.
2) Glut of Professional Content: You can get professionally created content streamed to pretty much any device you want.
3) Glut of Indy Content: Sites like HuffPo, Bleacher Report, and YouTube glorify amateurs and raise them to historically reserved distribution levels.
4) Better Indy Content: If Macklemore and the music business is any indication, the free stuff will improve dramatically over the next few years anyways.
So, why would the consumer pay? He/she probably won't, or, if they do, not very much. I'll argue that when Google Fiber either gets implemented or puts enough pressure on Time Warner/Verizon/Comcast to reinvest in faster infrastructure, movie theaters will go the way of record labels. Home speakers are awesome. Huge, clear displays are cheap. Indy film producers already expect to being really poor for the rest of their lives. The only thing missing is fast load speeds for high def video.
So, if content doesn't make money on its own, what else can it do in a social-capitalist regime? Enter Brian Halligan and Hubspot. Content as marketing isn't a new concept. It just feels way more important today than it was a half century ago. Ad creative has been awesome since the Mad Men. The difference though is that, today, there are many more content channels than there were in the 60's when TV was just getting going with "I Love Lucy" having 70% of all TVs in America tuned in. There are also exponentially more people in the audience trying to connect with brands in different languages with different customs across all these channels. Finally, all those people are way smarter than consumers in the 60's. They have so many resources to call you on your BS marketing drivel, so you're going to actually have to have a good product and authentic representation. This is what's going to rescue content creation.
Obviously, I say this cautiously because content creators won't want to sell out to corporate causes. Thing is though, as I've been able to reason through numerous conversations at Blue Bottle's various locations throughout San Francisco and Williamsburg (Brooklyn, we go hard...for coffee), the problem content creators have with corporations is the view that they lie to advance economic purpose. I'm not sure that's going to fly anymore, at least in as mass a way as it has in the past. Audience resources and demands for authenticity are already impacting the way brands are positioning themselves. So, there's going to be a lot of good, real writing, video, and audio created in support of commercial ends. And, each commercial outpost will probably have to have dedicated specialists conveying its voice across channels because of the real time conversation required. So, as long as companies are making products, content creators should be able to find work! Rejoice!
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